The world of handheld gaming continues to grow, and apparently, our phones are no longer large enough for us to game on. For the past few years, if you wanted a larger screen for gaming but didn’t feel like strapping a Razer Kishi V3 Pro XL to a giant 13-inch tablet just to play Call of Duty: Mobile (or dropping $1,500 bucks for the privilege), you would grab the iPad Mini for a solid, slightly larger gaming experience.

Fortunately, two companies known for producing high-quality gaming hardware have entered the market, aiming to capture some of Apple’s market share and cater to the substantial Android gaming market.

The Legion Tab Gen 3 from Lenovo and the RedMagic Astra Tablet both offer compelling gaming experiences for similar prices. But which one is truly the champion of tiny tablets? I put them head-to-head for a few weeks to help figure that out.

Design

Aside from being generic black slabs of metal and glass, the most noticeable design difference between them is the semi-transparent strip on the back of the Astra Tablet, which shows off some cool design elements. The only downside is that my fingers stick to it whenever I’m using the tablet, but that’s a small price to pay for something that looks so much better than just a black piece of metal.

This glass strip also houses the physical cooling fan surrounded by a small RGB ring. The Legion Tab has no RGB or really any standout design characteristics; it doesn’t even come in a different color, unlike the Astra which you can get in white.

The Astra also has more rounded, iPhone-esque corners, while the Legion Tab retains the squared-off, rectangular, asymmetrical edges that were popular a few years ago, and it appears somewhat outdated.

The Astra tablet has some extra features over the Legion Tab like a fingerprint sensor in the power button, which I would argue is table-stakes for any nonbudget device in 2025. It has a Magic Key which, thankfully, does not activate AI, but lets you choose from a few different actions. By default, it launches the company’s gaming software (more on that later), but you can also set it to things like Do Not Disturb, and a few others.

However, the Legion Tab does have one thing that might be a game-changer for some: two USB-C ports. The one on the right side of the front camera is a USB 2.0 port, used for charging, OTG and audio. The second USB-C port, located at the bottom, is positioned opposite the front camera and supports USB 3.2 Gen 2, offering data transfers of up to 10Gbps and display output as well.

I know most people don’t want to hook up their tablets to an external monitor, but I did, and the Legion Tab is absolutely the better device for it. I could never get audio to work properly on the Astra tablet while using a second display, but it worked fine on the Legion Tab. If you do plan to use a monitor, the Legion Tab is the way to go, especially since it has a much better desktop mode.

Display & Specs

Again, the displays on both tablets are fairly similar, with a few key differences. The Legion Tab has an 8.8-inch screen while the Astra is slightly larger at 9.06 inches. Both have high-resolution 2K-plus displays (2,560×1,600 and 2,400×1,504, respectively) with 165Hz refresh rates. The Astra’s display is an OLED panel, which does look a bit better and is technically better, but the LCD screen on the Legion Tab still looks fantastic. I have no issues with either one.

On the spec front, these tablets start to get a bit farther apart. For starters, the Legion Tab launched in early 2025 at CES with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. It’s a solid processor, but the much more powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite was announced more than two months before the Legion Tab launched. Whether the Legion Tab is a victim of bad timing or Lenovo made a cost-cutting decision, it doesn’t have the newer, better processor that powers the Astra.

There’s also only one configuration of the Legion Tab with 12GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 256GB of UFS 4.0 storage. 256GB is pretty small for a gaming device, and the top-end Astra has 24GB of RAM with 1TB of storage. Granted, you’ll have to pay a lot more to get those things, but it’s a huge difference and certainly something to consider if you’re a hardcore gamer.

Another big difference is battery life. The Legion Tab sports a 6,550 mAh battery with 65-watt charging, while the Astra’s battery is 8,200 mAh and supports up to 80-watt fast charging. To be fair, the battery life on the Legion Tab is still quite good — mileage will certainly vary depending on usage — and I never felt like I had to constantly charge it. Lenovo also includes a fast charger in the box, which is a nice addition. On the other hand, a bigger battery with faster charging always wins.

