This Is Peak Mobile Gaming

REDMAGIC has come a long way from being a fledgling gaming phone brand and is one of the fan-favorite options for mobile gaming devices, and after our review of the REDMAGIC Astra, it’s never been clearer that the company is here to play and it means business. Of course, REDMAGIC isn’t just a mobile gaming brand. It actually has a few PC gaming products as well, in the form of a laptop and a gaming keyboard. It has a gaming monitor and a gaming mouse as well.

That being said, REDMAGIC is still committed to mobile gaming at its core, and the Astra gaming tablet is its latest offering. With a 9-inch display, it’s a tablet that still feels portable while providing a bigger screen to play mobile games on. Phones these days have grown to a decent size, offering displays close to 7 inches. That’s a lot bigger than what we were all used to playing mobile games on 10 years ago. However, it’s still considerably smaller than a 9-inch display like the Astra offers, and the more you play games on it, the more it becomes apparent that right around 8 to 9 inches is the sweet spot for the near-perfect mobile gaming experience. At least when it comes to visuals. While not perfect, the REDMAGIC Astra tablet knocks it out of the park in many areas. At a starting retail price of $549.99, you’ll want to know whether or not your money is worth it. So, let’s take a closer look at the REDMAGIC Astra and see if it’s worth your hard-earned money.

Specs

REDMAGIC Astra Ultimate Review: Hardware and Design

While I have always enjoyed the style of REDMAGIC’s devices, I was never a mega fan of the current design with tons of glass. However, the REDMAGIC Astra tablet uses a lot less glass, opting for just a strip of it that goes across the top (when held in landscape mode) as opposed to fitting the whole back with glass. It almost acts as a banner, featuring some subtle gamer branding and design elements. Such as the “vapor chamber” and “composite liquid metal” wording, as well as the REDMAGIC and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite branding. The rest of the tablet is made of metal with a matte finish. This not only looks sleek, but it feels nice to the touch. It does garner a fair amount of fingerprints. So, if fingerprints bother you, just keep a microfiber cloth on you and you’ll be good to go.

What I appreciate most about the design is the size and how thin it is. While I slightly prefer the size of the Legion Tab Gen 3 more, 9.06 inches is comfortable to hold in your hands without feeling too big, and this also helps with the weight. In my time with it so far, I haven’t felt fatigued after playing on it for a couple of hours, and I feel like that’s important. The fact that it’s really thin both looks nice and makes it easy to fit in really any bag I own. In fact, it fits perfectly in both crossbody bags I have, one of which is for the Nintendo Switch OLED, and the other for my ROG Ally X.

The tablet features dual stereo speakers and one USB-C port. There is no 3.5mm audio port, which is a small bummer because you can’t use wired headphones with this tablet. The USB-C port is also off-center, and this is really my only gripe with the design. The placement of the USB-C port means it doesn’t sit perfectly in my Razer Kishi Ultra or Razer Kishi V3 Pro controller. It fits, but in landscape mode, the USB-C port on the Astra is at the top right. This means the display isn’t perfectly centered between the two sides of either controller. It still works, but it sort of throws off the weight and balance a tiny bit. I understand why REDMAGIC did this, though. By placing the USB-C port off-center, this leaves room to make sure the dual stereo speakers are centered, and this makes it less likely that I would cover them up with my hands while holding the tablet. Of course, I’d have preferred to have the stereo speakers front-facing, making room for a centered USB-C port on the bottom, but that’s me. On the left side of the tablet, there are no buttons or ports. Then on the right, you have the volume buttons and the Magic Key that takes you into the REDMAGIC game space. Then, on top, you have the power button, which also serves as the fingerprint sensor. Overall, the design is very solid, and the only thing I would really change is where that USB-C port is located. This is minor, though, and mostly just a preference thing.

REDMAGIC Astra Ultimate Review: Display

I’ve said this before, and I’ll likely continue to say it as I don’t see it changing. I am not generally picky about displays on phones or tablets. I was perfectly fine with the display on the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 because, ultimately, an LCD display is more than suitable for mobile gaming. Games still look great, and colors are nice and vivid. Having said that, I won’t deny that the OLED panel on the REDMAGIC Astra is really nice. The inky blacks and brighter colors that pop off the screen definitely enhance the gaming experience. If you prefer an OLED panel for your mobile devices, you’re going to love this tablet.

The resolution is 2,400 x 1,504, so it’s a bit lower than the Legion Tab Gen 3. However, this isn’t really noticeable since the resolutions are so close together, and the screen sizes aren’t vastly different. What I appreciated more than having an OLED panel, though, is the higher peak brightness. While I love the Legion Tab Gen 3, the AStra comes with a peak brightness of 1,600 nits and a full-screen brightness of 1,100 nits. This is well over what the Legion Tab Gen 3 offers, and in brighter rooms, it was nice to have.

