RedMagic has taken its latest gaming tablet worldwide. The Astra 2, which launched in China back on 30 June as the Gaming Tablet 5 Pro, is now confirmed for global markets, and buyers outside China get the same machine with no cut-down hardware. Two colours, Eclipse Black and Starfrost Silver, and two memory tiers.
The headline trick isn’t in the spec sheet’s usual places. The Astra 2 ships with a built-in x86 PC emulator, which means you can log into Steam and run actual Windows games on an Android tablet. No iPad or Galaxy Tab does that, and it’s the single feature that explains why this thing exists.
Around that sits a spec sheet built for one job:
- A 9.06-inch 2.4K OLED screen running at a 185Hz refresh rate, up to 1,600 nits, with touch sampling averaging 300Hz.
- Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 doing the heavy lifting, backed by RedMagic’s own RedCore R4 chip that handles frame stability and 2K upscaling on 200-plus supported games.
- Active liquid cooling with fluorinated coolant, visible through a transparent rear panel, rather than a conventional fan.
- An 8,300 mAh battery with 75W wired charging, a step down from the 80W the Chinese model gets.
The cameras are an afterthought, and rightly so on a gaming tablet: 13MP rear, 9MP front. Nobody buys this to take photos.
One clever bit of design is the dual USB-C ports. One is a fast 3.2 Gen 2 connector, the other a basic USB 2.0 port for charging, and the second sits along the long edge so the cable stays out of your hands when you’re playing in landscape. Software is RedMagic OS 11.5 on top of Android 16.
Pricing and when you can buy it
- 12GB/256GB: $749 / €699 / £599
- 16GB/512GB: $849 / €799 / £679
Today marks the global launch, but sales don’t open straight away. Early bird access begins 10 August, with open sales following on 26 August. Anyone grabbing an early bird voucher gets one-day priority ordering plus a free 80W charger thrown in.
Worth a note on where this lands. At $749 the base model sits above most Android tablets and just over the iPad Air, which is a tough spot. RedMagic’s bet is that the liquid cooling, the 185Hz panel and the Steam support pull in a specific buyer who wants a pocketable gaming screen without carrying a Windows handheld. Whether enough of those buyers exist is the open question.
