REDMAGIC 11 Air review: flagship game-ready performance and quality for half the cost

Following my Astra Tablet review last summer and later in the year, the REDMAGIC 10S Pro, I was offered the chance to put the REDMAGIC 11 Air, which became available to purchase on Jan 29, through its paces.

REDMAGIC is an independent company spun off from Nubia (a subsidiary of ZTE), which primarily focuses on gaming devices. After accepting, I then found out that the people who buy this usually do it because they game on their phones. Well, to save you a lot of bother, I do not game on smartphones, but I did do a bunch of benchmarks (including 3DMark), so it's up to you if you want to stick around.

Before we get underway, here is a disclaimer: REDMAGIC provided a sample without any editorial input or pre-approval. Oh, and also an apology: this review is rather image-heavy.

First up, let's dive into the specs:

Table of contents

• Design
• Setting up (software)
• Display and RGB lighting
• Cameras
• Benchmarks
• Conclusion

Introduction

One thing you may notice from the specs is that this includes the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite silicon from 2024 (not the newer Gen 5 variant), which is a bit of a shame. However, it is paired with a Redcore R4 gaming chip, on which I could find very little info. Aside from the marketing jargon I could find, my contact told me that it is:

a dedicated gaming chip designed to elevate performance and cooling. It powers customizable in-game effects, delivers Qualcomm-driven 2K super-resolution for smoother visuals, and utilizes intelligent power management to extend battery life while keeping the device cool during intense sessions.

For a quick and dirty comparison against another popular flagship, it is still quite a bit cheaper than anything in the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, and it's actually $790.99 cheaper than the Galaxy S25 Ultra, which also has the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but with 4GB less memory compared to the top 512/16GB REDMAGIC 11 Air variant.

Aside from the fancy names given to the colors offered on the product page, they are basically Black or White with a transparency effect on the back. Ours is the Black (Phantom) variant. I've put the full bands it supports in a table below.

As far as internals go, this can rival most flagships on the market today and probably even exceed in some areas, like with the ample-sized battery.

In the box

• REDMAGIC 11 Air Phone x 1
• Clear Phone Case x 1
• Power Adapter (80W) x 1
• Type-C Data Cable x 1
• SIM Tray Ejector x 1
• Warranty Card x 1
• Documentation

REDMAGIC laughs in the face of modern trends, because it is one of the few that still supplies an 80W Fast Charger power adapter in the box, which might have to do with the fact that it doesn't support wireless charging. Remember, kids, Samsung makes you pay around forty bucks for their 45W Fast Charger adapter, which adds to the total cost of your brand new Galaxy.

Day 1

The first thing I noticed when unboxing it was the weight. Even at just 207g, it is 26 grams lighter than my S23 Ultra, but only 11 grams lighter than the S25 Ultra for that extra 2000mAh of battery.

The design reminds me a lot of rectangular candy bar phones from yesteryear while retaining an impressive 90.7% screen-to-body ratio. There's no camera hump on the back, but for this camera, quality suffers a bit, which I'll get into later.

Calling

You may remember from my 10S Pro review that the call volume was too low for me to contemplate a switch to it; I am happy to say that the call volume on the 11 Air is quite good (not as loud as my Galaxy S23 Ultra), although it's enough to understand the other end of the call perfectly. This also goes for video calls, which utilize the stereo speakers.

Design

It is a typical candy bar shape with a dual camera array on the top left rear consisting of one 50 MP ultrawide camera, along with an 8MP macro camera. Below the camera array, there's the cooling fan flanked by RGB lighting, which looks like an additional camera, but isn't, and below that, with the white circle, is the flashlight.

The front is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, and around the sides is made up of a Aluminum Alloy Frame. The rear is protected by Gorilla Glass 5. The bezel looks quite nice with its uniform black color, with less focus on antenna lines, which made the 10S Pro look a bit too iPhone-esque.

