The RedMagic Nova is one of the best Android tablets I used in 2024

I recently had a brief experience with Samsung’s latest tablet. Starting at a cool $1,000, the first sentiment that the Galaxy Tab S10+ elicited from me was “Meh.” It isn’t exactly a sloth, but it lacks oomph. For that price, you can buy the M4-powered iPad Pro, a much better deal for multiple reasons.

So, are Android tablets doomed? No, and the RedMagic Nova is a prime example of that. It costs half of what the big boys out there ask for their high-end tablets, and yet, the Nova still serves a specially-tuned version of Qualcomm’s yesteryear flagship silicon. It’s the fastest tablet I’ve ever used, and paired with great battery life, excellent gaming features, and a killer price, it may just be one of 2024’s best tablet choices.

RedMagic Nova specs

You’ve never seen a tablet quite like this

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The RedMagic Nova tablet captivates your attention from the get-go. The surprises begin right from the unboxing experience. The company ships an 80W charging brick inside the retail package, and based on your location, you will get either the EU or NA version.

In a world where brands (cough, Samsung and Apple, cough) have the audacity of selling tablets that cost as much as $1,200 but still burden buyers with the added cost of spending on a charging brick, RedMagic is standing tall. To make matters better, the RedMagic Nova starts at just $499.

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But that’s just the start, as the Nubia-owned brand isn’t pulling any punches in any core department. Let’s start with the chassis, which is made entirely out of aerospace-grade aluminum. The dark gray aluminum has an anodized finish, which feels really nice to touch.

It’s not nearly as slim as the M4 iPad Pro (7.3mm versus 5.3mm) and about 17% heavier, tipping the scales at 530 grams. The craftsmanship is really impressive here, especially when you factor in the asking price. There are no creaking parts, the cuts are sharp, and the subtle polish across the corners adds to the in-hand feel.

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The thickness can also be attributed to the thermal hardware, including a real physical fan and a nine-layer cooling system. This whole contraption works, but more on that later in the performance section.

Over the years, I’ve grown quite wary of sharp edges, especially on large and heavy tablets, but the trend remains a mainstay. It’s pretty refreshing to see a small player like RedMagic daring to deviate and then execute its vision well.

The craftsmanship is really impressive here, especially when you factor in the asking price.

The RedMagic Nova has subtly brushed edges angled at 45 degrees to offer a more cozy in-hand experience. At the top, the fingerprint sensor is integrated into the power button.

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The standout element is the transparent strip running across the camera lens, offering a glimpse of the RedMagic Nova’s innards. This strip is not merely decorative, even though it looks stunning, in the same vein as the transparent aesthetics of the Nothing smartphones.

The top layer is made out of lens-grade aluminosilicate glass, which, so far, has managed to keep scuff marks at bay despite my rough usage patterns. Underneath the camera island is the fan cavity, lit by an RGB array that extends all the way to the RedMagic branding at the bottom.

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Also, apart from RedMagic and Asus, you won’t find any mainstream brand that offers a tablet with all those snazzy light-up effects to sell the “gamer” vibes. So, there’s that RGB cred, as well.

Overall, the RedMagic Nova will surprise you with its solid engineering and unmistakably bold design. That’s something I can’t say for tablets hawked by mainstream brands, and this in itself is quite a victory for an upstart like RedMagic.

A quality display, with some catches

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The Nova tablet offers a 10.9-inch display with a 2.8K (2880 x 1800 pixels) resolution, eclipsing the iPad Air and the Samsung Galaxy S10+ in pixel density and sharpness. The aspect ratio is your usual 16:10 format.

It’s an LCD panel that delivers a peak brightness of 550 nits, higher than that of the aforementioned Apple tablet. Where the RedMagic tablet races far ahead is the refresh rate figures, which stand at 144Hz.

To keep up with gamers’ quick reflex demands, the touch sampling rate has climbed to 840Hz. For comparison, the touch sampling rate of Asus’ ROG Phone 8 Pro only reaches 720Hz.

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The screen is sharp, and thanks to the high refresh rate, every UI interaction feels snappy. Compared side by side, even the mighty M4 iPad Pro feels slightly slow. Or maybe the Apple tablet is normal, and the RedMagic Nova is naturally faster.

It’s the same kind of fluidity that I usually get on a phone or tablet after adjusting window animation, transition animation, and animator duration scales within the developer options. Or maybe it’s the lightweight software interface that is weaving its magic.

