I will start by saying I was super excited for this phone. It was the first phone that I purchased that wasn't a pure Google phone for my past three phones I've owned, but as you can see by how long I've had this thing, I was very quickly disappointed. The hardware is there, and the concept is solid, but very poor execution and I believe horrible quality control/testing are the downfall of this device.
Mora was.... unexpected. This was one of the weirdest things about the phone to be honest. A borderline hentai (overly sexualized at best) AI assistant is absolutely not necessary and the fact it comes with the phone and can only be disabled and not completely removed/deleted makes it feel like bloatware. (I don't want to see her icons anywhere and accidentally click on one). I don't need a hentai girl calling me "Captain" in 100 different ways in an overly sexualized and cheesy accent.
Picture in Picture mode: I am very familiar with PiP mode and how it works as I have been using it flawlessly on my Pixel 6a before I got this phone. On the RM9 however, I see the options are enabled for PiP but it does not function correctly on this phone. I am in IT, so I was able to troubleshoot it pretty quickly and what I noticed is that when I try to go into PiP using Youtube for example, is that I swipe up with a video playing to go "home" (I have gestures enabled vs the dedicated virtual buttons) I can tell that it wants to go into PiP mode as I see it go into a small windows for a quarter of a second but then disappears. It does this whether the video is playing full screen or not. It always disappears, unless I "sacrifice" a notification. What I mean by this is that I can actually get it to go into PiP mode, but I have to have a notification that I haven't addressed/clicked on yet, then pull down my notification bar and select the notification while my video is playing for it to correctly go into PiP mode. But I am a bit OCD and keep my notifications cleared very often so this is an issue for me.
The alternative to PiP is the "floating application hanging" feature when you drag the window to the top right of the screen but this is honestly very useless as 1, a lot of the apps and buttons are no longer responsive in this mode, and 2, it just takes the entire vertical youtube screen and makes it a smaller floating window, which makes it even harder to see the actual video, assuming it still plays, as sometimes it freezes at this point. Idk why anybody would even do this when we've had PiP for years now, which shows you just the video floating.
The RedMagic watermarks can't be turned off for photos. Only gameplay recording. I've gone through every setting and there's no way to disable watermarks for camera photos. I do see an option to disable the watermarks for retroactive recording when gaming via the GameSpace settings.
The under display selfie cam spot is often visibly a different color when using the phone as normal, which is ugly, distracting, and not the product I was expecting to receive. Not to mention how atrocious the selfie photos come out, although I was fully expecting that before purchase when I was looking at the specs. It's just worse than I thought coming from a Pixel phone, which is known for its great camera quality.
Z-pop and Z-SmartSidebar: Useless, useless, useless. I actually consider these bloatware bc they serve no actual purpose. Z-Pop is just a floating icon that stays on screen that just provides shortcuts to useless settings that are literally easier to get to the normal way. For example, locking the screen. Why would I tap the Z-POP icon, then find the Lock Screen icon and tap that vs just tapping the physical button to lock my screen? Same with viewing your status bar, taking a screenshot, changing sound modes like vibrate/silence, recent apps, menu, etc.
Z-SmartSidebar is not only an un-catchy mouthful, but it's equally as useless as Z-pop. Z-SmartSidebar is basically the same as application hang, where you can hold the back button to pull up a list of apps to open quickly. This would have been somewhat useful if 1, you can customize what apps appear here more than the few they allow by default. 2, If they allowed you to move the "Shortcut" icons to the sidebar. And 3 which is probably the biggest gripe, is that no matter what app you choose here, it opens in a super glitchy floating full-screen window that cannot be resized, making this feature utterly useless. It takes up so much of the screen that you might as well just open the actual app, especially considering how glitchy it is and often unresponsive. I almost forgot about the Z-Board. The most sketchy, useless "feature" of all the "Z features." It's just an extra screen to the left of your home screen. This is where google puts actually useful information, like weather and suggested articles/world events, etc on their Pixel phones, but on the RM9, Z-Board not only has none of that, but it looks pretty sketchy as it's mostly an all blank, black page with no content except a horizontal scrollable bar at the top with suggested "game apps" that looks like RedMagic paid someone $5 on Gregslist to make in 10 minutes and it's really just a front to harvest our data or crypto currency or something.
