Best Gaming Phone 2026: Play Call of Duty, Genshin Impact and more

The RedMagic 11 Pro is an easy pick for the best gaming phone. It features plenty of gaming-focused features, the latest Snapdragon chipset and a price tag that won’t break the bank. What’s not to like?

As mentioned, this phone boasts several excellent gaming features that set it apart. Most notably, the RedMagic has integrated touch triggers, allowing you to use the phone’s rim as makeshift triggers rather than having to slap on a controller accessory.

It also sports integrated cooling, with vents on both sides of the phone to draw in and expel air, along with proper liquid cooling – a first for a smartphone.

RedMagic hasn’t skimped in the screen department either, offering a massive 6.85-inch AMOLED screen with a slick 144Hz refresh rate. Combined with uniform 1.25mm-thick bezels that’d give the iPhone 17 Pro a run for its money and an under-display camera, the screen is essentially clear of obstructions, perfect for gaming.

This is also one of the most powerful gaming phones ever tested, boasting the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 at its core, and surpassing the ROG Phone 9 Pro despite its more affordable price. This means you’ll be able to play any mobile game with ease, and with a massive 7500mAh battery at its core, it’ll just keep on going.

When it comes to pure performance, our money is on Asus’ top-end ROG Phone 9 Pro Edition. The highlight of the phone is undoubtedly the inclusion of the incredibly powerful (but no longer top-end) Snapdragon 8 Elite alongside 24GB of RAM, offering massive year-on-year gains and, importantly, good enough cooling to sustain that top-end performance for longer than any of the competition, gaming-focused or not.

In fact, you’ll even get a dedicated cooler in the box with the 9 Pro Edition, helping keep your phone cool to the touch and offering improved audio performance with a built-in subwoofer. It’s a nice touch rarely seen in the gaming phone market.

Like the RedMagic 11 Pro, this phone is brimming with gaming features such as the AirTriggers, key mapping and Macros. The software is excellent too, enabling you to make tweaks on the fly, even in the middle of an intense match, and Asus is a rarity in that it gives you the choice between a clean ZenUI and a gaming-focused UI.

Elsewhere, Asus has doubled down on making this phone not look or feel like a gamer phone. It has a pretty simplistic look compared to the likes of RedMagic, albeit with an improved AniMe panel that can display text, graphics, and even elements like battery life when the phone is screen down.

Despite a renewed focus on camera tech, the rear cameras still can’t compete with efforts from Apple and Samsung. But if you’re happy to make that sacrifice in the name of gaming performance, then this is a great, albeit premium, option.

If you’re an iPhone user who cares more about frame rates than f-stops, the iPhone 17 Pro is the one to buy. It might not be the showiest member of the 17 family – that honour goes to the ultra-slim iPhone Air – but the 17 Pro is the proper workhorse, and that really pays off for gaming.

Apple has given it the “true” A19 Pro treatment with a beefier GPU and much-improved cooling, and in testing, it simply holds high frame rates for longer than the Air while staying noticeably cooler in the hand. Long sessions of Call of Duty or more demanding titles don’t send it into thermal panic quite as quickly, which makes a big difference if you actually play for hours rather than minutes.

It helps that there’s now a genuinely strong library of premium games to take advantage of all that power. Console-style releases like Red Dead Redemption and recent Assassin’s Creed entries feel surprisingly at home on the 17 Pro, both visually and in how smoothly they run.

It’s also just a more comfortable size than the Max for many people, making it easier to grip during longer play sessions without feeling like you’re holding a tablet.

Crucially, the iPhone 17 Pro backs all this up with the basics done well. Battery life is a clear step up over previous smaller Pro models, and we ended most days with a comfortable buffer even after a fair bit of gaming.

Faster wired and Qi2 wireless charging help you top up quickly between sessions, and you’ve got plenty of storage options if you want to keep multiple big titles installed at once.

If you want a flagship smartphone with excellent gaming performance as just one of its many accomplishments, the OnePlus 15 is the phone to go for.

It can easily deliver excellent performance using the ultra-powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 alongside up to 16GB of RAM, delivering better performance than Asus’ ROG Phone. The difference between it and the ROG Phone? You’re getting much more than just top-end performance.

You also get a high-end 6.8-inch AMOLED display with an LPTO-enabled 165Hz refresh rate and 3200Hz touch sample rate, vanishingly slim bezels and a pixel-packed 1.5K resolution. Oh, and did we mention it supports 165fps in games like Call of Duty Mobile? Because, it does.

It also sports a versatile triple 50MP camera setup, innovative cooling systems that utilise aerogel, a massive 7300mAh battery and rapid 120W charging, all of which should appeal massively to gamers.

Of course, you won’t get some purist gaming enhancements, such as shoulder trigger buttons, but it does support bypass charging, which powers the chipset and not the battery to avoid heat generation during longer gaming sessions.

