REDMAGIC 10 Air – Review

So we have another gaming phone in for review, this time from REDMAGIC. I have previously reviewed REDMAGIC devices in the form of the REDMAGIC 9 Pro and the REDMAGIC Nova Gaming Tablet. The device we have for review now is a little bit different in that they have pursued slimness over some functionality. I have already completed the unboxing and associated video for the REDMAGIC 10 Air and I would encourage you to have a look at the article here before you continue reading this review.

Design
There are a few key areas I want to discuss about design which make the REDMAGIC 10 Air different from the previous REDMAGIC devices such as the 9 Pro or the more recent 10 Pro.
First things first, this device is significantly slimmer than the REDMAGIC 10 series, and this has been done by removing one of REDMAGIC’s USPs from the device.

I am, of course, talking about the REDMAGIC cooling system, which incorporates a turbofan with vents and an air ducting channel that runs across the entire phone, giving enhanced cooling to the processor and main areas of the motherboard. Now that we no longer have this cooling system, the phone can be slimmer, but the question is, does this compromise the performance? This is something I will look into more thoroughly later on.

The next area I wish to address is the removal or replacement of the gaming slider button that was found on previous devices with a new multi-function button called Magic Button.

Which can now be programmed to work in a few different ways. On previous devices, the slider would enter you into game mode and their custom gaming interface, which by default, is what Magic Button will also do; however, the Magic Button will now also allow you to set custom actions, albeit from a list of predefined ones, to enter different modes. This suggests that REDMAGIC are not targeting this device purely as a gaming-focused phone, but casting their net a little wider to allow light-use gamers to have the gaming phone experience without having an out-and-out gaming phone image.

The back panel is also slightly different from what we have seen from REDMAGIC before. Gone are the RGB LED accents which were on the Pro series. These have been replaced with very subtle graphics of the REDMAGIC logo and name. This makes for the phone being a lot more subtle than the 9 Pro and 10 Pro series that went before. Again, indicating the intentions of REDMAGIC for the REDMAGIC 10 Air device.

Something that has been carried over from the previous generation is the awesome full screen display. This panel is a 6.8 inch panel which has a very high screen to body ratio due to the under display selfie camera that is utilized. This gives you an uninterrupted display when gaming, watching video or browsing the web. The camera is noticeable if you look hard enough for it, and in very bright sunlight, you will see that sometimes a sun icon will appear over the camera area, indicating that it has activated sunlight brightness mode. This is a feature that can be turned off or on within the display settings menu.

Something else that has been carried over are the haptic air triggers on the right hand side of the phone. These air triggers work as buttons during gameplay and give substantial haptic feedback when in use. The positioning of them is at either end of the phone and they are inactive outside of gaming scenarios. By default, they will not be activated in games unless you use the Game Center settings menu to activate them.

As I previously mentioned, the RGB aspect of the phone used to be found on the back panel, but also it was found on the cooling system fan. Now with the REDMAGIC 10 Air not having a fan, they have had to relocate the RGB lighting, which they have done by integrating it into the flash element of the camera array. This is a nice touch and a nod to REDMAGIC’s heritage at using RGB to distinguish the phones as gaming-focused devices. The good news is, if you don’t want the RGB feature, it is easily disabled via the lighting section of the settings menu. I like that it is still present and it is useful as a way of alerting notifications amongst other things.

The last design aspect I want to discuss is the look and feel of the phone. It is still following the blocky style design of the previous devices and we still have very squared off edges and corners, making this phone seem very utilitarian. I am actually a fan of this style, as I did not like phones with curved edges to the display. This, for me, limited the actual usable area of the display panel and also made the fitting of third-party screen protectors extremely awkward. No such problems here as the display is a completely flat panel, edge to edge. Some people may find that the corners of the phone can be uncomfortable, however, in my extended use, I have found no such issue, as they are smooth enough with a subtle enough grounding that they do not dig into your hand or cause any discomfort.

The phone will come in three variants for colour each with their own imaginative name which is the REDMAGIC way Twilight (Black), Hailstone (White) and Flare (Orange). Flare is only available in the larger storage size and will be available in the near future the launch date is still to be confirmed, we are expecting this later in the month though.

