REDMAGIC Astra 2 Review – A Worthy Tablet Sequel?

“A glance at the Astra 2 will tell you that it’s not just targeting a niche, but a niche within a niche”

Gaming tablets, like dedicated gaming phones, occupy a strange niche. REDMAGIC is busily filling that niche with a near-constant stream of flashy, technically impressive devices. The Astra 2 is the latest to land (with a gratifying thud) on our desk.

A glance at the Astra 2 will tell you that it’s not just targeting a niche, but a niche within a niche. It’s bigger than a phone, but smaller than many tablets. At 9.06 inches, it’s closer to a Kindle Paperwhite than the latest generation of iPads.

This allows the Astra 2 to absolutely zero-in on gaming and media, casting aside other common tablet functionalities like drawing and working in favour of the fun stuff.

Building on the previous Astra model, the Astra 2 comes with a faster chip, enhanced sound, and a fancy liquid cooling system that reduces fan noise to a whisper, even under heavy load.

All of which makes for a pretty impressive gadget. But is it enough to make you part with several hundred bucks?

Read on to find out.

Design

If you’re accustomed to REDMAGIC’s approach to hardware design, you may be surprised to note that the Astra 2 is a fairly restrained tablet, without the usual Las Vegas strip of pulsating RGB lights.

The only bit of flair is a band of black across the back where the device’s liquid cooling technology is showcased by a channel of blue fluid with patches of white moving along it to indicate circulation.

Otherwise the Astra 2 takes a non-nonsense industrial design approach. It has a simple, robust-feeling brushed aluminium chassis, curved corners, and a relatively chunky bezel. Strangely, it takes us back to the iPhone 4, albeit without the glass back.

At 9 inches, the Astra 2 is more compact and therefore more ergonomically pleasing than larger tablets. This makes it ideal for gaming sessions. Despite its chunky form factor and robust feel, it’s surprisingly light in the hand. At a mere 363g, it weighs about the same as a can of soda.

This weight is well distributed through the device, meaning it never comes to feel unwieldy, even after lengthy playing sessions.

While the thick, squared off bezel has a slightly anachronistic look in 2026, it actually works well for gaming. The extra space gives you somewhere to rest your thumbs without accidentally brushing the touchscreen.

A tour of the bezel will reveal all the features you’d expect to find, including volume rocker, on/off button, mic holes, speaker vents, and the the trademark REDMAGIC bright red switch for activating Game Space. More on that later.

But what’s this? It’s a second USB-C port, allowing you to charge your device while using an external display or other peripheral.

Well played, REDMAGIC.

Display and Audio

As you’d expect, the Astra 2 comes with a stonkingly good screen. The OLED panel delivers deep, rich blacks, vibrant colours, and eye-popping contrast. Dark games look properly dark, and colour-drenched titles like Genshin Impact look positively festive.

Not only does the Astra 2 come with an impressive 2.4k display, all the better when packed into its modest 9-inch frame, but it boasts a refresh rate of 185 Hz.

There are tons of technical reviews out there exploring the Astra 2’s nit count, colour gamut, and sampling rate. We’re not that kind of site, but we can tell you that this tablet feels fast, powerful, and responsive.

All of which makes it fantastic for media. Videos and images look pin-sharp on the Astra 2’s screen, and they sound just as sharp (well, not so much the images) thanks to the dual 1227 stereo speakers with DTS:X Ultra certification and N’Bass acoustic enhancement material.

We don’t even slightly know what that means, but we can tell you that the Astra 2 sounds uncannily good. The speakers maintain their composure even at high volume, throwing sounds around the room so that dialogue, gunshots, or whatever seems to be happening all around you rather than just in front of you.

And not just around you, but in specific positions around you. Headphones will always be the gold standard for gaming, but the Astra 2’s speakers do a pretty incredible job of reproducing a surround system using a row of tiny holes on each side of the device.

Everything that appears on the Astra 2’s screen looks and sounds fabulous – even in the harsh bright light and ambient noise of the dread outdoors. If visual and audio fidelity is what you’re after, the Astra 2 won’t disappoint.

Performance

Let’s get the technical stuff out of the way. The Astra 2 is powered by Qualcomm’s latest flagship Snapdragon chipset, the 8 Elite Gen 5. It comes with 6 cores and a clock speed of up to 4.6 GHz, an Adreno GPU, and either 12 or 16GB RAM depending on the model you choose.

In short, it tears through pretty much every Android title available today, running titles like Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG Mobile, Diablo Immortal and Wuthering Waves at their highest available settings with little sign of slowdown.

And thanks to the Astra 2’s cutting edge liquid cooling system, which largely eschews the tablet staple of passive heat dissipation in favour of a vapour chamber that teams up with a small fan to move heat away from the processor more efficiently, gaming performance is incredibly stable.

While many tablets slowly succumb to the performance-hammering effects of heat, the Astra 2 can safely maintain high frame rates for extended periods. That means a side-by-side benchmark comparison between this device and another may not tell the full story. The Astra 2 is a great sprinter, but it’s even better at marathons.

Meanwhile, the device’s sizeable 8,300 mAh fast-charging battery means that you can play without wires for several hours. And when the wires do become a necessity, the Astra 2 has a clever bypass charging feature that allows the plugged-in device to draw power directly from the source rather than from the charging battery.

This has the useful effect of preserving battery health in the long term and keeping the Astra 2 cooler as you play.

The Astra 2 comes with a 9 MP front-facing camera and a 13 MP one on the rear, neither of which is an industry-leading pixel count. Performance is purportedly enhanced by AI algorithms, but it’s fair to say that photography is not the Astra 2’s specialist area.

Software

The Astra 2 is loaded with the upgraded REDMAGIC OS 11.5, which runs on Android 16. Despite the REDMAGIC overtones, there’s very little to distinguish the OS from any old Android device in regular use – and this is a good thing. Android is fine the way it is, thank you very much.

To enter REDMAGIC’s world, you need to slide the red Magic Key switch at the top of the device to activate Game Space. This triggers a gaming takeover of your screen, transporting you to a dedicated launcher for the games on your device.

If you take your tablet gaming seriously, Game Space is a real candy store of features. It allows you to create performance profiles, customise cooling behaviour, block notifications, monitor frame rates, and adjust system settings without leaving your game. Game Space also lets you prioritise performance for particularly demanding and high stakes titles while dialling things down for simpler games.

It’s not the most intuitive piece of software we’ve ever used, but it’s certainly powerful as a means of tweaking and customising your experience.

Conclusion

The REDMAGIC Astra 2 is a gaming tablet, but it’s not just a gaming tablet.

While its strongest suit is definitely gaming in terms of software, hardware, and design, it’s also a fantastic device for watching media thanks to its excellent sound and display.

If you’re looking for a device you can work, draw, and take pictures on, you should probably look elsewhere. But for gamers – i.e., the people REDMAGIC has in its crosshairs with the Astra 2 – this is among the best tablets on the market right now.