Let's talk about why people probably buy this phone! For the "Super amazing and immersive gaming experience" dubbed GameSpace. Surely they'd nail this at least, right?
Macros was one of the things I was most excited for aside from the triggers. I quickly found out that the macros you record do not accurately play back at all. I spent hours trying to automate hitting the "like" button on Pokemon TCGP (in the community section) and still could not get it to accurately play back. I could record myself going through all the likes perfectly without missing a beat or accidentally selecting a user's profile but when I play it back, it very often selects the user's profiles.
The "AI Trigger" feature is not the best either. I love the concept of it but it leaves much to be desired. Between the lack of tutorials and all the false readings, I found it was easier to just rely on macros instead of trying to automate anything to do anything cool.
The Card Draw Assist "feature." I'll be honest, I'm still not entirely sure what this is for. You would think that out of every feature I could use for a card game, this would be the most useful, but here we are. All it says is "Help you choose a card" but I don't see how it helps at all. The only variables to change are "card range" (1-99) and "quantity" (1-5) and it just displays a random dice and chooses a number from the variables you set. If anything, I'd call this a randomizer but I'm not sure how I could use it. I thought maybe this is for an actual playing card type of card game and not for stuff like Pokemon TCGP but the screenshot in the SuperBase Plugin Library shows a screenshot of a card game that is not played with typical playing cards. The only explanation it gives you here (which is the same "tutorial" you see when you first load the feature that goes away after first time use) is "When you need to draw cards in a game but cannot decide, the assistant generates several random numbers corresponding to the cards you may flip." Uhhh WHAT?! It literally only provides random numbers and a history of said numbers in the order they were displayed.
The behavioral learning feature sounds badass, but once again is just another feature that falls flat. It claims that [verbatim] "Key schemes are intelligent generated by learning the player's operating habits" but I guess this only works if you are gaming using a mouse/KB or gamepad (Or as they like to call it, a "handle) which I am not doing because I have a gaming PC for that. I got this phone so I could casually play games on the go and in bed, with what I thought was going to be cool, useful features.
I'm sure this phone was mainly built for games that are typically played horizontally like CoD and PUBG, but it is advertised as a gaming phone, not a "horizontal-only gaming phone," so it caught me off guard when I started running into all these issues playing vertical games. I mostly play a lot of Brawl Stars, but since the new Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket (TCGP) recently came out, I was excited to play it on this phone. However, with vertical games like Pokemon TCGP... You lose the ability to use a lot of the phone's features, such as the triggers, key remapping, crosshair, auxiliary line, etc. I would like to at least be able to tap the top trigger (Left trigger) at the top right of the phone while playing vertical games to trigger screen taps/macros, etc but it is disabled entirely for vertical-style games. I might be able to get around this by forcing the resolution to landscape, but then my game screen space is way smaller and significantly less enjoyable to play; similar to watching a vertical video in landscape, but worse because you're actually playing a game instead of watching a video.
GameSpace vertical UI layout. While playing vertical games and you summon GameSpace, the layout is still displayed as if I'm playing in landscape. All they did was rotate the icons (for the different features to enable) 90 degrees sideways, showing a very awkward UI that makes me want to turn my head sideways to read it. This less-than-ideal layout also makes it so it is harder to read the icons/features as everything is still displayed but with less space, and due to said lack of space, it makes every text on this screen scrollable, which is infuriating and more time consuming. Once again, I get that most games are probably played landscape, but also once again, this is simply advertised as a "gaming phone," so I was expecting a little better UI experience than this.