Audio is very similar on both tablets, with each housing stereo speakers. The Legion Tab supports Dolby Atmos, and the Astra uses DTX tuning. Both sound great, with loud, full sound that’s fine for gaming or streaming.

Performance

As you might expect from the specifications, both devices performed exceptionally well in my testing. I never experienced any slowdowns or stutters while playing anything. From Genshin Impact to CoD Mobile, everything ran wonderfully.

I did notice a slightly faster response time from the Astra, which I also expected due to the better specs. For shorter, more typical gaming sessions though, you won’t be able to tell a difference between the two. Longer gaming sessions, however, might be a bit different.

One of RedMagic’s biggest differentiators is its proprietary cooling system, which it designed a few years ago and has been continually improving. It’s pretty impressive what it’s been able to cram into a device so small. The main component is a dual-layer vapor chamber that sits above and below the CPU, ensuring the chip stays running at peak speeds for longer.

Essentially, this means the Astra should be able to maintain peak performance for longer, without heating up very much. In my testing, I never managed more than about an hour at a time, but it never slowed down or got hot.

Software

Both software experiences are good overall; however, they both come preloaded with a fair amount of ads, thinly designed as games. Aside from that, the software is fast and clean with no major issues. There are a few quirks here and there, like the auto brightness not really working on the Legion Tab and some translation issues on the RedMagic, but I was perfectly fine using both.

Lenovo and RedMagic offer different versions of a dedicated gaming overlay (Legion Space and Game Space, respectively) that function much like the multiplexer software on gaming PCs — the bundled software that lets you tweak the GPU and other settings to maximize performance.

When you’re playing a game, you can open a slide-out menu that gives you a bunch of options for tweaking the CPU, GPU and a few other things. Aside from turning off notifications while in game, most people won’t ever need to mess with it, but it’s there if you want to try it out.  

Neither company is great about software updates, however. The Legion Tab launched with Android 14 and is currently running Android 15. But Lenovo only committed to three Android version updates, and Android 16 is already rolling out. So that means you’re basically only getting one year of support.

The Astra is even worse off I’m afraid because while it launched with Android 15, RedMagic makes no commitments to software updates, and from past experience, you’ll be lucky to get one or two, eventually.

However, as these devices are meant to be primarily gaming devices anyway, not having the most up-to-date software isn’t too big a deal. Not to mention, these are really your only options in the Android world anyway.

If I had to pick one, I’d probably go with Lenovo since they are a much bigger company, and I have a bit more faith in them than I do in RedMagic. But they both need to do better on updates.

Final Thoughts

As cliché as it sounds, the ultimate winner here is us. We finally have really solid small gaming tablets that aren’t the iPad Mini. Apart from the fantastic Nexus 7 tablet, which seems like a distant memory (if you don’t know, ask your parents), the small Android tablet market has been dominated by either cheap, borderline unusable tablets or devices designed specifically as digital babysitters.

Both the Legion Tab Gen 3 and the RedMagic Astra tablet are fantastic devices for either gaming or streaming. And they’re powerful enough that you could get some work done in a pinch if you really needed to, particularly with a portable monitor and keyboard.

And the prices aren’t terrible either. Both start at $549 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, although I’ve seen the Legion Tab drop as low as $380 on Lenovo’s website. The 16/512GB Astra is $699, and the top-end 24GB/1TB model is $899.

At $380, the Legion Tab is absolutely the better deal, especially since you get a charger, case, folio cover and a tempered glass screen protector with an easy-install kit all included in the box. The Astra might not be worth the extra money, unless you really want the higher performance. And all you get in the box is a cable.

But if the Lenovo isn’t discounted and they’re both priced at $549, I have to go with the Astra tablet. It’s just better at almost everything. And it’s a bit more future-proof.