nubia RedMagic 10 Air review
Display
The RedMagic 10 Air has a large 6.8-inch AMOLED display with an above-average resolution of 2480 x 1116 pixels. The display is pretty much flat except for the very corners that are slightly curved down.
RedMagic claims that the display has a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. We did our standardized measurements and got 579 nits of brightness by maxing out the slider and 1,023 nits in max auto mode. That's not industry-leading by any means, but in practice, it is bright enough to be usable outdoors. Plus, the anti-glare coating on the display does help. Still, RedMagic has seemingly downgraded the display somewhat compared to the Pro and Pro+ models.
Max display brightness test
White test pattern, 75% fill (nits)
- Manual mode
- Auto mode
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The RedMagic 10 Air lacks any official HDR video support. On the plus side is support for the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM.
Refresh rate
The refresh rate options are 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz and Intelligent adjustment (Auto). The latter is the default option, switching between 60Hz and 120Hz, depending on the scenario. It will dial down to 60Hz when showing a static image, for instance, or when you have a video player open such as YouTube and Netflix.
The phone supports a 2,000 Hz instant touch sampling rate and a 960Hz average touch sampling.
Battery life
Since it is both slimmer and lighter than its Pro and Pro+ siblings, the Air also has a smaller battery. While being smaller in absolute terms, it is still quite sizable, at 6,000 mAh in capacity. We did our standardized testing and got pretty solid results. Nothing spectacular, but still solid. The web browsing endurance is a bit on the lower end of things, but other than that, we have few complaints.
Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.
Charging speed
Battery capacity is not the only thing that got slashed. The same has happened to the charging speed. Again, it's not like 80W is slow in any sense of the word. It's just not as fast as the 100W on the Pro and Pro+ models. On the plus side, you do get an appropriate PD charger bundled with your RedMagic 10 Air.
The RedMagic 10 Air is a very fast-charging device. In our testing, it managed to charge 42% of the battery after 15 minutes on the charger and then 74% in 30 minutes. A full charge took just 45 minutes.
Charging speed
- in 15 min
- in 30 min
- Time to full charge (from 0%)
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Speakers - loudness and quality
The Redmagic 10 Air has a stereo speaker system of the hybrid variety. That means you get one main bottom-firing speaker and an amplified front-facing earpiece as the second channel. This innately brings about some imbalance, but even so, the phone sounds pretty nice. The speaker setup supports Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound and has a DTS-X Ultra certification.
Seeing how it is slimmer than its Pro sibling, it only makes sense that the RedMagic 10 Air would be a bit quieter. Thankfully, as per our testing, not by much. It still managed a "Very Good" score.
Quality-wise, there's not much change. The bass is quite prominent, and the tracks sound full, but there's a noticeable distortion of the highs and vocals at high volume levels, so we suggest you turn it down a notch for the best possible audio experience.
Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.
Connectivity
The RedMagic 10 Air is a dual SIM phone with simultaneous SA/NSA Sub-6 5G support. Unfortunately, there is no eSIM support.
For positioning there is dual-band (L1+L5) GPS support with AGPS. 2xMIMO Wi-Fi 7/be covers local connectivity. It also has tri-band support, which means it can access the 6GHz frequency range.
Bluetooth 5.4 and NFC are also on board, plus an IR blaster.
The Type-C port is backed up by a simple USB 2.0 connection. That means a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 480 Mbps. It has OTG/Host support but nothing else fancy, like video output.
The RedMagic 10 Air has a pretty full set of sensors on board. There is a BOSCH bmi26x accelerometer and gyroscope sensor, an AKM AK0991X magnetometer and compass and an STK STK3A7X light and hardware proximity sensor. There is no barometer on board.
Reader comments
- Lister
- 4 hours ago
- n1s
I like how they pushed this out before Samsung and Apple. Who started this trend?
- xPandamon
- 7 hours ago
- JHj
If the camera wasn't an oversaturated mess, it could have been a decent buy. But those photos just look completely off.