Hardware
From a hardware perspective the changes are mostly under the skin and the biggest change here from the REDMAGIC 10 Pro is the downgrade of the chipset to a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 instead of the Elite being used in the 10 Pro. Now on paper this sounds like it would be a bad thing but in reality to the daily user you and me are going to be very hard pushed to actually notice any significant difference in speed and fluidity of the chip. The one area where things are a bit better is the efficiency of the newer chip which would normally affect the battery life of the phone but due to the 10 Air already having a massive 6000 mAh battery this is somewhat negated.

In terms of storage and memory the REDMAGIC 10 Air is available in two configs you can have one with 12GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage or one with 16GB of RAM and 512 GB of Storage like the version I have here. The memory being used is LPDDR5X along with UFS 4.0 for the storage which will ensure fast data transfer and multitasking.
However the Snapdragon chipset is not the only thing providing the power here as the phone also features RedCore R3 and Energy Cube built into the phone to enhance your gaming experience by taking these tasks off the Snapdragon chip when in the gaming environment. The RedCore R3 chip will work on Graphics Enhancement techniques such as graphics interpolation and maximise frame rates on supported titles such as Genshin Impact and Call of Duty Mobile amongst others. In addition to this fairly big task it will take on some of the other resource draining features like, Enhancing in game audio, optimising power efficiency and thermal management via the ICE-X cooling system.
That brings me onto the next big change from the REDMAGIC 10 S Pro: the cooling of the phone.

As previously mentioned the REDMAGIC 10 Air does not have a built-in cooling fan that has been normally found on the REDMAGIC phones in the past. This is achievable by the use of a slightly different cooling system that was actually first seen on the REDMAGIC Nova Gaming Tablet last year. When I reviewed that device last year I was impressed but it was also a tablet so had a larger area for the all important cooling system. Well the good news is that REDMAGIC have been refining this system which they call ICE-X and on the 10 Air it has been implemented into a passively cooled phone. The Vapour chamber in use for actually providing the oomph of the cooling power is significant at a size of 6,100 mm². This in turn is supported by a 9 layer system which utilises a lot of the same technology as gaming laptops. An important element of the 9 layer build is liquid metal with a thermal conductivity of 80w/mK, it is 13 times more effective than other cooling solutions and gets rid of excess heat fast.

I am pleased to say that all the engineering that has been put into the cooling system does indeed work and during extended gaming sessions I did not feel any heat build up. In fact the only time the REDMAGIC 10 Air did get hot was during prolonged SatNav use while charging the phone and streaming Spotify via Android Auto. I am yet to find a phone that will not heat up in that scenario but I include it to be thorough.

Those are all the good things inside the phone but we don’t see and feel them, that aspect is taken care of by the display which is quite a beauty in itself. As I previously mentioned the screen is a 6.8” which is great size for both gaming and media. This is down to the high resolution of 1.5k due to the 2480 x 1116 pixels and the high PPI of 401. The screen is also an AMOLED panel so that gives you all the normal benefits of that tech with High Peak Brightness of 1600 nits rich and true to life colours thanks to the 100 DCI-P3 wide colour gamut. Where it becomes a gaming phone screen though is the 2000Hz instant touch sampling rate with an average rate of 960Hz to allow your touches to be picked up accurately and fast, great for when you are playing fast paced action games. The other important feature here is that lack of a camera cutout afforded by the under display camera that I previously mentioned. The screen uses Gorilla Glass 5 to give it some protection against scratches and scuffs Although in my short time using the phone I managed to accumulate at least two scratches to join the one already present. I would recommend picking up some sort of screen protector if you want the 10 Air to stay in good condition. REDMAGIC do sell them on their website and these will probably fit better than my cheapo 3rd party one.

That being said though the screen is not the only way of interacting with games on this phone on the REDMAGIC 10 Air as you also have the excellent shoulder triggers which will allow you move some of the action away from the screen leaving you more space to see what is actually going on. The shoulder triggers are cleverly designed to look like the shoulder buttons on gaming controllers. This makes gaming more fun and responsive, especially in fast-paced or competitive games. The triggers themselves also have a 520Hz response rate and matching RGB from the RGB light on the rear (sadly the triggers don’t light up!)

Of course these are the main headlines but you do also have all the regular flagship style features onboard such as Dual Band Wifi with support for 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be. In terms of cellular banding you have full Support for everything up to 5G with the following bands available on the phone.

• 2G bands GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
• 3G bands HSDPA 800 / 850 / 900 / 1700(AWS) / 1900 / 2100
• 4G bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 66
• 5G bands 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 26, 28, 38, 40, 41, 66, 77, 78 SA/NSA
• Speed HSPA, LTE, 5G

Bluetooth is taken care of with 5.4 compatibility utilising the A2DP codec and is also LE compatible. I was able to easily pair my Pixel Watch 3 45MM and Pixel Buds Pro 2 to the phone and had very few connection issues.

