Thermals over Best-in-Class Silicon: The New Battle Line in Gaming Smartphones

As the broader smartphone market continues to be rocked by tumultuous signals following the consumer memory chip crunch, vendors at MWC26 Shanghai seemed to adopt a realigned approach to the market by counterintuitively expanding into a dedicated gaming subcategory. ZTE's nubia REDMAGIC remains the segment's most disciplined operator, running a twice-yearly cadence—the REDMAGIC 11 Pro in late 2025 and the 11S Pro globally in June 2026—pairing Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 silicon with hardware no mainstream flagship will touch: 24,000 Revolutions per Minute (rpm) mechanical fans, active liquid cooling, 7,500 Milliampere-Hour (mAh) cells, and 520 Hertz (Hz) shoulder triggers. Another more telling signal is Lenovo's return.

After a 4-year absence following the 2022 Legion Y70, the company relaunched the line in May 2026, explicitly framed for the "AI gaming era," notably at the same moment ASUS has been stepping back from its ROG phone commitment. Xiaomi is also making moves in the category, launching the Redmi K90 Ultra at the end of June with a built-in active cooling fan and an 8,550 mAh cell, but pairing them with the prior-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite rather than the Gen 5 part its own K90 Pro Max already carries.

Even as ASUS, a longstanding co-anchor to the gaming subsegment alongside ZTE’s REDMAGIC, is facing a full withdrawal from the mass market, Lenovo’s reentry and Xiaomi Redmi’s push into gaming-focused flagships have demonstrated that these Chinese vendors have identified significant value in the market and target audience even as the mass market has stalled. Lenovo and Xiaomi’s entry into the market highlights an important trend in gaming smartphones: a growing competitive differentiation that is shifting away from “best-in-class” silicon chipsets toward other performance-related metrics, such as sustained, proven thermal regulation. With gaming as the central use case, vendors are focusing on the smartphone’s ability to maintain performance under high temperatures without throttling. By leveraging hardware upgrades (liquid cooling, fans, etc.) and software to optimize performance, gaming smartphones aim to deliver sustained output as the credible differentiator within the subsegment.

This subcategory is growing in relevance as rising costs of memory chips and components have plagued the market since the end of 2025. The reallocation of wafer capacity from memory makers away from consumer-grade chips to high-margin High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and high-capacity, enterprise-grade DDR5 chips for Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers has placed a considerable strain on Low-Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR) and NAND supply. The supply chain strain, paired with a growing commoditization trend in flagship phones converging on the same components, has caused gaming smartphones, which traditionally relied on large Random-Access Memory (RAM) and storage configurations to differentiate themselves from their most competitive feature, to instead lean on AI-driven frame stabilization and performance tuning as the emerging axis of differentiation.

ABI Research believes the near-term bottleneck for gaming smartphones is a matter of scale. It remains an incredibly niche market, and with Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) and NAND cost pressures through 2026 and 2027, component prices are expected to squeeze the aggressive spec-for-price formula that the subcategory traditionally depends on.

For a vendor considering entry or expansion into the gaming-niche smartphone market, ABI Research makes the following key recommendations for the current environment:

• Sustained thermals are not the latest fad, but instead they are increasingly becoming a credible differentiator. Vendors should seek throttle-resistant sustained performance that is independently tested and benchmarked over time, not simply peak benchmark scores. Proper configuration of thermal regulation can provide a prior-generation System-on-Chip (SoC) with sufficient performance validation, enabling entrants to sidestep higher silicon cost pressures.
• Pick a lane and own it. As the gaming subsegment is beginning to bifurcate into a purist tier (REDMAGIC’s Premium Performance) and a crowded value tier (Redmi, Lenovo Legion, iQoo, etc.), a brand-led entry into the market should target the value tier deliberately, instead of attempting to contest REDMAGIC in a scenario where it cannot out-engineer the smartphone’s performance.
• Make on-device AI the roadmap and not just a tagline. By leveraging gaming- and performance-specific use cases such as frame generation, thermal-aware scheduling, and performance tuning, vendors can continually differentiate their product capabilities, which can be translated into mainstream flagships. Real demonstrable competence in on-device AI software can position entrants solidly in the market, using the gaming subcategory as a proving ground rather than treating AI as a marketing opportunity over hardware.