nubia Red Magic 9 Pro survives bend test from both sides

21 December 2023

A couple of days ago nubia’s Red Magic 9 Pro was officially launched outside of China, where it was initially introduced last month. We’ve already put the gaming beast through the paces of our usual in-depth review, so go take a look at that if you haven’t already.

Also as usual, Zack from the YouTube channel JerryRigEverything has taken out the tools and subjected the Red Magic 9 Pro to his customary ‘durability test’ to see how it can withstand scratches, burns, and bends.

Spoiler alert: very well, as it turns out. The scratch test is pretty much the same for all devices nowadays, with the exception of foldables. All of the non-folding screens are covered with glass, and glass scratches at level 6 on the Mohs hardness scale, with deeper grooves showing up at level 7.

As for subjecting the display to an open flame – that’s a pretty extreme use case, isn’t it? And regardless, all OLED displays behave pretty much the same in this instance, with the affected pixels turning white after a short while (usually around or less than 30 seconds, 20 in this case), and mostly, but not fully recovering. So far so uneventful, then.

It’s the bend test where most phones do well, but some do very badly from time to time. A handset snapping in half is far from unheard of, especially if it’s a gaming phone, and since the Red Magic 9 Pro has some weirdly placed openings for its fan, we were anxious to see how it would do.

We’re happy to report, however, that it survived without any issue. It was bent from both sides with force, and nothing happened – the structural integrity was never threatened. That’s commendable, the designers really did a great job with this one.