The RedMagic Astra follows on the heels of RedMagic’s earlier Nova gaming tablet, seeming to change little except upgrading to the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. That’s an exciting change, though, as it’s an extremely powerful chip that has made recent Android gaming phones all the more impressive. With a quality display, promising performance, and a $549 price tag, the RedMagic Astra could very well be a worthy alternative to gaming handhelds if you like the Android games available to you and don’t mind dipping your toes into cloud gaming or emulation from time to time.

RedMagic Astra – Design and Features

The RedMagic Astra doesn’t sport the same snazzy looks of RedMagic’s phones, but it’s still a slick and clean design with a hint of style in the form of a clear panel on the back. This shows through to where some of the componentry is ostensibly laid out and gives a peak at the fan in the sealed cooling system, which also has a splash of RGB lighting. The rest of the system is thoroughly blacked out.

Most of the tablet is wrapped in aluminum, providing a clean seam between the back and frame of the tablet. The front sports a 9.06-inch display that has tight and even bezels around it, allowing the device to avoid being much larger than it needs to be. At just 6.9mm thick and 370 grams, the Astra ends up impressively compact and portable. That weight is also great for handheld use. Bigger and heavier tablets become unwieldy to try holding for extended gaming, whereas the Astra is more manageable.

That screen is also a great one. It has a 2400x1504 resolution, which is fantastically sharp at this size, and it’s a smooth 165Hz OLED panel that can deliver 1,600-nit highlights and perfect black pixels side by side, making for vivid visuals. Games and movies alike look great. When viewing the display at extreme off angles (beyond about 45 degrees), black pixels start to look a bit gray, but if you’re looking at the display from more optimal angles, it looks appropriately black.

The tablet packs in a pair of speakers that produce plenty of volume – more than most phones and more than is needed for gaming with the tablet in your hands. They’re over-the-top and a bit grating at full volume, but sound decent when dialed back a bit.

To my surprise, RedMagic has rated the Astra up to IP54 certification for protection against dust and some water. It shouldn’t be dunked underwater, but it won’t be the end of the world if there’s a spill or you get caught out in the rain.

Part of that certification is probably coming from the Astra not using an active air cooling system like the RedMagic 11 Pro. Instead, it keeps all of its cooling elements inside. These include multiple vapor chambers and liquid metal to move heat away from the chipset. The fan inside actually moves air through an internal duct, though how much that actually contributes to the cooling when it can’t directly expel heated air is unclear. On the bright side, what has been a shrill fan on air cooled systems is silent on the Astra.

The Astra has a fingerprint reader built into its power button, though it also supports facial recognition. The former is quick and reliable, but the same can’t be said of the latter. In addition to the power and volume buttons, there’s a red switch I’ve seen on several RedMagic phones now. This launches the phone’s special GameSpace, essentially a custom launcher for games with shortcuts to various settings and tools useful while gaming.

On the bottom of the tablet (or side if held in landscape), there’s a USB-C port positioned off to the right of center. This avoids having the tablet running right into your hand if you’re charging and using it at the same time. The USB-C port also supports DisplayPort output up to 4K/144Hz and has 10Gbps transfer speeds – both exciting to see.

RedMagic Astra – Software

The Astra comes with Android 15 and has RedMagic OS 10.5 running on top of that. It’s not too outlandish an Android skin and doesn’t even seem overly gamer-targeted until you hit the GameSpace switch and encounter RedMagic’s digital assistant Mora – a scantily-clad anime girl that does little, makes a lot of noise, and doesn't even leverage all the AI capabilities of the hardware to hold a virtual conversation. She’ll happily float around on your screen and present notifications though.

The software does have some helpful features, though. The tablet includes controller mapping software that was largely useful, but not quite perfect. It helped me get a controller working in place of in-game touch controls, but some settings simply didn’t behave properly. For instance, it wouldn’t register joystick nuance, so all of my aim adjustments were jerky going from 0 to 100% acceleration instantly.

RedMagic doesn’t plainly state how many software updates or years of Android security patches the Astra tablet will get, but a representative has told me that the tablet will receive five years of OS support and security patches in Europe and three years of each in other markets, including the US. What is still unclear is whether those three years will include three Android version updates.

RedMagic Astra – Gaming and Performance

The Astra offers excellent gaming performance, though not quite to the level I would have expected. Before this, the RedMagic 10 Pro smartphone set the stage for how much performance we could expect out of the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, and that had me very excited to see what a tablet could do with it. After all, a tablet doesn’t have the tight confines of a phone and ought to have room for more robust cooling systems as well as more surface area for heat transfer.

To my surprise, the Astra simply didn’t squeeze as much out of the Snapdragon 8 Elite as other devices have. It consistently performed in between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Across Geekbench 6 and 3DMark benchmarks, the Astra tended to lag between 10 and 20 percent behind the RedMagic 10 Pro and even the OnePlus 13. This is still strong performance, but not what I would have expected. It seemed to make no difference whether the tablet had different performance modes enabled in the GameSpace either.

With that said, the Astra was at least consistent. It may not be trying to drive itself as hard as it could get away with, but it holds up well under load. Even running the 3DMark Steel Nomad Light stress test – a series of 20 benchmarks in a row – the Astra maintained a 94.5% consistency with scores running from 2095 points to 1979 points.

While the tablet certainly generates heat, it doesn’t put a lot of that where you’ll feel it. After a session playing Delta Force over a half-hour, the tablet was only slightly warm to the touch.

This level of performance is also more than enough to handle everyday use with extremely smooth operation. The Astra never once felt slow.

The tablet runs on a sizable 8200mAh battery, though that doesn’t feel quite as impressive when considering the RedMagic 10 Pro phone has a 7,000mAh battery packed inside its much smaller frame. The battery is still enough to handle hours of gaming, even with fairly demanding usage. And since there’s no cellular modem, the system sips power while idling, so you’re unlikely to find it dead if you leave it alone for a few days.

RedMagic Astra – Cameras

The RedMagic Astra has cameras, but like many other tablets, they’re mostly there because they need to be. In anything less than bright sunlight, the 13MP rear camera takes such blurry, noisy photos that it shouldn’t be relied on for much.

The 9MP selfie camera actually fairs a little bit better but still has a lot of noise and not a terribly sharp image. Even in very bright conditions, they struggle to produce great photos. If you just want to have a video call or pop up in a game stream, it'll do, but neither are quality cameras.