RedMagic Astra 2 Review

Design

• Similar design to last year’s Astra
• Portable, lightweight, premium design
• RGB lighting and liquid cooling

In terms of overall look and feel, RedMagic hasn’t changed much with the Astra 2 compared to last year’s RedMagic Astra – but I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

We praised the design of last year’s Astra, particularly its portable dimensions, which made using and carrying it an absolute dream – especially compared to bigger tablets like the Honor MagicPad 4 – and that’s all just as true this year. 

The Astra 2, in terms of how nice it is to hold and use, stands out from the sea of other Android tablets I’ve used this year. At 9 inches and 16:10, it strikes the right balance between being big enough for gaming and entertainment without being hard to hold one-handed or use for extended periods. Measuring 6.9mm and 363g, it’s a refreshing change from the 675g OnePlus Pad 3 I tend to use at home. 

I also love that it’s one of the vanishingly few tablets with a completely flat rear, with a single camera embedded in the frame. I forgot just how nice it is to have a tablet that sits flush on a table, with no annoying wobble whatsoever when tapping or typing on the screen. 

More generally, it’s certainly a gaming-focused tablet – there are customisable RGB lights on the rear panel, and there’s even a transparent window with a visible PCB if you squint hard enough. Though, as with the Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer from yesteryear, this isn’t actually the tablet’s internals; just a cool visual design.

One thing you might notice is the lack of the active cooling fan that used to sit to the left of the camera housing on last year’s Astra – and that’s because it has been completely ditched this year in favour of liquid cooling. 

Yes, the same high-end cooling tech used in top-end gaming PCs is now available in a tablet. And, with a bright blue liquid flowing across the rear panel, it’s easy to see when it’s in use. Small bubbles roll along the tubes, indicating that the liquid is actually flowing through the system. The question is, is it a gimmick or does it actually do anything? I’ll get to that a little later. 

Despite ditching the fan that could, in theory, let water and dust into the system, the water resistance hasn’t improved this year – it’s still IP54 – but when most popular tablets, including every best iPad, lack any kind of official rating, it’s still enough to stand out. It’s not quite the IP68 of the Galaxy Tab S11, but then again, this tablet isn’t quite as expensive. 

Gaming-focused extras like the dual USB-C ports are also back – one on the long side and one on the short side – and work really well for a gaming tablet. It essentially means you can charge your tablet without the cable getting in the way, regardless of how you’re gaming – and both ports support the same fast-charging protocol. 

The signature bright-red Game Space switch is also back, serving as a shortcut to a dedicated gaming overlay on the tablet. You flick it on to enable it, and when you’re done, flicking it off takes you back to your regular Android home screen – a simple idea, admittedly, but one that works very well in practise.

So while the Astra 2 may not look all that different, the small refinements on offer here really add up to one of the best-looking and, arguably more importantly, most comfortable tablets I’ve used in quite some time. 

Screen

• Bright, vivid 9.06-inch OLED screen
• 16:10 aspect ratio is perfect for games and videos
• Rapid 185Hz refresh rate

I’ve long been a fan of big-screen tablets like the 13.2-inch OnePlus Pad 3 and the behemoth that is the 14.6-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, but after using the Astra 2 and its relatively dinky 9.06-inch for the past month or so, I might well be a small-screen convert. 

The 9.06-inch screen offers a great blend of big-screen entertainment and ease of use, even one-handed. It’s undoubtedly a bigger canvas than you’ll find on even the biggest smartphones, yet not so big that it becomes cumbersome to hold for extended periods, especially when gaming. 

It also means your fingers don’t have to travel quite so far to hit the various buttons depending on what you’re playing – something I never really noticed when gaming on a big screen, but I do now. I can hold the tablet on either side and comfortably reach most of the screen without needing to adjust my grip at all. 

