RedMagic Astra 2 Gaming Tablet Review: Performance In A Portable Package

Gamers who are tired of playing on the relatively tiny screens of mobile phones, but still want a relatively portable device, have a limited number of choices. Many of the top choices for the most powerful gaming tablets today come with a large 11-inch display, like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra or the iPad Pro M5. 

If you want something smaller to easily fit in your bag or purse, the first thing that would come to mind for many would be the iPad mini. However, while this smaller tablet might be capable of some gaming, it might not be able to keep up with your demand if you plan to spend hours playing on it. RedMagic has got just the solution for you if you're looking for a gaming tablet you can easily bring with you; without compromising on performance or battery life. 

This gaming company built one of the Android tablets that are more powerful than the iPad mini with the Astra, and it just released a second-generation Astra 2. So, is the RedMagic Astra 2 a worthy successor, and will it be able to satisfy your gaming needs while on the go? The company sent us the gaming tablet so we can test it out and see for ourselves how it holds up to everyday use and gaming.

The Astra 2 comes with a relatively large 9.06-inch OLED screen, which is a similar size to the previous-generation Astra, but is slightly larger than the iPad mini's 8.3-inch LCD screen. Despite that, its dimensions of 8.15x5.28 inches put it close to the size of A5 notebooks, while its 0.27-inch thickness makes it thinner than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. This makes the Astra 2 easy to slip into whatever bag that you use to carry your daily stuff. 

The tablet is still heavier than the 10.34-ounce iPad mini, though, weighing around 12.9 ounces, so you'll definitely feel the difference between the two devices if you hold them both. However, you're getting better performance and stability out of the RedMagic tablet, which makes the two-and-a-half-ounce difference a worthy trade-off.

This tablet is available in two colors: the black or dark gray Eclipse or the silver Starfrost. Our test unit came in the darker color and has a smooth metallic satin finish, with a glass strip at the back showing off its "AquaCore Cooling System 2.0" and large vapor chamber to expel heat away from the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC that powers the tablet. The combination of the tablet's smooth back and dark color gave it a beautiful finish that could rival the look of iPads, with the only clue suggesting that it offers so much more power coming from the glass strip. That said, this smooth finish makes it quite slippery to hold, especially if your hands are dry, so I recommend getting a case.

Since the RedMagic Astra 2 is designed specifically for gaming, it comes with top-tier specs to give players the best possible experience. It's powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which is Qualcomm's latest high-end chip, and is equipped with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. If you find yourself needing more memory but still have a lot of free storage space, the tablet has the Extended RAM feature, which lets you allocate an extra 12 GB for a total RAM capacity of 28 GB. This makes it a good bet for demanding games like "Ark: Ultimate Mobile Edition" and "Genshin Impact."

The tablet's 9.06-inch inch display has a 185Hz refresh rate to take advantage of all this power and give you the smoothest possible gaming experience. This may be a bit overkill, especially as many popular games of this generation can't even hit that frames per second limit. For example, "Call of Duty: Mobile" comfortably hits its 165 fps limit, even with the graphics settings at maximum, while "World of Tanks Blitz" delivers 120 fps throughout the match. Nevertheless, the extra fps that you get with this high refresh rate screen means that you can take advantage of more frames when developers update their games to take advantage of newer hardware.

Of course, we cannot forget about the headlining feature of the RedMagic Astra 2: Its built-in water-cooling system. This ditches the fan from the original RedMagic Astra and replaces it with the AquaCore Cooling System 2.0, making the tablet quieter while still ensuring stability during long game sessions. However, it can make the device feel a bit too warm, with a section of the screen near the top part going over 47 degrees Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit) after a prolonged benchmarking session.

While this tablet is an excellent gaming device, you can also use it for watching movies and listening to music once you get tired of playing. Its OLED display has a full-screen brightness of 1100 nits, which is more than enough for you to see every detail of what you're watching. It even hits a peak brightness of 1600 nits, ensuring you can see the screen even as you're sunning yourself on the beach. 

Even though it can get very bright, you can also dim the screen so that you won't get blasted by it when you're in a dark room. This is particularly useful if I'm gaming in bed and don't want to wake up my sleeping wife. Note that RedMagic used a 16:10 aspect ratio for the tablet, making it a bit taller than most smartphones in landscape mode. While this is not ideal for 16:9 or wider content, it does give you a bit more screen real estate for gaming.

The Astra 2 also features stereo speakers that are sufficiently loud for you and a couple of your friends to enjoy movies, TV shows, or your favorite playlist. Its speakers are loud and clear, and they're even louder than my larger 13-inch iPad Air. Nevertheless, you might find it lacking if you're an audiophile; especially as I find that my iPhone 14 Pro Max sounded a smidge more refined than the gaming tablet. Unfortunately, the tablet doesn't have a 3.5 mm headphone jack, so you either have to use Bluetooth speakers or headphones if you want a proper listening experience.

Even though the RedMagic Astra 2 is built for gamers, I found that it's also a capable device for productivity and creative work. It's especially great for editing photos on Lightroom, where its 1100-nit OLED screen with 1504x2400 resolution ensures that I can see the details of the photo I'm editing crisply and clearly. I also don't have to worry about color accuracy, as it covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color space, and has exceptional color accuracy with a Delta-E of 0.7. 

More importantly, the tablet's liquid cooling ensures that it doesn't dim the screen when I edit a ton of photos. This is in contrast with my iPad Air, which dims its display after I use Lightroom for several minutes at full screen brightness.