The display has a couple of oddities going on. To anyone who has experienced the deeper blacks of an OLED screen and the vibrant colors, the Nova’s screen will instantly stand out, but not in a good way.

Notice the color disparity and the crushed shadow details Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

The blacks are not, well, black, and the color science is also slightly off. The screen calibration here is pretty cold, and to such an extent that it takes a severe hit on the content color reproduction.

Take, for example, this side-by-side comparison with the iPad mini. Notice the difference between the color output, especially the highlights and saturation levels. That’s interesting, as both the tablets use an LCD screen with similar peak brightness levels.

The display has a couple of oddities going on.

The chroma details are crushed aggressively in the shadow regions. Third-party apps and Netflix list the DRM support level at L1, with a catch. The DRM Info app mentions support for HDR and HLG, while the Netflix app clearly says “None” for HDR capabilities.

iPad mini (left) and RedMagic Nova Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Another issue is glare. The screen is quite reflective, and it could have been a tad brighter to balance things out. However, you can still read content on it under daylight without too much squinting, though angle adjustments would be required from time to time.

Indoors, this screen gets the job done for its intended task. A majority of mobile games out there, and even those accessible through emulation platforms, don’t usually offer a ton of settings to specifically draw the benefits of OLED or HDR compliance.

Touch response rates are impressive. Of the nearly half a dozen gaming enthusiasts who tried the RedMagic Nova, they loved the motion clarity and silky smooth interactions. For shooter games like Call of Duty: Mobile, that combination can make a real difference.

Feature-rich software package

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The RedMagic Nova runs a mostly stock Android experience, and save for the utility apps, there isn’t much third-party jargon installed on the machine. There are a couple of clusters named Hot Apps and Hot Games, but these are merely pre-download shortcuts that can be easily removed.

The company has only done a minimal job with reskinning Android 14 and now calls it RedMagic OS. However, the OS offers many tools baked at the system level, in addition to theming material, light, and sound effects. You hear the vroom of a sports car when you launch the Game Space. And the fan also triggers its own engine sound. Call it dedication to the craft!

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On the connectivity front, we have Z Smart Cast, a wireless lane for casting the tablet’s screen on a TV or monitor. The larger screen becomes the hub of activity, while the tablet’s screen can be turned into a touchpad or control point.

It’s a mix and match of Samsung’s DeX and the iPad’s own screen mirroring and extension systems. In wireless mode, there is some expected lag, so it’s not ideal for fast-paced gaming. Thankfully, you can also go with an HDMI or USB screen casting option.

Remember that RedMagic isn’t chasing a full-fledged desktop environment for work, so it lacks the tools you would otherwise get with DeX. This is a gaming tablet, and in wired connection mode, it does its intended job without any hiccups.

This is a pretty cool experience, one that comes without any technical hassles. Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

I hooked it up with my 24-inch gaming monitor and played my fair share of Diablo Immortal and emulated games such as God of War. The experience was fantastic, and I didn’t run into any issues with frame rate dissonance or random stutters.

The theming system offers a dedicated dashboard for the light strip at the back. You can enable it for games, media playback, notifications, and other activities. You can also pick the colors and effects to set the whole mood for each activity.

Similar to Samsung and OnePlus devices, a hidden floating sidebar offers quick access to utility tools and frequently used apps. Additionally, a quick ball system inspired by iPhones combines navigation and a few other system tools into a neat little cluster.

Wireless casting the Red Magic OS on a 144Hz monitor Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Moving over to the notifications shade, the RedMagic Nova offers a handful of quick access buttons for casting, fan control, and light strip switch, in addition to the usual set of shortcuts.

The star of the show is the Game Space. It’s a neat little game launcher, but this is also where you see the work RedMagic has done for its gaming audience. At the top is RedMagic Time, a unified dashboard to access all your in-game capture files, neatly arranged in a slide format for each game.

RedMagic has done a commendable job with the software.

In the Settings section, you can separately control the CPU and GPU performance profiles, adjust fan and recording behavior, and customize screen attributes such as touch sampling rate, sensitivity, and stabilization, among others.

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Within the Game Space, you can customize keyboard/mouse and controller interactions for each game, both of which are accessible right by the start button. Casting controls are also available in the same draw-out menu bundle for seamless launch.