The 16:10 aspect ratio also complements the gaming experience, with a wide-screen look that gives you a wider field of view in games than boxier tablet screens do – and it also means you can watch Hollywood blockbusters without those annoying black bars at the top and bottom. 

The flip side is that small, widescreen tablets like this aren’t great for split-screen productivity – it’s just too compact to display them with enough space to be useful. But, that’s not really the focus of the Astra 2, so it’s not really a black mark against it. 

It helps that it’s a very nice screen; the pin-sharp 2.4K OLED panel delivers the inky blacks and vivid colours it’s known for, making it great not just for gaming but for general movie-watching. And, at 185Hz, it’s one of the fastest screens around. 

You likely won’t find many, if any, games that currently support that high a refresh rate, but it’s great futureproofing nonetheless – and it makes gameplay buttery smooth and responsive, especially when paired with its 2000Hz touch sample rate. 

And, despite being a large-ish OLED screen, it manages to hit 1100nits in high-brightness mode, more than enough to let me game outdoors on a sunny day, and it goes up to 1600nits if you’re watching HDR content. 

Throw in impressively slim 4.9mm-thick bezels and a 90.1% screen-to-body ratio, and it’s a genuinely hard-to-fault screen. Top marks, RedMagic. 

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 power with 12- or 16GB RAM
• Liquid cooling really helps sustained performance
• No problem playing big games with top-end graphics

There’s no point in burying the lede here; the Astra 2 is the most powerful Android tablet we’ve used to date, beating goliaths like the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra in both the CPU and GPU departments – a tablet that comes in at over double the price. 

It doesn’t quite reach the lofty heights of the iPad Pro M5, of course, but it does score closely to the iPad Air M2. Yes, it’s two years old, but it shows the desktop-level power also on offer from this much smaller, more potent Android-based tablet. 

It’s driven by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and comes with a very generous (especially in the current climate) 12- or 16GB of RAM, with either 256- or 512GB storage to choose from depending on the variant you go for. Yes, other tablets have the same chipset, but it’s so much better utilised here. Ultimately, it comes down to one thing: built-in liquid cooling.

Yes, that liquid you can see running across the back of the tablet actually does something – better than that, it makes a big difference to sustained performance, especially when combined with a large vapour chamber. When tablets push flagship chips like the 8 Elite Gen 5, they can overheat, and the chip gets throttled. That simply doesn’t happen with the Astra 2. 

In our 20-minute stress test that repeatedly renders a native 4K game clip, the Astra maintained 85.7% stability. For context, the Honor Magic Pad 3 managed just under 77%, while the Tab S11 Ultra offered 68.7%. That means that the tablet keeps on delivering those high frame rates, even when pushed to its absolute limits. 

Of course, benchmarks don’t always translate well to the real world, so I ran the (already fairly demanding) Wuthering Waves at the highest settings possible. Despite in-game warnings that it’d make my device hot and reduce performance, it stayed locked at a smooth 60fps for the hour-plus I played, with no noticeably warm areas on the chassis. 

It’s not just Wuthering Waves either; I ran games like Genshin Impact, One Punch Man World, and The Division Resurgence, all at the highest settings with little complaint from the tablet. It feels like the only bit of tech I’ve used so far that can fully utilise the power of the 8 Elite Gen 5 without any issue – a true achievement from the RedMagic team. 

Simply put, whether you’re a dedicated gamer or need the extra grunt to edit and export multiple 4K streams in CapCut, the Astra 2 has you covered – confidently at that. 

Software

• RedMagic OS 11.5 based on Android 16
• Relatively stock design by default
• Plenty of gaming-focused features to boost performance

I never used to be a big fan of RedMagic’s tablet software. It was a garishly over-the-top gaming-inspired overlay that, while suited to the gamer aesthetic, wasn’t actually that enjoyable to use in day-to-day life. It was, as the kids say, doing too much.