One area where I did have a minor annoyance is that when I connected the phone to my car via USB for Android Auto I had to select it to work in media transfer mode (MTP) every time even if the phone had not been unplugged but the car was being started again. This became quite tiresome after a while. I am sure that this behaviour could probably be changed with a setting but I couldn’t find where to change it.

Before I move away from hardware I need to talk about another area of the gaming experience that is driven by both the hardware and the software. This is of course the audio experience. As you would expect from a gaming phone the soundstage is well supported and the 10 Air has dual stereo speakers, one at either end of the device. The speaker at the base of the device is slightly larger than the one up by the top that also pulls double duty as an earpiece. However they have been tuned in a way that there is no perceptible imbalance between the two. The Speakers setup has been certified to DTS-X Ultra level which allows the speakers to take advantage of various qualities of sound, such as location, movement, and size making the audio experience more immersive and engaging. This is also supported by Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound tuning to provide the best possible sound over various different apps, not just games.
Whilst the sound is important there also needs to be a physicality to that sound which is brought forward by the use of a large super linear haptic motor for the vibration feedback. And of course you also have that nifty RGB Light ring as well to add that extra flair to the whole experience!

There is one thing that is sadly missing from the audio experience which will potentially affect gamers more than other users. This is of course the 3.5mm headphone jack. This is very important where sound is part of the game as is the case where FPS games are involved. The use of a good wired headset will minimise any sound latency effects that may be experienced while gaming to a level which cannot be matched by Bluetooth headphones so for the hardcore mobile FPS gamers this could be a negative that is worth bearing in mind. I have not found it to be an issue when i was playing Call of Duty Mobile but then again I am not good enough to be aware of the sounds of things going on around me!
Moving on lets look at the software.

Software
I am going to be excluding the Game space software in this section as this warrants its own full section as it is quite extensive tbh. What I do want to touch on here is what REDMAGIC 10.0 is all about.

The first thing I will say is that this is one of the cleaner OEM Launchers that I have come across and apart from 1 massive glaring omission I am a big fan.I am able to choose my grid width preferences and icon sizing with relative freedom (staying within the launcher settings). The smallest text size is suitable and it means that the interface doesn’t look cartoon-like. The application drawer all the icons show their default colour over being changed to match the wallpaper colours. While I am not sure if I prefer this it does mean that I can find things a bit quicker in most cases. I would prefer it if my background in the app drawer was a bit dimmer as it can be a bit too much visually sometimes.

The bit that causes me frustration is the inability to set my feed to Google Discover when I swipe left from my first home screen.This is so annoying and I cant recall an Android phone from rect memory that has not got this as an option. I know that OnePlus had their own option for this action but they did have the ability to change to the Google Discover feed. This should be a standard feature on all Android phones and it really annoys me that it is not there. The Google News widget is not an acceptable substitute. Please change this REDMAGIC. I also don’t recall this being an issue on the REDMAGIC Nova Gaming Tablet but perhaps it was and I just don’t use the swipe left option as much on a tablet.

Moving away from the negatives to the positives. Of course the REDMAGIC 10 Air has a whole array of AI goodies thrown into the software with all the Google Gemini powered features that you would expect to see within the Google Apps. REDMAGIC have also implemented some of their own AI in the form of Smart Sidebar, REDMAGIC Translation and REDMAGIC Smart Communication

Starting with the Smart Sidebar it allows you to drag in an actionable sidebar from either side of the phone to access useful actions such as take screen shots, start screen recording and pin apps. Where it becomes a bit more useful is for a means to quickly multitask into other apps.You can set up your own apps to appear in the sidebar area. This is a really nice way of multitasking especially if the app needed is not an open app. This is a screenshot of an app that has been opened via Smart Sidebar.

Next up is REDMAGIC Translation which will allow you to complete real time translations within phone calls and also have the phone transcribe phone calls for reference to at a later date.

Lastly is REDMAGIC Smart communication.
This is a way of the phone boosting its signal quality by optimizing the antenna stitching ensuring that you have the best signal. It will also decide which sim will be the best one to use to ensure the optimal signal is being obtained.