On the right side of the phone, on each corner, you will find the Immersive 520Hz shoulder triggers, which, by the way, do not light up like on the 10S Pro; then there's the volume rocker and a power key that doubles as an action button. The keys have a good height and are easily detected by feel, and the buttons are completely smooth.

On the left side, there is the Magic Key, which is textured. By default, it sets the phone in "GameSpace" mode after a long press, but you can link it to a few other handy things, too, like Camera, Flashlight, Voice Recorder, and switch sound modes.

The key omits support for Face-to-Face translation, which is likely a feature reserved for the Pro handsets.

On the bottom, from left to right, there's a speaker grill, a USB Type C charger port for the included 1 m USB Type C-to-USB Type C cable, a mic hole, and the SIM tray.

The top of the 11 Air has what looks like another mic hole and the IR Blaster. On the front of the device, there is an under-display 16 MP front-facing camera. There is no notification LED, which is actually redundant thanks to full always-on-display (AOD) support.

Setting up

Software

The 11 Air ships with REDMAGICOS 11, which was updated to 11.0.9, and is based on Android 16, with the December 2025 Security Update, which is the newest at the time of writing. However, in terms of software updates and support, that is all up in the air. The phone itself is covered by a two-year warranty, but there is no information on the official website on how long REDMAGIC provides security and OS updates.

Alongside not having this information anywhere on the website for reference, customers have been receiving mixed responses from REDMAGIC support, with some saying the phone will get 5 years of software updates, while others have been replying by claiming they will receive just three years of software support, in regard to last year's 10 Series. See for yourself.

In any case, I asked my contact for clarification, and was told the following:

Software support: REDMAGIC now provides five years of software support for customers in the European Union and the United Kingdom, including major Android OS updates and regular security patches. In other regions, REDMAGIC offers three years of support.

There's a page for Global ROMs and updates, but the REDMAGIC 11 Air is not yet listed. Anyway, you can view the (almost) entire process of setting up; some screens could not be screenshot due to security limitations.

REDMAGIC 11 Air Setup

I used the vanilla Android setup rather than cloning my daily this time around, which was a standard stock affair, aside from the last step, which updated REDMAGIC OS to 11.0.9.

REDMAGIC 11 Air Post setup

Above, you can see some post setup screens. The experience is mostly stock Android aside from the attention to detail on gaming (something I really do not do on a phone). Right after the Android onboarding, you are presented with a few screens to set up Favorite apps, decide if you want gestures or not, and the phone checks for REDMAGICOS updates again.

Bloat?

Yes, there is a bit of bloat; it is mostly third-party apps, which can easily be removed. There are whole discussions about it on the reddit.com/r/REDMAGIC/ board, mostly people asking "does REDMAGIC ship bloat on their devices?" With people usually answering "Yes." I went into it in a bit more detail in my Astra Gaming Tablet review, so rather than parroting the same thing all over again, you can discover my first impressions about REDMAGIC OS and the bloat, which has not changed much at all between v10 and v11 right here.

tl;dr people: Yeah, there is bloat, but you can remove it all.

Home Screen

The Home screen is just called "System Launcher." It is pretty customizable. You can change just about everything; in fact, the only thing I found that was not possible to change is the ability to remove labels from icons, which was a bit disappointing, given that you can change just about everything else. I was also pleased to see a highly customizable AOD, which Samsung could take note of here.

REDMAGIC 11 Air Home (System Launcher)

Instead of Google Discover on right-swiping the Home screen, you get "Board" with REDMAGICOS, and I found it pretty useless. You can only disable or enable four categories, and that's it. And that's only after you accept the long Privacy Policy, which could mean it tracks whatever you decide to click on and updates itself that way, since there is no way to customize the feed. Thankfully, you can switch to Google Discover or disable the -1 page completely, yes, -1 is what REDMAGIC calls this page in the Home settings.

Lockscreen, or how I learned to "Move to stay sharp."