For those who care more about responsiveness, the Astra doesn’t disappoint. It has a refresh rate of up to 165Hz and a touch sampling rate of up to 2,000Hz, with a multi-finger rate of up to 240Hz. In other words, whether you play with just your thumbs or you like to have several fingers touching the display during gameplay, your inputs are going to be recognized. This can be hugely important in competitive multiplayer games. I’m more of a casual when it comes to controls and just use my thumbs, but the Astra will be more than enough for people who have multi-finger playstyles.

Overall, I think this is an excellent display, and there isn’t much, if anything, to complain about with it. The colors, size, brightness, refresh rate, and touch sampling rate are all on point to account for a really fun time playing games.

REDMAGIC Astra Ultimate Review: Battery Life and Charging

On a gaming device, whether it’s a tablet, a phone, or a handheld, you want the battery life to last. At least long enough to get some good game time in. For most, that’s probably going to be a few hours at the very least. For me, depending on the device, that’s right about where I want it. That being said, on a tablet like the REDMAGIC Astra, I’d want the battery life to last me at least most of the day and then some.

Luckily, the Astra more than meets my expectations for a mobile gaming device. I was getting about 10 hours, sometimes 12 hours of screen-on time before needing a charge. I wasn’t playing games that entire time, but I was often spending 3 hours gaming in one sitting, and the battery wasn’t completely drained.

The Astra has a pretty large battery capacity at 8,200mAh, so I wasn’t expecting it to have any trouble with staying powered during my usage. For standardized battery life testing with all our mobile devices, we bring up a 24-hour YouTube video and let it play until the battery on the device dies. When I did this for the Astra, it lasted for 12 hours and 39 minutes before I needed to plug it back in and let it recharge.

During real-world use for me, which is usually a few hours of gaming, as well as a few hours of browsing apps and the web, and watching some videos on YouTube, the Astra still has about 40% battery left when I go to bed. So, really quite a lot. If you’re playing games on it all day, then definitely expect it to die before the day is over. However, you shouldn’t have a problem with average use.

Charging speeds

For the recharge time, it took 1 hour and 31 minutes to get from 0% to 100%. That’s really not too bad at all, considering the size of the battery. You could drain it completely and then be back up and running with a full battery in well under 2 hours.

REDMAGIC Astra Ultimate Review: Performance

It should be no secret that the REDMAGIC Astra has pretty stellar performance given its specifications, but to be absolutely certain of its capabilities, we still put the tablet through its paces like we would any other device. So we can be sure just how good it is. For me, personally, performance comes down to how well the tablet handles games. This is really all I would be doing on this tablet if I weren’t writing a review of it. I don’t generally watch too many videos on mobile normally, and if I’m reading something that isn’t on my PC, I prefer a smaller device like my phone since it’s lighter. That being said, we’ll start the performance discussion with the gaming aspect.

I played more than a few hours of games like Delta Force, Genshin Impact, and Diablo Immortal on this tablet, and it more than meets the requirements to run those games at their peak levels on a mobile device. While the tablet can get somewhat warm after playing games for a few hours nonstop, this is to be expected. The REDMAGIC Astra is made of metal, save for the one piece of glass across the top edge on the back, and it houses the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is currently the most powerful mobile chipset available. It has a lot of performance chops in the hardware department, and that’s going to push the temperatures up there a bit.

Luckily, you won’t feel most of these temp increases. REDMAGIC has done a good job of keeping the device as cool as possible during heavy loads, thanks to the Enhanced Ice-X cooling system and the included vapor chamber. There’s a little fan in there, too. In addition to these things, REDMAGIC has made sure that any of the components that produce the majority of the heat are mostly away from where your fingers touch the tablet’s chassis. The warmest parts are the parts you won’t really be touching.

In addition to testing the performance capabilities through gameplay, we also run the tablet through a series of benchmarks to see how it holds up on paper compared to other devices.

Benchmarks

For benchmark testing, we put the devices we review through a handful of different tests. This includes the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, Geekbench 6 CPU and GPU tests, AnTuTu 3D Benchmark, and we do our own little test that we call the CapCut test, where we export a 4K video that’s about a minute long at 4K 60 to see how long it takes the device to do this, and we record the time.

Starting with the Geekbench tests, the REDMAGIC Astra had a single-core score of 3,099, a multi-core score of 7,870, and GPU score of 19,509. The single-core score was better than every tablet we’ve reviewed since we started these tests, except for the 13-inch Apple iPad Pro with the M4 chip. The multi-core score was better than most tablets we’ve reviewed, except for, once again, the M4 iPad Pro, and this time the OnePlus Pad 3.

