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Chinese phone maker Nubia has been selling gaming smartphones under its Red Magic brand for more than four years. Now the company is expanding into gaming tablets.

The first Red Magic tablet features a 12.1 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel display with a 144 Hz refresh rate, 240 Hz touch sampling rate, and up to 600 nits brightness as well as a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor and as passive “ICE Magic” cooling system that the company says helps keep the temperature low during gameplay. The tablet is up for pre-order in China with prices starting at 3,999 CNY (about $550)

While Nubia is putting an emphasis on the tablet’s gaming cred, it also just appears to offer a pretty good set of specs at a reasonably affordable price tag (at least when compared with Samsung’s flagship tablets).

The tablet features LPDDR5 memory and UFS 3.1 storage and comes in 12GB/256GB and 16GB/512GB configurations. All models feature 10,000 mAh batteries and support for 80W fast charging.

Red Magic equips the tablet with four speakers with DTS audio, a 16MP front-facing camera, and 13MP rear camera, and support for optional accessories including a stylus and magnetic keyboard.

Wireless capabilities include WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and 5G cellular connectivity. The Red Magic tablet has a metal unibody chassis, measures 280 x 182 x 6.5mm and weighs 613 grams.

The tablet ships with RedMagicOS 8.0, which is the company’s custom version of Android 13. And that’s where the whole idea of a gaming tablet runs into the question of whether you actually makes any sense. Most native Android games can run on devices that don’t have premium specs, and you can use pretty much any Android device to stream games from Microsoft, NVIDIA, or Amazon’s cloud gaming services.

A speedy processor, plenty of RAM and storage, and an advanced cooling system can come in handy if you’re planning to use the tablet for emulation. But with a $550+ price tag, you might be better off picking up a Steam Deck if you really want a handheld gaming device.

That said, the Red Magic tablet has at least one thing going for it that the Steam Deck (and even Red Magic phones) don’t: passive cooling, which should allow for silent operation.

Global pricing and availability haven’t been announced yet, but since Red Magic phones tend to go on sale worldwide, I’d be surprised if the company decided not to offer its first tablet outside of China.

 

 

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  1. This tablet can use a keyboard, but problem is most Android ganes don’t support keyboard nor mouse nor mousepad. Android is a nightmare regarding that aspect.

    Reply

    1. Just about any android device can use a bluetooth keyboard really. If anything, that just makes the choice to show it off like it’s something novel even weirder.

      Reply