The lockscreen appeared to be defaulted to some inspirational wallpapers that change, and made me break out in a sweat just by looking at them. Of course, it can be changed to whatever you want, but I found it amusing that a smartphone geared towards gamers had a default lockscreen that encourages users to go out and exercise.

Display

The REDMAGIC 11 Air has a 6.85-inch screen and is only 8 mm in thickness. That weight also feels like it is distributed evenly across the phone, and you can place this down almost completely flat on its rear. The cameras, turbo fan, and LED flash protrude around two or three millimeters from the rear.

The AMOLED display has a 1216 x 2688 screen resolution, with a 431 PPI pixel density, a 20:9 aspect ratio, and Gorilla Glass protection. Nubia claims the display has a 1800-nit peak brightness for HDR content (no Dolby Vision here), which is a bit less than the REDMAGIC 10S Pro we reviewed, with its peak 2000 nits. Nevertheless, I found the screen to be vibrant and bright enough all the time I was using it in Adaptive refresh rate mode, which automatically adjusts the refresh rate between 1-144Hz depending on the app being used.

No camera cutout?

Now, with all the technical jargon out of the way, can I just say how refreshing it is to have a display where there are no black dots or cutouts for the selfie camera? In a word, beautiful. I know that under-display front-facing cameras are becoming more common, but other phone makers, please take note.

RGB lighting

For those who like RGB, the REDMAGIC 11 Air also has a bunch of lighting effects on each side and the back. Thanks to the front reserving everything to the display, there are no lighting borders or notification LEDs of any kind, and although you can set the lighting to notify you on certain things like calls, when charging, and an Alarm clock, it's definitely noticeable, even with the clear back case on (which is semi-transparent).

By default, the RGB lighting was off, which is a different experience I had with the 10S Pro, where it was enabled by default (admittedly, that was in REDMAGIC OS 10). It was only enabled by itself when charging, but this can be controlled through the "Light Strip Setting" shown below:

As you can see, you can control pretty much every aspect of it, like setting the lighting to flash green when you have an incoming call, or pulse blue with notifications. Owing to its name, all of the lighting is set to red by default.

Cameras

Coming back to cameras, and as I have said in previous smartphone reviews I've done, I am no camera buff. I'm a point-and-shoot kind of guy, but it seems to me that smartphone makers prefer to concentrate a lot more on camera quality, sometimes at the expense of other features.

On the rear, the REDMAGIC 11 Air comprises an Ultrawide 50 MP Omnivision camera (OV50E40), along with an 8 MP macro camera. Optical image stabilization (OIS) and PDAF (phase detection auto focus), which is a high-speed automatic focus technology, are also included.

REDMAGIC 11 Air Day

As you can see in the above photos, it was quite sunny out. I was quite impressed by the quality of daytime photos; the colors are not oversaturated, and the Omnivision camera array appears to be able to make great use of lighting, even when taking photos of scenes that would otherwise come out dark or with a lot of shadow. Annoyingly, the watermark is enabled by default, so prospective buyers, take note, this can be disabled in the camera settings.

However, as we also discovered with the REDMAGIC 10S Pro, that all starts to break down when you use the zoom function. The REDMAGIC 11 Air supports up to 10X zoom, and when utilized, even on a clear day, the result is a blurred mess of an image. To get a decent result using Zoom, you have to be happy utilizing no more than 5X digital zoom for a crisper image, such as the example of the boat (named GWEN) that I took, and did not use full zoom on.

As long as you aren't making use of full zoom, the photos come out clear as day, and I was really impressed with the quality of some of the scenery shots.

REDMAGIC 11 Air Night

With nighttime image captures, I was impressed at how the sensors could capture dark scenes with enough lighting, but once again, forget full zooming because it just looks ridiculous. A quick search on Reddit tells me that REDMAGIC has never really invested too much time in camera quality in its phones, opting instead for gaming performance, so that's where your decision should lie when choosing this over a more expensive flagship with a 200MP camera and 100X AI-assisted zoom.