Next, we did the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. Here, its best loop was 6,283, its lowest loop was 5,520, and its stability was 87.9%.

For AnTuTu the Astra got a score of 2,604,996, and for the CapCut test, it was able to export that video in 19.86 seconds.

Thermals

We also don’t stop at testing gaming performance or putting the devices through benchmarks. We also check the thermals during some of the more demanding activities.

We test thermals during the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, after an hour to an hour and a half of gaming in Genshin Impact with the graphics settings maxed out, and after video recording at 4K. For the video recording, we check thermals after 5 minutes and after 10 minutes. Starting with the 3DMark test, after it was over, the Astra was sitting at 110.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

After the video recording, it was at 89.3 after 5 minutes, and at 92.1 after 10 minutes.

Finally, playing Genshin Impact for an hour and a half with maxed-out settings pushed the device temperature to 97.1 degrees. Honestly, the only time the tablet was uncomfortably warm was after the 3DMark test. I could still pick it up and hold it, but the temperature was warm enough that I didn’t want to. All things considered, the thermals of this tablet will be just fine when you’re playing games. So, there’s nothing to worry about on this front.

REDMAGIC Astra Ultimate Review: Software

Since this is a REDMAGIC device, the software is going to be pretty much identical to the REDMAGIC 10S Pro that we reviewed a bit earlier this year. The main difference is that all the uniquely REDMAGIC software elements will be visible on a bigger display. However, there aren’t many differences when you compare the two devices.

With that in mind, you get a reasonably close to stock Android experience with the UI in most parts of it, save for the settings menus, which have their own colorful design to the icons and such. The big thing with the software on REDMAGIC devices is the Game Space. You can enter this by sliding the dedicated button for it on the side of the tablet. It’s on the right side, and towards the bottom corner.

The Game Space is essentially a one-stop shop for all your gaming stuff, like an actual place to see all your installed games. You can launch them from here, too. The Game Space is also where you can adjust performance and GPU settings, turn on the tablet’s fan, and customize the UI. If you’re just going to use this for playing games, or if gaming is what you will use it for the majority of the time, then you might as well just keep in Game Space often.

Outside of this, the Astra has a pretty straightforward user experience that you’ll be familiar with if you’ve used a modern Android device from the past few years. Like with the REDMAGIC 10S Pro, the software on the Astra is pretty good, and I don’t feel like it really needs any changes.

REDMAGIC Astra Ultimate Review: Camera

I’ll mostly keep this section short because this is a tablet and it wasn’t designed to give you solid camera features or top-notch images. That’s what your phone is for. However, it does have a camera, and the camera app has some pretty standard features you’ll find in most mobile device cameras these days. In terms of quality, the pictures are just ok. They won’t be winning any awards for quality or breaking any records. But if you have both this and your phone on you, and your phone’s battery is dead when you need to snap a picture, then this will suffice. I wouldn’t use it for photos otherwise. Color accuracy seems to be ok, but could use a tiny bit of improvement.

The camera has no macro or portrait modes, so you get locked out of some of the better camera features that smartphones tend to have. The image quality is also unsurprisingly bad when zoomed in to 5x on this device. Because, again, this is a tablet and it doesn’t have the best camera sensors. All in all, this will take pictures in the event you don’t have another device to do so. It can also be just fine for video calls with the front camera. That being said, I would simply avoid using the main camera for pictures if you can, and opt to use your phone instead.

Should you buy the REDMAGIC Astra gaming tablet?

Honestly, yes. If you’re into mobile gaming and you’re looking for a device that performs exceptionally well when playing games, this is a device that does that and then some. It’s got a beautiful display, a high-powered chipset, lots of RAM and storage, and it’s thin and light. Not to mention it has what I feel is the perfect size display for not only mobile gaming, but a tablet in general. The Astra isn’t perfect, but it comes close, and that’s certainly in no small part due to the affordable price tag. With a starting price of $599, the Astra is definitely an attainable gaming device for plenty of consumers. I highly recommend it if you have the money to spare.

Would I use this over the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 personally? No. But that’s because I have a mobile controller with a USB-C direct connection that I love using, and I want the tablet centered between the two sides of the controller. Unfortunately, the Astra’s USB-C port is towards the top when held in landscape mode. So, it sits further down between the two controller sides, and this just rubs me the wrong way. However, REDMAGIC does have a controller that is meant to work with this tablet. So if you go with that, or you just don’t play with a mobile controller at all, then I think this is a hard device to pass up.

Buy the REDMAGIC Astra if:

• You want your mobile games to be separate from your phone
• You’re looking for something affordable but want top-notch specs
• You want good battery life

Don’t buy the REDMAGIC Astra if:

• You’re fine with playing games on your phone
• You already have a pretty decent tablet for gaming
• You want a bigger screen