Redmagic Nova review: We put this gaming tablet with a built-in fan to the test

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Let's face facts. iPads have been the go-to gaming tablets for years now. The Android tablet market has been lackluster. Sure, the Galaxy Tab S10+ and Ultra have so far proven to be powerful tablets, but gaming is an afterthought. But the Redmagic Nova gaming tablet is finally here to shake things up.

This is a beast of a tablet. I put it through test after test, and it came out on top each time, hardly breaking a sweat. The unique 3D cooling system and internal fan probably helped. I do have a couple of things to nitpick about, but all in all, it looks like us gamers might finally have a tablet we can call ours.

Top-tier specs, a unique cooling system including a built-in fan, and a gamer-centric design make the Redmagic Nova the best gaming tablet on the market today.

The Redmagic Nova gaming tablet is available now. The base model, which comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, costs $499. You can upgrade to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for $649. It comes in Midnight black, and you'll need to order it directly from the Redmagic site, but shipping is free.

This is no iPad, but the Redmagic Nova still looks and feels like a premium tablet from the moment you take it out of the box. It has an all-metal body highlighted with an anodized back cover for extra grippiness. There's a futuristic-looking bar along the top of the back with the Redmagic logo, a camera, and a window to view the internal housing with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip (or at least a section that wants you to think it's the real internals).

My first impressions were positive, especially after I turned it on and that gorgeous 10.9-inch display fired up. Vivid colors and deep blacks were instantly apparent. I immediately knew this was a quality 144Hz display, even if it's LCD rather than OLED, and I couldn't wait to start gaming on it. The Redmagic Nova is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Leading Edition, Qualcomm's most powerful mobile chipset on the market right now. This is paired with up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and performance is lightning-fast.

Gaming is what this tablet is all about, and gaming is where it excels. It easily handles the best mobile games. Genshin Impact, Honkai Starrail, and Asphalt Legends are fantastic on this tablet. It really lets those animations shine, and they look great on that big screen. Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Mobile are about as immersive as you can get on a tablet. There is never any framerate loss, and victories are easy to rack up, especially against people playing on lower-end mobile devices.

The Nova handles PC games over Steam Link as smoothly as it handles mobile games. Space Marine 2 is an absolute blast to play with a synced Xbox controller. I can bring it to my brother's, and both of us can play side-by-side. Other games play just as well via Steam Link.

I still haven't heard the fan fire up. I don't know if it's ultra-quiet or if the 3D surround cooling tube can handle it all, but the fan is set to operate, and there's even a cool sound of a car engine starting that is supposed to play when it gets going, yet it never goes. I constantly touched the back of the tablet to feel it was getting hot, but it was always cool and metallic. Kudos to Redmagic here. They've really nailed the cooling on this thing.

This tablet runs Redmagic Game Space 9, an in-house skin powered by Android 14. It is a near-stock Android experience with minimal bloatware. The user interface is responsive and familiar, and the Redmagic gamer-focused features are a nice touch.

Nubia's Syncmind AI uses onboard intelligence to optimize the tablet for the game you're playing. I don't know if it actually does anything, but games fly on this machine, so something is working. It also has the same personalization settings as the Nubia Z60S Pro I reviewed back in August, which I really enjoyed.

Stellar photos and a stock Android experience

There's an entire menu option dedicated to the light strip on the back. The Redmagic logo is actually an RGB strip, and you can set a bunch of different effects for it. You can't see it yourself, but anybody looking at you can, and that's alright.

The quad-speaker system is loud, with two on the bottom and two on the top, and they pump out some decent sound for a mobile device. Gaming is great using those speakers, but watching videos is even better. Listening to music will never be as good as on a dedicated speaker, but in a pinch this tablet will do fine.

I also appreciate Redmagic's careful attention to button placement. The power button is in the top right corner, and the volume rocker is on the upper right side. This means my hands are nowhere near them when I'm playing a game in landscape mode. There are no accidental screenshots or powering off of the device mid-game. It's the small details that count.

This tablet's appeal starts to fall apart when it gets outdoors. The screen is super-reflective, and despite the brightness being turned up to max, it is never bright enough on a sunny day. Trying to see anything on the screen is nearly impossible, except for my own ugly mug staring back at me as the screen practically becomes a mirror.

It's also in the sunlight that I notice all the fingerprint smudges on the back. Under the sun, the entire tablet stops looking cool and gamer-like. Perhaps this is fitting for us gamers, though.

Theoretically, the Redmagic Nova should last several days on a single charge. It has an enormous 10,000mAh battery, after all. Despite this, I find myself getting a little anxious about the remaining charge by evening, and I'm not even gaming all day long. I tend to play everything in the highest settings, and I love the lighting on the back that flashes continuously when a game is running, so these things contribute to power loss.

That said, I wasn't entirely disappointed by the battery. My Pixel would never handle the kind of loads I threw at this tablet and make it to evening. Plus, the included 80W charger gets it back up to form in no time at all. I just wish the tablet would last into the next day on a single charge.

The Nova may be a great gaming device, but a photographer's friend it is not. The 50MP rear camera produces pixelated images even at 1.5X zoom. The colors seem off in all the photos, and the video is underwhelming, even when set to 4K resolution. Forget the 20MP front-facing camera.

It's also an unwieldy device to wrestle into position for a good shot. This is a hefty tablet. At 530g, it is nearly as heavy as the Galaxy Tab S10+ (570g) and much heavier than the iPad Air (460g). All this weight is quickly felt in the wrists when gaming directly. Holding it while lying on the sofa or lounging in a chair gets tiring. I find it best to prop it up and use an Xbox controller with it, but some games make this impossible.

Finally, I had a horrendous time with biometric logins. The facial recognition never worked. Not even once, despite scanning my face several times. The same with the fingerprint reader, which is a flat sensor on the right side of the device. My finger missed it constantly. I resorted to the old pattern unlock method, a tried-and-true way of getting into Android that never grows old.

You should absolutely buy the Redmagic Nova gaming tablet, with a few caveats. For starters, go for the upgraded version. You'll want the 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Secondly, remember this is a gaming tablet meant for indoor use. That's probably not too much of a deal-breaker if you plan to use it indoors most of the time, but you'll also want a case for it.

At $499 ($649 for the upgraded version), you're getting one heck of a piece of hardware from a company that seems laser-focused on gaming. Everything about the Redmagic Nova is perfect for gamers. And thanks to apps like Steam Link and the Xbox game cloud, this tablet is almost ready to replace your console and maybe even your PC.

Top-tier specs, a unique cooling system including a built-in fan, and a gamer-centric design make the Redmagic Nova the best gaming tablet on the market today.

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