In addition, I want to note that most of the nighttime photos required me to "hold still" while capturing up to and around 1-2 secs per shot, except where there was ample lighting, which was as quick as day shots (immediate). So you might have to factor that in as well if you plan to use this to take nighttime action shots.

Benchmarks

To offset my failure at doing some gaming on the REDMAGIC 11 Air, I have instead opted to include a bunch of benchmarks that really should show just how capable this phone is in the CPU and GPU departments. I used a mixture of AnTuTu, Geekbench 6 for Android and 3DMark with screenshots of all the results below.

The benchmark chart comparisons were provided by Sayan Sen.

Cooling

Before we dive in, I should note that REDMAGIC claims this about the "Multi‐Component Cooling System" to deal with heat dissipation:

Advanced cooling with vapor chamber, turbo fan, and graphene for sustained gameplay

Yes, it has a dedicated fan which can be manually controlled through a widget that is helpfully placed on the Home screen's second page. You can let it decide for itself (default), set it to eco, or cool mode. It also has a cool supercar starting-up sound effect

So the Air series does not employ the ICE-X cooling with Liquid Metal 2.0 that is included in the 10S Pro, but it does have a 24,000 RPM fan, which is 1,000 RPM quicker than in the Pro series.

Gallery: REDMAGIC 11 Air Benchmarks

As was to be expected, the REDMAGIC 11 Air outperforms pretty much most Snapdragon 8 Elite handsets on the market, thanks to a bit of overclocking (4.32GHz vs 4.23GHz CPU and up to 1250MHz vs typical 1100MHz Adreno 830 GPU), although it must be said that the 11 Air is clocked slightly lower than the 10S Pro at 4.47GHz, resulting in slightly lower scores across the board:

AnTuTu v11

• Overall 3,230,945 CPU: 980,439 GPU: 1,120,259 Memory: 446,098 UX: 684,149

For some additional context, AnTuTu's Memory score also accounts for the UFS storage speeds on the phone, and the UX score weighs various real-world tasks like image and video editing/processing, document processing, and a bit of data analysis, among others

My REDMAGIC 11 Air device managed to come in around 20th in the AnTuTu v11 rankings, with mostly Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices coming out on top.

Geekbench v6

• CPU Single-Core: 2,988 CPU Multi-Core: 9,711 GPU Open CL: 19,332 GPU Vulkan: 25,030

Geekbench 6, which returned a score of 2,988, is 81 points higher than the 2,907 recorded on the Honor Magic7 Pro in Single-Core mode. However, in Multi-Core mode, the REDMAGIC 11 Air soars past the Magic7 Pro's 6,243 score by 3,468 points, recording a score of 9,711. On the GPU front, the 11 Air beats the S24+'s best score by 4,077 (15,255) with a score of 19,332. It's a shame the Galaxy S25 isn't listed in the Compare yet, but the Honor Magic7 Pro is a good enough equivalent. One thing's for sure, it really showcases the overclocks and faster LPDDR5X memory being used in the REDMAGIC 11 Air.

If you are wondering, Geekbench ran a series of short tests which measured things like web browsing, document rendering, text processing, code compilation, various photo editing and processing tasks, and more.

3DMark

• Solar Bay: 11,988 (avg fps 45.62)
• Solar Bay Extreme: 1,141 (avg fps 7.98)
• Solar Bay Extreme Stress Test: Best Loop (1,125) Worst Loop (923)
• Steel Nomad Light: 2,544 (avg fps 18.85)
• Steel Nomad Light Stress Test: Best Loop 1 (2,557) Worst Loop 3 (2,055)
• Wildlife: Maxed Out!
• Wildlife Extreme: 6,876 (avg fps 41.18)
• Wildlife Extreme Stress Test: Best Loop (6,879) Worst Loop (5,486)

3DMark's standard Wild Life test wouldn't even give a score as it was "Maxed Out!", saying that the REDMAGIC 11 Air was "too powerful" for it, which is when I resorted to the stress tests. This is a Vulkan-based benchmark just like the other 3DMark tests.

