The RedMagic 11 Air works your cash harder than anyone else right now | Review

The RedMagic 11 Air is now out in the wild, and with it comes a cheaper, slimmer handset looking to take the grunt work of the Pro and scale it to more players. This is still a Snapdragon 8 Elite device from the makers behind some of the best gaming phones on the market, though - not too shabby for $529. That's just a little less than the RedMagic 10 Air's MSRP.

Launching in the same week as $3,000 options from Samsung, the RedMagic 11 Air is pretty refreshing. It offers everything I've come to expect from these dedicated gaming phones, with smart sacrifices away from the fancier features of its flagship sibling. You won't find any visible liquid cooling windows here, but a 7,000mAh battery and performance that beats Asus's last release can still turn just as many heads.

RedMagic 11 Air Early Bird perks available January 5 at RedMagic
The RedMagic 11 Air launches its Early Access availability on February 10, but you'll need to grab your Early Bird vouchers from January 5 to make the most of the $30 discount on release.

View Deal

Design

While the RedMagic 11 Pro used its liquid cooling window as its main design centerpiece, the RedMagic 11 Air has more of a 10 Pro look about it. I've had the 'Transparent Black' model in hand for the last few weeks, a dark gray chassis with gold accents running across the rear logos. Thin lines, sotly curving their way down the back of the phone, have a PCB-like feel, while that RGB fan - a hallmark of this brand - whirrs away underneath the cameras.

Branding isn't particularly garish, and the gold sits well against the darker hue, with both 'RedMagic' lettering and the company's main logo pushed to the corners of the main design.

There's a transparent cover over the top of all that, though, which picks up and clings onto fingerprints like its life depends on it. The shiny surface does well to hide these marks in everyday life, but they're always there until a case comes along and hides them.

Aside from that aesthetic change, the next big difference between the Pro and Air is the thickness. Measuring in at 8mm, the RedMagic Air is 0.9mm thinner than the main flagship, a difference that's easily noticeable from the first time I picked it up. There's still plenty to hold onto here, and the handset sits particularly nicely in the hands across both portrait and landscape positions.

Thankfully, the Air also keeps its speakers away from your fingers when held sideways, a bugbear that meant previous iterations suffered from muffled audio in-game when using the touchpads on the top. Here, that sound streams out from each side, just underneath the bend of my finger when reaching up to the pads along the edge.

Button and port placement is largely the same as recent RedMagic phones, with the left flank holding the dedicated Game Space button (no longer a toggle), the underside offering a centered USB-C port (good news for those after the best mobile controllers) and the SIM eject slot, while the right side offers up those touchpads, a volume rocker, and lock button.

Display

The RedMagic 11 Air uses the same 2688 x 1216 AMOLED panel as its sibling, a display that hasn't changed much since the days of the RedMagic 10S Pro. It's still blindingly bright at full whack, with excellent colors and nicely saturated balances. We're still a little slower than the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro with its 165Hz refresh rate, but very few games will actually reach that ceiling. 144Hz keeps ahead of the current Google Play Store library nicely and keeps faster titles like Call of Duty Mobile running smooth.

Again, it runs a little cooler in its natural tones but blues, greens, and silvers shine particularly well - even if oranges and yellows drop a little warmth as a result.

Like the Pro model, this screen is also pretty much edge to edge, with only a tiny sliver of bezel lining it. The under-display selfie camera was also imperceptible throughout my testing.

Cameras

The RedMagic 11 Air makes its first big sacrifice in the camera department. While the Pro dual-wields 50MP lenses in both its wide and ultrawide systems, the Air makes do with an 8MP option for the latter. It means a significant amount of noise is introduced into an otherwise nicely clear image when zoomed out.

Gaming phones always take their cameras down a few pegs to make way for better internals, but if you still want to take decent wider shots in between thumb-tappers the Air isn't going to be your best pick.

Colors are vibrant and uniform when shot through the main lens, still suffering a little from the overblown post-production of most RedMagic phones, but offering a clear, sharp, and impactful image in high lighting. I was surprised, however, to find that the selfie camera struggles with this color consistency.

My blue walls show up as a strange green when shot through the selfie camera, keeping their original hues through the wide lens.

At the end of the day, gaming phones are never going to bother mainstream flagships with their photography. However, there are drawbacks to this cheaper model in particular.

Software

The Air version runs on the same RedMagic OS 11 (on top of Android 16) as the Pro model, so the experience is pretty similar. They're part of the same family after all, so nobody's expecting a refresh here.

As it stands, everything runs smoothly with snappy everyday navigation and quick app loads (and reloads). You've got your usual bloatwre pre-installed, ranging from annoying fake-folders to the obligatory Booking.com. They're all pretty easy to delete, though, and customizing the homepage is just as easy as it is on other Android 16 devices. Getting everything set up the way you want it takes very little time.

The handset also ships with RedMagic AI+ for various trend-chasing but ultimately fairly useless extra features. Google Gemini is also along for the road, which provides a more useful chat assistant in everyday use.

Of course, Game Space is still rolling strong. If you're new to RedMagic devices, know that this is a dedicated space for all your games, stats, GPU settings, and internet tools. It's a more console-like experience that completely takes over the phone when toggled via the red side button.

Gaming

Put to work in 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay, the RedMagic 11 Air shows its cheaper price position compared to the 11 Pro and 10S Pro, but does topple the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro in the process. It's not got the cooling grunt of the 11 Pro, and doesn't ship with a 24GB RAM variant at launch, so it's never going to keep up with the flagship but it's certainly playing harder with that Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.

We're at around a 14% decrease in performance compared to the flagship Pro model. It's understandable, this is a thinner, lighter model with fewer cooling features and a fall back to LPDDR5X RAM. It's also coming slightly behind the previous generation 10 Pro, though that handset does still sit higher up the price spectrum even when on sale.

The important thing to remember is that in-game this thing runs just as fast as you'll need it to. Larger games like Genshin Impact might see a few more frames dropped compared to the 11 Pro in a few years' time, but for now that Snapdragon 8 Elite can handle anything thrown at it, and the RedMagic 11 Air is supporting it with more gaming tech than most mainstream handsets.

Battery

The 7,000mAh battery drops a little weight compared to the 7,500mAh version in the Pro model but it's doing less with it. That means it matched, and sometimes exceeded, the average daily battery life I experienced from the flagship. After two and a half days of casual use, with a few gaming sessions thrown in for good measure, I'm at 15% battery.

It's also worth noting that the Air model doesn't offer the same wireless charging functionality as the Pro.

Should you buy the RedMagic 11 Air?

Looking for a new Android that can handle all your games and more demanding adventures? The RedMagic 11 Air absolutely fits the bill. If you're a serious mobile gamer pushing the limits of what today's titles can offer you'll be far better off with the flagship, but overall the Air handles itself particularly well.

That's because, while you're dropping 14% (on average, from my tests) of raw performance, you're spending about 30% less on the handset itself. That's the kind of value ratio I can get behind.

After all, budget options from other brands won't get you near this level of power. The OnePlus 15R still retails for $699.99 in its cheapest form and barely scrapes the performance on offer here.

How I tested the RedMagic 11 Air

I used the RedMagic 11 Air as my day-to-day device for two weeks, leaving my iPhone 13 Pro at home. Gaming benchmarks were achieved via 3D Mark software, running both Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay three times and taking an average result as the final score. For more information on how we make our recommendations, check out the full GamesRadar+ Hardware Policy.

I'm also hunting down all the best gaming tablets, or take a look at the best gaming handhelds and best gaming laptops for something more Windows-flavored.