RedMagic Astra Gaming Tablet unboxing

The RedMagic Astra Gaming Tablet made its global debut yesterday and will open for an Early Bird pre-order from July 10 to July 15, starting at $469/€469/£409. So our unboxing is just in time!

The tablet ships with just a USB-C cable, but if you pre-order during the promo period, RedMagic will throw in an 80W charger for free!

We'll get to the specs, but the compact size of the Astra Gaming Tablet is what truly defines this machine. RedMagic, naturally, bills it as a gaming tablet, but it could be an excellent travel companion for multimedia consumption and staying connected!

It's easy to hold this tablet in one hand, thanks to the flat metal frame. And at only 374 grams, it's light enough to allow prolonged use. Still, we wouldn't mind a folio-style case for added protection.

It's this small

The RedMagic Astra Gaming Tablet is well-specced indeed. It's running a Snapdragon 8 Elite that has an advanced cooling system to rely on. There's a Liquid Metal layer on top of the SoC to move heat away from it and onto a complex vapor chamber.

Then there's an active cooling fan that spins quietly to move heat out of the tablet. RedMagic says all of this cooling brings down the Snapdragon 8 Elite's temperature by 8°C, which is very significant under load.

Despite its diminutive size, the tablet packs an 8,200mAh battery too!

Solid specs and a built-in fan

The display is excellent. We appreciate that it's an OLED panel and not an LCD (as good as those are these days). You can really feel the bump up from 120Hz to 165Hz; animations are sharper and zippier.

There are just two speakers on either side of the Astra Gaming Tablet, but they're boomy. They have very solid volume, too. Led Zeppelin comes alive in a way that's not possible on your flagship phone. You could use this tablet as an ad hoc speaker for your tunes.

Compact tablet doubters will say that you should just buy a foldable phone instead of a portable tablet. But there's definitely a place and suitable use cases for a high-end small tablet. It's superb for on-the-go multimedia enjoyment - videos simply are nicer on this than on your phone!

And of course, the RedMagic Astra Gaming Tablet will excel at gaming in a way a phone wouldn't, thanks to its bigger canvas, its potent (and properly cooled) hardware, and its bigger battery!