RedMagic has learnt from those early mistakes though, and the Astra 2 ships with something I’d describe as refreshingly close to a simple Android 16 experience. You can go full gamer aesthetic in the Settings menu if you miss the old look, but by default, it’s the cleaner look – and that’s the right move if you want to broaden the tablet’s appeal beyond hardcore gamers to casual gamers. 

That’s not to say that RedMagic has shed all the gaming-specific features that made it so unique; they’re still there, just more focused. The Game Space is tied to the red switch on the side of the tablet, and with a flick, you’re taken to the console-like UI where you can launch your favourite titles.

Swiping in from the side once the game launches reveals a whole host of options to choose from. It includes basic gameplay features like changing the chipset’s performance mode (‘Rise’ is the most powerful mode) and optimising background processes, alongside a host of unique experiences. 

Super Picture Quality, for example, uses AI to upscale 1080p@60fps games to 2K@120fps with crisper visuals, while plug-ins can customise on-screen crosshairs, track in-game events, apply filters that make it easier to spot enemies and much more. It’s a real treasure trove of features and add-ons that, if you spend time experimenting, can really boost the already excellent gaming experience on the tablet. 

The anime waifu-inspired Mora virtual buddy/AI assistant returns, but thankfully it’s hidden by default; you’ll have to enable it in the Game Space settings to interact with it. It’s certainly not to my taste, but it’s there if you want it. 

Keeping all that condensed to the gaming space turns the Astra 2 into a hybrid of sorts; a regular Android tablet for social media and a more console-like gaming tablet when it’s time to lock in. 

There are AI smarts here, but they’re limited to standard features like live translation, transcription, notepad smarts, and, of course, Gemini-related smarts. It’s not as big or flashy as Samsung’s Galaxy AI, but it’s rather refreshing – who really uses those AI features regularly, anyway? 

Cameras

• 13MP rear camera
• 9MP selfie camera
• Fine for quick shots, but nothing more

Camera tech is never at the forefront of manufacturers’ minds when it comes to tablets, and that’s doubly so with hyper-focused gaming tablets like the Astra 2. 

There is a single 13MP rear-facing camera with a flash module to add a bit of extra light to environments, but as you’d expect, results aren’t mind-blowing. It’s a fine snapper if you, say, see your dog looking cute while you’re mid-Wuthering Waves, but the images lack the detail and general oomph most of us are likely accustomed to from our phones. 

It’s a similar story on the front, with the tiny 9MP snapper embedded in the bezel delivering good-enough quality for video calls and the like, but it won’t be your go-to lens for recording content for social media. 

The camera on the phone in your pocket, even if it’s a few years old, will take better snaps than the Astra 2. And, honestly, that’s absolutely fine.

Battery life

• 8300mAh battery
• Can last for days with mixed use
• Full charge in under an hour

Despite its small, thin footprint, the Astra 2 has a large 8300mAh battery inside. It’s only 100mAh bigger than last year’s Astra, but it doesn’t really matter; combined with the power-efficient OLED screen and the 8 Elite Gen 5, the tablet has no issue lasting all day without crying out for a charger.

Being a gaming tablet, I put it to the test by playing Wuthering Waves for an hour with maximum graphics enabled, and I saw 13% drain, translating to just shy of nine hours of gameplay before it needs a top-up. And that’s when really pushing the chipset to its limits; with more casual use, like scrolling through TikTok and replying to messages, the Astra 2 can go longer, with excellent standby times too. It really does depend on what you’re up to.

Thankfully, it supports bypass charging for those longer gaming sessions, both helping the tablet stay cool and preventing battery degradation. And when it does need a top-up, 75W charging will get you from flat to full in 56 minutes, with 68% in 30 minutes in testing. 

That charging power is shared between the two USB-C ports on the tablet, so you’ll get the fastest possible charging regardless of which you use.

There’s no wireless charging here, but that’s not a big surprise given its metal chassis. You can’t have it all, I suppose…

View RedMagic Astra 2 offers

Should you buy it?