Transferring the photos that I want to edit from my camera to the tablet takes quite a long time if I do it wirelessly, but it easily accepts a USB hub or dock, so I can just plug my SD card physically into the tablet. It also works flawlessly with my portable SSD, so I don't have to rely on cloud services for transferring huge files quickly. Aside from editing photos and transferring files, it's also great for notetaking during events, especially as its portable size makes it easier to use at places where there are no desks. If I'm in a pinch, I could even use it as a writing device by pairing a portable mouse and keyboard with it; although I find the screen too small for my standard workflow.

The RedMagic Astra 2 comes with a front camera and a rear camera with flash, but don't expect great things to come out of it. The front camera has a 9-megapixel resolution with f/2.2 aperture and 1080p 30fps recording, which should be good enough for video calls and selfies. The rear camera offers 13 megapixels with 4K 30 fps video capture. The rear camera also offers digital zoom up to five times, but at the expense of resolution.

This tablet features "Enhanced AI Algorithm" on both cameras, helping cut down on noise and sharpen images, especially if you're taking photos in dimly lit places. However, you can see the "enhancement" in the photos, especially those taken in challenging conditions. While the output is acceptable when viewed from afar, the details often get smudged and blurry when you zoom in. There's also no way to turn off its AI enhancement or shoot raw photos, so you can't use Lightroom or other apps to squeeze more details out of the camera.

Given all that, these cameras should be good enough for capturing quick snapshots and memories, but you shouldn't rely on them if you want to take your photography to the next level. If you really want to dive into photography, you're better off getting one of the best camera phones on the market today.

Gaming is battery intensive, so it's crucial for any gaming device to come with a massive battery, too. That's exactly what you get with the RedMagic Astra 2, with its 8,300mAh dual-cell battery. This massive capacity allowed me to play several rounds of "World of Tanks Blitz" and "Call of Duty: Mobile" for around 2-3 hours, and I still had a little over 50% battery left after that. I could play for around five hours at maximum settings. Note that I always play games with the screen set at brightest and the games' graphics quality at maximum, so I was pushing the tablet to its relative limits.

After draining the battery to zero, I plugged it into my fast-charging brick and USB-C cable, which delivered around 25 watts to the tablet. It took me about an hour and a half to get it back to 100%, which is fast enough for my daily routine. The tablet has a theoretical maximum charging speed of 75 watts, though, so I probably would've been able to charge it faster if I used the included USB-C cable. Now, if you want to preserve the tablet's battery, you can activate the Charge SEP feature, which bypasses the battery altogether and allows it to use power directly from the USB port.

The Astra 2 also gives you two charging options. It still has the USB-C port located on the right side of the tablet when held in landscape, similar to the charging port of the original Astra. However, RedMagic added another fully functional USB-C port at the bottom so that the charging cable will never get in the way, letting you comfortably charge it whether you're holding it in landscape or portrait mode.

Aside from its powerful hardware, the RedMagic Astra 2 also comes with "Game Space," a dedicated dashboard where you can find all your games, and also comes with features to help you be more competitive. Hardcore gamers will love this, as it lets you adjust power modes, show a hardware performance overlay, record your gameplay, and even use AI to circle items on the screen for guidance. It also has a lot of plug-ins that you can activate in a match, like color filters to help you find targets, a floating notepad you can write tips on, and even an on-screen crosshair.

However, all these features have a learning curve: You'll have to make time to explore and set them up before you get into a match. You should also experiment with the features in a sandbox or in practice mode before running it an actual match, as they might not work as intended and distract from what you're trying to achieve. Another thing to note is that these plug-ins might not be legal if you're entering a competition, so it's best to keep them turned off for matches like these.

You can get this gaming tablet directly from the RedMagic website with a starting price of $699 for the 12 GB+256 GB variant. If you need more space and memory, you'll have to shell out an extra $100 for the 16 GB+512 GB version. 

This might feel expensive, especially as the iPad mini has a starting price of just $599. However, that is for the 128 GB version of the Apple device; the 256 GB iPad mini actually costs the same as the base variant of the Astra 2 at $699, and if you go for the 512 GB version, you're paying $899 for the iPad mini; $100 more than the $799 RedMagic Astra 2.

Unfortunately, you do not get a charging brick in the box, so you'll have to use what you already have or purchase one separately. Since the tablet has a maximum charging speed of 75 watts, it's a good idea to get a charging brick that can deliver 100 watts or more. That way, you can charge the tablet, your smartphone, and other gear simultaneously at maximum speed, something that's pretty useful if you're in a rush.

The RedMagic Astra 2 isn't that much of a game-changer compared to the first RedMagic Astra, with its biggest advantage being the liquid-cooling feature, which helps cut down the tiny whining sound that the fan of the original Astra made. But if you're tired of gaming on smartphones and want a bigger screen without compromising portability, this tablet is an absolute game changer. Although iPadOS is definitely more polished than the Android 16-based RedMagic OS 11.5 that runs on the Astra 2, you're getting so much more hardware for the money with this gaming tablet.

This is apparent with the Astra 2's larger 256GB base storage and 12GB RAM and Snapdragon SoC, offering so much more performance versus the smallest Apple tablet. Aside from that, it also has a very nice 9.06-inch OLED display, which is slightly larger than the iPad mini's 8.3-inch screen, and is so much brighter with accurate colors. In fact, I will say that the Astra 2 is better than the iPad mini not just in gaming, but for productivity and creativity, too.