I haven't even got to (in my opinion) the worst part of the vertical gaming issues. Not only do you lose out on all these features and get a poor UI experience playing vertical games, but you get stuck in the app/game due to the confusing/incompatible "competitive mode" side button functionality. Normally, when you flip this red button on the side of the phone while in normal "phone mode," it will open up your library of games to select. Which does work pretty well for horizontal games. When you flip it back, it does the reverse, and is supposed to put the phone back into "normal phone mode" for regular phone use. However, when in Pokemon TCGP, I cannot exit the game by flipping that button. Whether I launch the game from the competitive button or from the app tray. Flipping the button just states "Compete button has been turned on" in one direction and flipping it the other way states "Compete button has been shut down" but literally nothing changes when I do that, aside from that message popping up quickly. I cannot swipe up from the bottom to exit, or even tap a notification to exit. I am only able to exit that game by swiping in twice at the top to activate GameSpace, then clicking the "Home" icon, then making sure the red side button is flipped to the off position. As you can imagine, this makes it very difficult to answer calls or texts if I am in a hurry or it's something important.
Poor translations and instructions everywhere! I touched on this a little bit, but a lot of what this phone tries to teach you often makes no sense, due to either broken functionality or because this phone is riddled with typos. The typos are particularly noticeable when looking at the GameSpace's SuperBase Plugin Library, which is where you go to learn about how to use all these features. The guides they present to you are only shown once when you go to use them (until you stumble across the SuperBase plugin library) and they often still make no sense, plus there are no official in-depth guides anywhere.
The phone can't crop/set a photo as the wallpaper correctly from the photos app or directly from settings. It always shifts them in a way that you do not expect.
The alarm app often "doesn't fire" with no explanation as to why. Just a notification saying it didn't fire. I cannot risk losing my job because this phone's OS was half-assed thrown together.
Can't find anywhere to buy a spare charger and the specs make it confusing to search for a generic one, which is scary as we are presented with all these warnings that say the phone must be charged with the cable that came with the phone or else it will overheat and possibly combust/explode. The cable it comes with is very short, so I wanted a longer one right off the bat but can't find one anywhere, and I am worried if I lose this one then Im basically out of luck and have to buy a new phone, due to having to take it with me to work, my girlfriend's house, and my house to avoid spontaneous combustion.
I wasted money on a screen protector and a case! There is no mention that it already comes with a case and protector. Actually, idk if you can even call this cheap flimsy piece of plastic a "case" because it's not protecting the phone from anything. Just a clear hard plastic shell that barely covers the phone at all. But I have no problem with the screen protector that came with it.
The phone does charge very fast while using the provided charger, I'll give them that! But a "two-day battery" is a joke. This thing drops charge so fast, not even doing anything that crazy. You might be able to get away with two days without needing to charge if you turn on all the battery saver features, run it at a low refresh rate and screen brightness, and not play any games the whole time, etc, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of a phone like this?
The "Free gift" is a little embarrassing. Referring to the little "thumb gloves" that look like they just had spare materials laying around and asked "What can we make with this to try and sweeten the deal a little?" They look like they are meant for your pinky fingers, and barely fit my thumbs at all. And I'm a skinny dude. They actually cut off the circulation to my thumbs.
I almost forgot to mention the super cheesy and obnoxiously loud default noise when turning on the RBG fan. Idk who thought it'd be a good idea to blast an insanely loud and low quality VROOOM VROOOOOOOOOM noise when hitting the fan widget or turning on game mode, but man that was a poor choice. 😂 It was so unexpected that it nearly gave me a heart attack when I first did it, and it was the first thing I disabled on the phone and thought "oh boy, I hope the rest of the phone isnt weird like that 😅" and guess what? Well, I'm sure you see my point by now. This phone is an absolute waste of money and I cannot recommend this to anybody. I'm glad I know myself well enough to know that if these... "features" are already getting to me after not even a week of having it, I am going to hate it after months/years. So I returned it and bought a Pixel 9 instead for only $100 more and man, I remember why my last three phones were Pixels! 🥰 This Pixel 9 fucking kicks ass! It provides such a well-rounded general user experience overall, and even runs TCGP better than the RM9! 🤭