Switching away from the game Game Lobby, there’s Super Base. Here, you get access to Gravity X, where you can create and save presets for physical input devices. The mapping controls are also accessible within a game by swiping to access the game assistant.

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Finally, there’s the plug-in library, where you can play with over a dozen custom tools that can give you an edge in games. For example, there is somatosensory manipulation, which lets you flick the tablet in your hands to execute an on-screen click. For games with crowded on-screen buttons, this one comes in handy.

In shooter games, you can enable the Audio and Visual Probes, which offer a guided highlight of the action far away, by circling the audio and motion activity. You don’t necessarily have to whip out the scope to find the action.

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There’s a dedicated sound equalizer, plus a Free Display plug-in that lets you adjust a game’s aspect ratio. What I loved the most was the easy key remapping system, which saved me the hassle of dealing with dedicated controller apps.

Overall, RedMagic has done a commendable job with the software, which is clean and loaded with meaningful gaming-first features. I wish the desktop casting mode offered a few more tricks, but that’s not why someone is buying a tablet like the Nova, so the omission makes sense.

Fast and hot performance

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Unhinged silicon throughput is what you buy the RedMagic Nova for, and it does deliver on that front. You can pick between variants with 12GB and 16GB RAM and up to 512GB storage. The keyboard and stylus are sold separately.

Leading the charge here is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Leading Version. Compared to the regular version, this special silicon is an overclocked trim that speeds up the GPU to 1GHz, while the prime Cortex X4 CPU core touches a peak frequency of 3.4 GHz.

The best part is that you can tap into all that firepower — if you are willing to bear the heat tax. The tablet offers three performance profiles by default: Rise, Eco, and Balance.

Diablo mode in action. Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

But there’s a hidden Diablo mode, too. Compared to Rise mode (the top system-level performance preset), Diablo mode takes the GPU frequency from 500MHz to 1GHz, while the CPU speed goes from 2.3GHz to 3.4GHz.

Starting with AnTuTu benchmarks, the RedMagic Nova topped the GPU leaderboard with 876,442 points, eclipsing the MediaTek Dimensity 9300+ and other Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices.

The overall score of over 2 million points put it ahead of mainstream options such as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and it only lags behind a few other gaming-centric phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 silicon.

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However, it still can’t quite catch up with the M4 silicon inside the iPad Pro. The Apple tablet had a lead of around 21%, while the GPU tally was also ahead by a similar margin. Running the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress test, the Nova raced past the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro and sat at the top of the list. However, something really interesting happened here.

The net tally was higher, and the stability was lower when running the test in standard mode, but when overclocked in Diablo preset, the overall score fell slightly. Still, the stability went from 27.7% to 86%, which is intriguing.

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That’s a massive leap, though it comes at a cost. When the CPU and GPU are running at their peak frequencies, the frame rate fluctuation is minimal and pretty uniform.

Even after 20 successive loops, the performance stability only drops by around 8%. In Rise mode, after the 17th loop, the tally takes a sharp plunge, and you land at nearly one-third of the maximum system output.

So, how do the fans fit into the picture? Well, within five minutes of enabling the fan, the battery temperature dropped from 44 degrees to 36 degrees Celsius. But in overclock mode, things get toasty pretty quickly.

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After a stress test, I measured the external temperature at 48 degrees and the battery temperature at 46 degrees. The glass strip runs really hot, and on one occasion, it reached 51 degrees.

But those figures were recorded after running the full suite of tests in GFXBench. While playing games like Zenless Zone Zero or Call of Duty: Warzone, the average temperatures didn’t climb above 42 degrees range.

Realistically, you will feel the warmth.

Realistically, you will feel the warmth, but not enough to ditch the tablet. Plus, the cooldown effect is the quickest I have seen on a performance-oriented tablet, so there’s that.

Synthetic benchmarks are only one side of the equation. At gaming, the RedMagic Nova crushes it. I cherry-picked the most demanding titles out there, and every single one of them performed admirably.

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For titles that can touch 60 fps, the average range always hovered between the 56-60 fps mark. Running emulators, you can easily get between 30-45 fps, at least for the PlayStation 2. Winlator, which is super cranky with the setup, also delivers a playable experience of AAA titles.

If you’re primarily concerned with mobile titles, like native Android or emulation for PlayStation Portable (via PPSSPP) and retro platforms, the RedMagic Nova will offer an enjoyable experience.