Overall I have to give REDMAGIC props from keeping the software pretty close to that of stock Android 15. One thing that is an area where REDMAGIC has always been a little less clear cut though is how the future support of the software will be in terms of the software update and also security updates. Well I do have some news on that front. REDMAGIC have revealed that the REDMAGIC 10 Air will get 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates meaning that the phone will continue to be supported until 2030. This is good news however I do feel that they do need to do a bit better as we are now seeing phones getting this support for up to 7 years from the likes of Samsung and Google, even Honor have improved their offering as they will not support both for up to 6 years on the recently launched Honor 400 series.

Next up is the big one for this phone, the Game Space and Gaming experience.

Gaming and Performance
I want to address this as 2 parts as the gaming experience is not just about the hardware performance for the phone it is largely supported by the Game Space software.

First up Game Space
The Game Space software is essentially a suite where you can keep your games on your phone and also a place to tweak how each game will run on your device. Here you will also find access to some other tools for enhancing your gaming experience.
There are two sections to the Game Space menus the first one is for your local stored games which is called Game Lobby and then the second one allows you to access other functions this second menu is called Super Base.

Within Game Lobby you will be able to see your locally stored games, your play time stats and other details. You can also set up customised ways for the game to run and how it utilises Energy Cube which is a term given for in game enhancements. For example if you want Call of Duty mobile to run at 120 FPS and it all run on the max performance setting (called Rise in the settings) then you can set this up here. This means that whenever the game starts up you will be in the best optimised state for that game. Here is an example of the settings I have for Call of Duty Mobile.

 

When you’re within the game itself you can also access the settings for the Energy Cube and plug in controls by swiping in from the left hand side twice this will then bring up the full menu overlay as shown below. I have included a few screen shots below of the interface. I have tried to play a few games where the shoulder “trigger” buttons are utilised and I will be honest I have had some success albeit let down by innate lack of ability!

 

What is really cool is that you can use the Trigger buttons in any game which means I was also able to set them up in Alto’s Odyssey which is one of my favourites games to play when I need to chill out. I have set them as the jump function and it allows me to experience the full beauty of the game without having any interruption on the screen.

You also have the Multi square sub screen option which would allow you to use an second display as a secondary screen for data and quick operations. The caveat is that this second display does need to be a REDMAGIC device. Again with this being my only REDMAGIC device at this time I was unable to test this feature.

The last option within Super Base is called Mora, this is REDMAGIC’s anime style mascot and in here you can settle character up to do various things such as have her as a wallpaper and charging screen. There are also various outfits you can choose to have the character dressed up in!. This one is definitely not for me but might appeal to some!!!

So now that we have got the Game Space software out of the way how does the REDMAGIC 10 Air actually perform whilst gaming. Well you will pleased to here that in my testing I had no issues with GamePlay at all. I had not lags or stutters in any of the games I tested. I was as advertised able to get a 120FPS rate on Call of Duty and the triggers worked exactly as advertised.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Chipset with the Adreno 750 GPU work brilliantly and using my gameplay never skipped a beat. If there is any thing that is a slight negative it is that the phone does get a touch warmer than I would have liked but then again this is normal for most phones running this sort of processing power, it was certainly not anything that would cause me concern nevermind stop me from continuing my gaming session. Something to bear in mind is I was using the phone with the in box case during the sessions so your results may vary when the case is not being used.

I did try out some of the plug-ins while I played COD Mobile, however as previously mentioned I cant say if the addition of these actively helped my game or not as I am not that good at the game.

I also tried to plug the REDMAGIC 10 Air into my Ultrawide PC Monitor to see if I could utilise the bigger display for gaming but unfortunately the device does not support Video out through the USB Type C port as this is a feature available on the REDMAGIC 10 Pro and recently announced REDMAGIC 10S Pro. The other way would be via Smartcast which would allow me to control the game from my phone whilst viewing on a TV. Unfortunately I was unable to get this feature to work with either of the TV’s in my house so I was unable to test this further. I am sure it was an issue with the TV or me not configuring something correctly on the TV though.

Overall I was very impressed with playing games on the REDMAGIC 10 Air, however I will be the first to admit this is not my primary use case for a phone. I want a phone that is powerful enough for anything I am going to throw at it and for it too last a decent period of time while doing the tasks I ask of it. The good new is that the REDMAGIC 10 Air does this with bells on. There was not point during my review period that I found the phone to be sluggish or unresponsive. It handles all my normal phone tasks with aplomb and has the added benefit of being a very powerful hand held gaming rig when I want it to be. I suppose that kinda cover the performance side but there are a few more factors I want to look at away from gaming and aw horsepower.

