The RedMagic Astra 2 wins benchmarks but loses on support

RedMagic's Astra 2 has done something unusual for a gaming tablet: it has convinced the reviewers who do not normally care about gaming tablets. TechRadar's Jon Mundy called it "just about the fastest Android tablet in the game." PCMag's Florence Ion, who tested one across a six-hour flight and a research project full of PDFs, gave it 4.0 and subtitled the review "A Gaming Tablet With Mainstream Appeal."

Both are right about the hardware. Both also flag the same two problems, and neither problem is about how fast it plays PUBG.

The Astra 2 pairs a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with the first liquid cooling system in a widely available tablet — RedMagic swapped out the physical fan its previous tablet used. The point of that system is not peak numbers but the refusal to give them back.

TechRadar ran 3DMark's Solar Bar Extreme Stress Test, twenty consecutive minute-long GPU loops, and recorded 99 percent stability: the worst loop was effectively the same as the best. Ion ran her own version, benchmarking repeatedly with cooling on and off, and found the Geekbench 6 numbers barely moved, averaging roughly 3,750 single-core and 11,700 multi-core across the stress runs.

Those figures put a 9.06-inch tablet alongside phones twice its price. Ion measured 3,790 and 11,764 in a clean Geekbench 6 run — close to the Galaxy S26 Ultra — and 8,160 frames at 48.35fps in 3DMark Wildlife Extreme, ahead of both the S26 Ultra and RedMagic's own 11S Pro phone. The Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, at $1,199.99, managed 2,773 and 9,091.

Battery testing agrees. PCMag's rundown gave 11 hours 40 minutes from the 8,300mAh cell, half an hour longer than the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra's larger 11,600mAh battery and roughly 50 percent better than the iPad mini. Charging measured 71 percent in 39 minutes. RedMagic includes a USB-C cable but no charger, and its specifications identify the short-side USB 3.2 port as the faster connection.

A 9.06-inch OLED at 2,400 x 1,504 with a 185Hz ceiling, up from 165Hz on the original Astra. Uswitch's Ernest Doku measured the practical side of that: 300Hz average touch sampling peaking at 2,000Hz, driven by dedicated Synaptics silicon rather than the main SoC. Competitive players will notice. Everyone else gets scrolling that feels unreasonably smooth for the money.

Mundy is dry about the 185Hz figure itself, describing it as "something of a gimmick given that the vast majority of games won't make the most of it" — but the panel underneath is a real OLED with proper HDR, in a price bracket where the Legion Tab and iPad mini are still shipping IPS LCDs. Doku also liked the 4.9mm bezels, arguing they stop you palming the screen mid-match. Mundy is less charitable about the Gorilla Glass 3 covering it, a material that launched in 2013.

First, the price. The Astra 2 starts at $749 / £599 for 12GB and 256GB, or $849 / £679 for 16GB and 512GB. That is a jump of $200 / £160 over last year's Astra — around 36 percent — for what TechRadar characterises as the expected annual spec bump, with the 2026 RAM shortage the obvious culprit. At $749 you are shopping against the M4 iPad Air at the same price, which Ion names as the better buy for most people.

Second, and less discussed: RedMagic's international policy promises two Android version updates and three years of security patches from launch for the Astra 2. EU buyers receive longer support under the company's regional policy. Ion puts the problem plainly — tablets are not devices people replace on a phone cadence, and Apple and Samsung support theirs for the better part of a decade. Outside the EU, a $749 slate scheduled to stop receiving security fixes in 2029 is a different purchase from one supported into the 2030s, and no amount of sustained GPU throughput changes that arithmetic.

RedMagic OS 11.5 on Android 16 draws consistent complaints. Mundy found it "far from a looker" and loaded with bloatware — Booking.com, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, AliExpress and assorted games preinstalled, plus a duplicate browser. Doku called it overbearing. The redeeming feature everyone singles out is Game Space, reached by flipping a physical switch, where you can tune performance per title, block notifications and load plugins.

Audio splits the room. Doku praised the DTS:X stereo output; Ion measured 104dB and found it garbled as it got louder. Mundy's complaint was placement — the speakers sit where your hands go in landscape, which is the orientation the entire device exists to serve. There is no kickstand, no cellular option, no eSIM, no wireless charging, and the 13MP rear and 9MP front cameras are carried over unchanged and are, by every account, fine for a video call and nothing more. The liquid cooling emits a faint buzz once it has been working a while, with no fan noise to hide behind.

Buy the Astra 2 if you play demanding games for hours at a stretch and want the frame rate at minute ninety to match minute one. Nothing else near the price sustains performance like this, and the dual USB-C ports mean you can charge from the side while holding it in landscape.

Skip it if the tablet is going to be your reading, drawing and browsing device for the next six years. The hardware would manage that easily. Outside the EU, the support window will not.