I mostly stuck with 6x-10x upscaling and had a good time with PSP games running on the Vulkan graphics backend. That’s nearly 4K resolution equivalent, for reference. With the Dolphin emulator, 4x is the sweet spot running atop the OpenGL framework for Nintendo titles.

The fan makes a difference in quickly cooling the chassis. Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

The experience translates well on a large screen using Z Smart Cast in wired mode, with controller and keyboard inputs. Feral’s Alien Isolation game, a fairly demanding title, worked well in a steady 60 fps ballpark.

For cooling the whole kit, the RedMagic Nova comes armed with a nine-layer cooling system, which, aside from a 20,000 RPM fan, also includes a heat pipe, air duct, copper foil, insulation sheet, thermal gel, and an alloy array underneath the screen.

The whole system rises to the occasion, more so at post-usage cooldown instead of keeping things consistently cool under stress. Overall, if you are after an Android tablet for gaming and emulation, the RedMagic Nova is easily the best deal out there.

Good battery life, better charging

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The RedMagic Nova comes equipped with a dual-cell 10,100mAh battery, which is good for a tablet of its footprint. But what sets it apart is the charging speed, which makes sense given the kind of utility you seek out of it.

This slate supports 80W fast charging. The only tablet that comes close to that figure is the OnePlus Pad 2, at 67W, while Samsung and Apple only reach close to the halfway mark.

I could get a 100% top-up from a blank slate in about 1 hour and 7 minutes. For a quick run, you can reliably go from an empty tank to about 40% level in roughly 20 minutes. For this tablet, it’s more of a necessity than a perk.

Depending on the kind of game and what levels of graphics output you are expecting, the battery levels drop rather haphazardly. Take, for example, the mobile version of PUBG, which can eat up to 12%-15% in just about 30 minutes at peak frame rate and visual settings.

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In Diablo Immortal, the drop was slightly lower at around 10%-11%. Now, those figures will vary dramatically. For example, most games play nearly as well in Balanced mode as they do in the overclocked Diablo mode, but the battery uptake varies by a healthy margin.

Conversely, you may not necessarily see the kind of fps gains you are expecting by doubling the GPU frequency and increasing the CPU clock speed to its maximum limit. The situation with the Nova is rather unique in more ways than one.

Compared to Android native games, emulated games take a heavier toll on the battery. But even while sticking with Android games, it depends entirely on the game’s visual architecture on just how much battery it will suck up per session.

While playing PUBG Mobile, Diablo Mode consumed 13% of battery at the best graphics presets in 30 minutes, while Rise Mode used only 10% with smooth graphics and delivered a fairly good 60fps experience.

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Interestingly, if you take things up a notch to 90 fps, the battery draw is equal across the Rise and Diablo system profiles. If you plan to primarily engage in gaming, you can expect anywhere between three and five hours of battery life.

For days where you only seek casual gaming for short spells, the tablet can last a whole day, but try to tone down the screen refresh rate and brightness levels to achieve that.

There are a couple of cool charging features in the context of heating. The first one is Turbo mode, which increases the pace of charging but at the cost of the battery running hotter than usual.

Then, there is charge separation. This one cuts off access to the battery when a charger is plugged. The entire system is driven entirely by the power delivered through the USB-C port, which means the battery doesn’t heat up. This mode is ideal for long gaming sessions and should also bode well for battery health in the long run.

Should you buy the RedMagic Nova?

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The RedMagic Nova is quite an easy recommendation, primarily because it’s the only product of its kind in the segment. For just $499, you can tap into the full potential of a top-tier Qualcomm silicon, which is half the competition’s current ask for such a facility.

The build is great, and gaming enthusiasts will appreciate a healthy bunch of innovative features. It acts more like a mobile gaming console if you also have a larger screen at your disposal and love emulation gaming.

The RedMagic Nova is quite an easy recommendation.

The RedMagic Nova is also the fastest-charging tablet, and the heat dissipation kit is reliable. The UI is also clean. The only downsides are crushed color output on the screen, garish software design, and heat generation courtesy of its performance profiles.

Overall, the RedMagic Nova ticks off more boxes than almost any slate in its price bracket, and it does so in style. For its target audience, it delivers on the aspects where it matters, and that’s a win at the end of the day.