One key aspect to any phone being useful despite how powerful it is, is the ability for it to gain connect and hold onto a mobile signal. Again here is a an area where the REDMAGIC 10 Air did not disappoint. I would have to say that it matches my current best performer which was the OnePlus Nord 4 from last year in terms of the mobile connection capabilities. It was also very good at keep a WiFi signal as well, particularly in weaker signal areas.

I have tested this against another device I currently have in the form of the Oppo Find X8 Pro and the results are shown below. This test was done within about 10 metres of my router and through two walls.

 

The REDMAGIC 10 Air did get slighter slower download speeds on average but the upload speed is matched throughout the testing.

I also measured the signal strength and the majority of time the REDMAGIC 10 Air did pick up a slightly stronger signal than the Find X8 Pro. They are both more than sufficient for streaming media and online gaming.

Bluetooth connectivity was perfect and I had no issues connecting and maintaining a connection with either my Pixel Watch 3 45mm or my Pixel Buds Pro 2. I also did not experience any significant latency issues when playing back mixed media.

GPS was good and it was quick to obtain a fix and use that fix for tracking car journeys and locating me on the Life 360 app, which we use as a family to see where each of us are during the day.

Battery wise for me with the usage I tend to have on normal work day this is two days phone. However I have been able to drain it quicker than this by using the phone for a combination of gaming GPS navigation and camera whilst I have been on days off. The good news is it will charge very fast with the included 80 W fast charger taking less than an hour for full juice of the massive 600mAh battery. In screen shot below you can see that have had nearly 4 hrs of screen on time and I am still above 50% meaning that I have the potential for another full day of use before I need to plug it in again.

Now that the gaming and performance aspects are covered lets dive into the camera. This was an area I was keen to check out as I was concerned that this would be one of the weakest aspects for the phone.

Camera

To say that the REDMAGIC 10 Air camera is an afterthought would be unfair but it is not totally inaccurate. The cameras the phone are by no means bad but they are not great either. We have two cameras on the back and these are comprised of one OV50E 50 MP camera that is the Maine lens. This therefore gets the OIS functions and the 7P Lens with APL coated anti glare. The secondary ultra wide angle is a OV50D 50MP camera but doesn’t have any of the other bells and whistles of the main camera.

The shots it can produce without the zoom being used are actually pretty good and the ultra wide works reasonably well. However when you start to zoom in things start to get messy. You can go upto about 5x zoom and things are still serviceable but once you get past this the lens cannot handle the image clearly any more and things start to break down.

When you are using the camera in good light you can get some good results as can be seen in the shots below. Even the portrait mode works well and delivers some nice “bokeh” effects.

However when the light gets darker the camera starts to struggle and you start to see some blur and undefined edges.

If I am being completely honest if you are wanting a camera focused phone then the REDMAGIC 10 Air is not the phone for you. Yes you can use the cameras in a pinch but they are not designed for high quality photography.

I have put some camera samples down below for you to allow you to judge them for yourself.

Conclusion

I came into this review wanting to know a few things about the REDMAGIC 10 Air. I will repeat that question again here.

The question is, does this quest for a slim phone negate the benefits of having a slightly chunkier device with the integrated cooling that REDMAGIC are renowned for.

It is now time to answer that question, for your average phone user the answer is no the slimming of the device does not create a negative experience of the REDMAGIC experience. This phone will do everything you could need or want it to do with the possible exception of high quality zoomed photography. Yes it misses out on some features like wireless charging and display out capability but this phone is not designed for that. The phone is designed for the everyday user who might be put off by the more full-on REDMAGIC 10S Pro series.

If on the other hand you are a hardcore mobile gamer that wants the very best mobile gaming experience and all that entails. The REDMAGIC 10 Air is not the phone for you and I would recommend that you look to the REDMAGIC 10S Pro series as they would be better suited to your needs.

I see the REDMAGIC 10 Air as a way for REDMAGIC to target a different market segment those who want gaming phone level performance but don’t want a “look at my gaming phone” style phone. This where the REDMAGIC 10 Air makes the most sense to me and if that was the design teams brief then they have nailed it. I can do all the things I want to do on this phone but no one would know that at is core is the beating heart of a gamer phone.

If you want to buy the REDMAGIC 10 Air then it is now variable on there website in the Midnight and Hailstone variants with the Flare version launch date tbc.