Redmagic’s liquid-cooled gaming phone starts at $749

The Redmagic 11 Pro is the first phone (outside of a OnePlus concept design, at least) to feature true liquid cooling, and it’s launching worldwide later this month — including the US, though you won’t be able to buy it direct from any carriers.

We’ve seen plenty of phones launch with vapor chambers and call it liquid cooling, but the 11 Pro is the first to have liquid coolant actively pumped round the phone’s body to cool the internals. It’s supplemented by a waterproof fan, liquid metal cooling for the CPU, and a vapor chamber too.

All that cooling tech was built for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 on the inside, plus a huge 7,500mAh battery (though that’s a little smaller than the 8,000mAh cell on the Chinese version). On the outside there are extra LEDs, touch-sensitive shoulder buttons, a headphone jack, and one very welcome touch: camera lenses that are entirely flush with the body.

It goes on sale direct from Redmagic on November 19th, starting from $749 for the black Cryo finish, but that isn’t the version you’re likely to see all over the place, as it hides the liquid cooling under the surface. If you want to see it in action you’ll need either the black Nightfreeze I’ve been testing or the silver Cryo variant, which have a transparent section that highlights the cooling. Those models start at $849, but do net you extra RAM and storage too.

Photography and video by Dominic Preston / The Verge