If the latest same-old iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab is boring you to tears, you may have to look to the boutique brands for something unique. RedMagic’s new Astra 2 gaming tablet is supposedly one of the coolest pint-sized devices around. I mean that literally.
RedMagic, a company that makes specialized, boutique gaming devices, this week showed off its new Astra 2’s specialized thermal management. It’s one of the first tablets to employ a liquid cooling system alongside a specially designed vapor chamber and liquid metal apparatus. The tablet maker claims it crafted a custom vapor chamber without making the tablet overly heavy.
That’s a lot of cooling for a 9.06-inch tablet, but let’s break down just why this is interesting. Liquid cooling is a well-known solution for gaming desktops that uses a liquid medium to transfer heat away from components and to fans where it can exhaust outside the closed system. Starting with its RedMagic 11 Pro gaming phone, the company has managed to incorporate a miniaturized liquid cooling system built into a thin-frame device. RedMagic claims this “AquaCore Cooling System 2.0” inside the Astra 2 leads to better sustained performance, which will prove especially important for gaming.
The tablet also employs OLED screen, which normally runs hotter than a typical LCD display. It supports a 2,400 x 1,504-pixel resolution with a maximum 185Hz refresh rate. That’s already promising enough, but RedMagic also claims its screen can hit a searing 1,100 nits global brightness.
The tablet is also making use of Qualcomm’s current flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 CPU. I know from experience that the chip requires a hefty cooling system to keep it running at its peak performance. RedMagic also stuck its tablet with a specialized RedCore R4 gaming chip built to help the Astra 2 with sustained gaming at higher frame rates. All this extra focus on visual quality and gaming performance necessitates thinking outside the box to keep this device cool. We’ve seen plenty of gaming mobile devices, like the Asus ROG Phone, resort to bulky add-on fans to help balance temperatures.
The Astra 2 tablet has already been available in China, where it’s called the RedMagic Gaming Tablet 5. Now it’s coming to the U.S. market for a starting price of $750 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. If you want a version with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, you’ll need to pony up $850. The Astra 2 won’t go up for global sale until Aug. 26, but the company promises you can claim early bird vouchers to get it before the tablet goes up for global sale.
Apple may be getting ready to launch a new 8.4-inch iPad mini later this year that also packs the same organic light-emitting diode display, though we haven’t heard if Apple will use any novel cooling system for its tiny tablet. Bloomberg has previously reported the next-gen iPad Pro slated for 2027 will feature a vapor chamber for enhanced cooling.
Whether or not you give a damn about gaming tablets—especially those originally billed for the Chinese mobile gaming audience—we should be glad that there’s still room for innovation in tablets Will we see Apple or Samsung adopt liquid cooling anytime soon? Not likely, though it’s time more companies start thinking outside the box to push the performance of our tablets and phones.