If you’re looking for a top-end Android device that can handle games without breaking a sweat and much more to boot, the OnePlus 15 is an easy recommendation.

If you’re looking for the best performance possible without splashing out on flagship-level devices, the Poco F7 Ultra is the phone to buy.

Despite its mid-range price tag, the smartphone packs the same ultra-powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite as some of the best phones around right now.

As such, the F7 Ultra can handle practically anything you throw at it, delivering faster speeds and better gaming performance than practically anything else at its price point, making it ideal for mobile gamers who want to save a bit of cash.

Plus, with a 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED screen and a pixel-packed WQHD+ resolution, the latest 3D titles will look absolutely amazing.  

It’ll also keep on going with a large 5300mAh battery, and with 120W charging, it’ll go from flat to full rather quickly too.

The camera performance isn’t much to write home about, and the software is packed with bloatware to offset the price of that flagship chip, but these are worthy sacrifices for that level of performance. 

The £309 Poco X7 Pro offers incredible performance and a slew of gaming features at a very reasonable price, making it a great option for mobile gamers.

It packs MediaTek’s Dimensity 8400-Ultra, just a step down from the flagship 9000 series, but don’t let that fool you; the X7 Pro is slick, fast and perfect for gaming, It could handle games like Call of Duty Mobile with high-end graphics enabled, with no notable heat build-up or performance drop-off thanks to its built-in liquid cooling.

In both real-world use and in benchmark testing, the Poco X7 Pro can comfortably hold its own against flagships twice the price.

It also has a few gaming-focused features to improve the experience, including software that automatically optimises performance for gaming workloads and a 120Hz refresh rate to keep the on-screen motion smooth on that lovely 6.67-inch AMOLED panel.

Of course, bagging this phone at a cheaper price than the competition does come with compromises. The performance isn’t quite as good as the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro Edition, and while camera performance is fine for the price, it’s not exactly going to win any awards.

Nevertheless, those flaws are easy to forgive when you’re getting such an excellent gaming experience at a budget-friendly price.

If you want a totally different gaming experience, look no further than the foldable Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7.

The foldable nature of the book-style smartphone means you’ve got access to a large, high-res 8-inch 120Hz AMOLED display when you want to play games on a big screen while still folding down to a size resembling a standard smartphone.

And, with the phone measuring just 4.2mm unfolded and weighing in at 215g, it’s still lighter and thinner than most dedicated gaming phones.

It’s not just the sheer size of the foldable display that makes the Z Fold 7 the best foldable for gaming either; it’s also pretty powerful, sporting the same custom Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy as the S25 Ultra.

It’s more than capable of powering high-end AAA gaming experiences with high-level graphics and consistent gameplay even over longer periods of use, with a built-in vapour chamber for added cooling.

Elsewhere, a 4,400mAh battery should be enough to get you through even demanding gaming sessions, a triple rear camera setup headed by a 200MP lens that offers more versatility than a regular gaming phone, and it has a whopping seven years of OS upgrades to look forward to.

As much as we love the Redmagic 11 Pro, the phone will feel a bit bulky to some which is why the Redmagic 10 Air is the perfect alternative just waiting to be snapped up.

Being just 7.85mm thick and only weighing in at 205g, the Air is much lighter than both the 11 Pro and the 10 Pro, but it still manages to pack an official IP54 rating to keep it well protected over time.

Even though it has a slimmer build, the 10 Air still brings a ton of power to the table thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. In our testing we were able to get through high-end 3D titles like Zenless Zone Zero without seeing any drops in frame rate. For less taxing titles like Call of Duty Mobile or anything that runs in 2D, you’ll be in for a super smooth experience.

One of the key reasons why Redmagic phones are appealing to gamers is the Game Space software. This unique bit of tech operates as a home dashboard where you can see all of your downloaded games in one uncluttered space, so you don’t have to scroll through a library of apps every time you want to dive into a bit of gaming. You can view all your plugins here as well, providing you with plenty of freedom to customise your experience to suit your needs.

Just in case you were concerned that having a slimmer build might come at the cost of battery life, you can rest easy as the Redmagic 10 Air boasts a massive 6000mAh cell. With that kind of energy to back it up, it’s perfectly possible to get up to two days of use under moderate circumstances. Of course, if you want to enjoy a few hours of gaming in a single day, then you’ll still have plenty of juice left in the tank before you head to bed.

There’s also 80W fast charging available, so you won’t be waiting long to top up the phone when needed. In our tes,t it only took 57 minutes to jump from 0% to a full battery. The fact that all of this comes in a package that’ll only set you back £439/$549 is incredible, and the only reason why you might want to opt for a larger Redmagic phone is for a more recent chipset.