Also, in case you are wondering, Solar Bay measures the ray tracing capabilities of a graphics chip, while Steel Nomad tests rasterization. Meanwhile, the Wild Life benchmark also measures rasterization, though to a lesser scale.

PCMark

Lastly, I ran PCMark, even though you cannot download it from the Google Play anymore (just like AnTuTu, for some reason), it is still a valid test to find out details about the battery life and performance.

As can be seen above, the entire Battery Life test took over nine hours, generating an average performance score of 24,228 after 64 passes. However, when running the Work 3.0 Performance test after recharging the battery back to 100% and letting the phone cool down, that score went up to 24,773. Please do note that I do not have a Luminance meter, so I was not able to calibrate the screen brightness first. So in this test, the performance score makes more sense.

Yes, this includes the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, launched in October 2024. The benchmark results, although important, should be taken into consideration with other findings, which show that the SoC appears to have mixed results across devices.

Since the scores are not directly comparable as it is a battery life-based test, we multiplied the obtained scores with how long the phones' batteries lasted in order to obtain an efficiency metric that will allow us to compare each of the phones' efficiencies.

As you can see above, the REDMAGIC 11 Air as the 10S Pro lagged behind the Honor Magic8 Pro and the Magic V5 in this efficiency test of ours. Since these numbers above are multiplicative, the actual peformance difference should be the square root of the differential.

For example, the Honor Magic8 Pro is approximately 64.76% better than the REDMAGIC 11 Air. That means the efficiency difference is approximately around 28.36% better on the former.

Conclusion

It's clear to me this is more like a Fan Edition SKU rather than all of the emphasis being put on the weight and how thin it is in comparison to the flagship. It mostly employs the features from last year's "10" flagship series.

The Good

Let's first talk about the good things. For one, I absolutely love the under-display camera. I was never a fan of camera cutouts, but all the flagships moved to it in an attempt to place larger screens and kill off any sort of bezel. I also love the price. Okay, you are getting a year-old spec for much cheaper than the competition, but it still beats many of last year's flagships in performance with that same Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and dedicated Redcore R4 gaming chip.

The Bad

This phone does not support eSIM, which is kind of weird in 2026, and there's no wireless charging. I also didn't like that they underclocked their overclock (hope you know what I mean!) The 10S Pro was clocked to 4.47GHz, but this newer 11 Air is clocked to 4.32GHz, why? The Adreno 830 GPU is clocked higher than the 10S Pro (1250MHz vs 1200MHz), though, resulting in one higher score in the 3DMark Wildlife test. The Air is quite obviously the cheap "S Pro" option, so it should at least align with the previous flagship in terms of specification.

Lastly, it seems REDMAGIC also skimped on the RGB lighting to bring costs down; it has one fewer lit-up logo on the back, no lighting in the shoulder triggers and there's only lighting for the single vapor chamber on one side, while the 10S Pro had them on both sides.

Would I recommend?

Otherwise, it is a great-looking phone with an awesome display, and thanks to the slightly overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite, it still remains quicker than most others with the same chipset, more than double so compared to my S23 Ultra, which is now showing its age at almost three years old.

Something else we cannot dismiss is the pricing, too. Remember that the top offering 11 Air with 16GB+512GB is almost $800 cheaper than the nearest S25 Ultra equivalent, and to top it off, the REDMAGIC 11 Air has 4GB more memory too. So you could treat yourself to a real 2025 flagship quality phone even if you aren't a gamer and be set for a couple of years, at least.

If you are looking for flagship performance at a nice price point, and you do game on your smartphone, you can't go wrong here. You'll need a physical SIM, and not be bothered about the lack of wireless charging, that's it!

Where to buy

The REDMAGIC 11 Air is available now, starting at $529, with the aforementioned variant costing $629.

Follow us onGoogle News Add as a preferredsource on Google Follow@NeowinFeed Post Like Share Share Share RSS Report a problemwith this article