Red Magic 10 Air Review: Slim Gaming Flagship with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

A flat screen, under-display camera, no huge camera module, flagship performance, ahead of the iPhone 17 Air and Samsung S25 Edge launch, entering the thin and light flagship track. Red Magic 10 Air belongs to the brand-new product series of Red Magic, removing the iconic fan, aiming to ensure the necessary performance with a thinner and lighter body, achieving a usage experience more suitable for daily life.

Although hand feel is a very subjective concept, Red Magic still improves the hand feel in various rational ways, thereby promoting the enhancement of daily use experience. Red Magic 10 Air has a thickness of 7.85mm. For comparison, the thickness of the Red Magic 10 Pro series is 8.9mm, iPhone 16 Pro is 8.25mm. Red Magic 10 Air weighs 205g, compared with 229g of the Red Magic 10 Pro series, directly lighter by 24g, close to the 199g of iPhone 16 Pro. The overall weight distribution of the whole device is very balanced, plus without a huge lens module, it avoids the common top-heavy problem, not heavy in the hand.

Red Magic 10 Air is a flat screen + right-angle metal frame, but the frame part is processed relatively round, so that when holding it can fit the palm better. The overall hand feel of Red Magic 10 Air is indeed good, but as the use time increases, it always feels a bit strange, like the palm is suspended. Later I found the reason—the back cover lacks transition. The back cover lacks the corresponding design to continue the fit brought by the round frame, like a pleasant melody suddenly stopping. If in the future a little transition can be made on the back cover to connect to the frame, I believe the hand feel can be even better than now. I would be more willing to pick it up. If you don’t care about this point, then its hand feel is already very good among phones of this size.

The front of the phone is still the iconic under-display full screen, 6.8-inch flat screen, 2480 x 1116 resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, 2160Hz high-frequency PWM dimming at low brightness, switching to DC dimming at medium and high brightness. On the back, the Red Magic logo is arranged vertically along the camera, the flash also takes on the function of the former breathing light. On the frame, only the shoulder key and the competitive key for quick entry into game space are retained. The competitive key is changed to a red round button, with the operation method changed to long press. In color choices, I recommend white. The Red Magic 10 Air frame is only 1.48mm, but because the black body is close to the color of the frame, it easily gives a visual illusion of a wide frame. In this regard, the white one is much better.

Overall, Red Magic simplified the appearance design as much as possible on the original basis. Just looking at the appearance, it is hard to see that this is a flagship phone focusing on performance and gaming. Together with a better hand feel and simple appearance, it makes it more suitable to appear as the main device in multiple occasions.

In core configuration, Red Magic 10 Air is equipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. In addition, possibly due to the need to reduce weight and thickness, the fan was removed and replaced with passive cooling. To be honest, this cut is a bit harsh, equivalent to directly removing one major feature of Red Magic. But if you think that the Red Magic 10 Air without a fan is no different from an ordinary Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phone, then you are totally wrong. Tested four games with Red Magic 10 Air: “Genshin Impact,” “Zenless Zone Zero,” “Where Winds Meet,” “Honor of Kings.”

If we expand and look at its performance strategy in “Genshin Impact,” we will find its strategy is similar to the Red Magic mainline flagship. In default balanced mode, the super core is controlled at 1.6GHz, all big cores run around 2GHz, balancing frame rate and power consumption. In the higher performance-demanding “Where Winds Meet,” Red Magic 10 Air still follows the performance strategy mentioned above, but at higher frequencies, with the super core maintained at 2GHz, all big cores raised to around 2.5GHz, achieving 49.7 frames in the highest graphics of the Kaifeng map.

This data does not look very high, but most Snapdragon 8 Elite Edition and Dimensity 9400 phones, under this test environment, have an average frame rate at the same level. So for Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phones, this result belongs to extraordinary performance. The price is higher body temperature. At this time the maximum body temperature reached 58.9℃, middle frame temperature 51.3℃, already a bit hard to hold. Plus, without active cooling, the body heats up faster. It is still recommended to use with Red Magic Cooler 6 Pro or similar cooling back clip when running heavy load games. But correspondingly, Red Magic 10 Air does not reduce brightness, does not reduce frequency, basically running the whole process with this very aggressive strategy, which is indeed ruthless. Red Magic 10 Air also made adaptations for some games, such as supporting mobile ray tracing in “Arena Breakout,” and 120fps + Supreme graphics mode in “Teamfight Tactics.”

In other configurations, Red Magic 10 Air has a built-in 6000mAh battery, 80W wired charging, stereo dual speakers, and uses the same 5G dual-band WiFi and surround antenna as the Red Magic 10 Pro series, ensuring stable network performance in different environments. Overall, although Red Magic 10 Air does not carry Snapdragon 8 Elite Edition and does not have the iconic fan, its performance performance is still Red Magic, even showing a very tough performance strategy in heavy load games. For an ordinary Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phone, this strategy may sometimes feel too much, but for users who like Red Magic and like to push performance to the extreme, this will instead be the advantage of Red Magic 10 Air compared with competitors.

In addition to the phone’s own performance, Red Magic 10 Air also made special adjustments for gaming in other dimensions, such as side shoulder keys. Red Magic 10 Air uses 520Hz dual-IC touch gaming shoulder keys, summarizing several shoulder key setup schemes. In “Genshin Impact,” you can put R key on dodge, L key set to attack key or skill key; or in “Honor of Kings,” put L key and R key respectively on the dragon pits to always check map status; or in FPS games, put L key and R key on shooting and aiming.

It is worth noting that the shoulder key touch response of Red Magic 10 Air is very fast. Even if your hands are sweaty, it will not affect the normal use of shoulder keys. Not only the shoulder keys, but the screen is also optimized for touch, with 960Hz touch sampling rate, 2000Hz instantaneous touch sampling rate, which is a dimensionality reduction attack for general performance-oriented phones. In addition, Red Magic 10 Air is the first to be equipped with Magic Touch technology, aiming to further reduce touch delay, avoid touch loss and false touches, so its game touch experience is very excellent, completely point and shoot.

Overall, Red Magic 10 Air is essentially still a gaming phone. Even without active cooling, it still retains aggressive performance release to meet players’ needs. At the same time, it has a simpler appearance, lighter and thinner hand feel, therefore more suitable for daily use. If you like flat screens, light and thin, and also have certain performance requirements, then Red Magic 10 Air is worth considering.