RedMagic 11 Air review

144Hz full-screen OLED panel

The RedMagic 11 Air's display has grown a bit and is now 6.85". It's actually the same exact panel used in the RedMagic 11 Pro. It has a 1,216 x 2,688px resolution and 144Hz refresh rate, up from 120Hz in the previous Air generation. There's no word on HDR support. Still, the phone will play HDR content on YouTube.

The bezels around the phone are really thin and symmetrical, measuring 1.25mm in thickness. And along with the non-existent cutout for the front-facing camera, the frontal design looks great. It's almost futuristic in a way. The under-display camera is nearly impossible to spot, too.

Expectedly, the 11 Air's screen performs similarly to the 11 Pro's. We recorded 677 nits in manual mode on a 75% white fill, while in auto mode, the display boosted up to 1,515 nits. That number rose to 1,937 nits on a 10% white patch.

This means the display provides good legibility even on a bright sunny day, and HDR content will look good, where applicable, of course. After all, the phone supports HDR content only in the YouTube app.

Refresh rate

The refresh rate options are as follows - 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz and Intelligent adjustment (Auto). The latter is the default option, switching between 60Hz and 120Hz, depending on the scenario. For instance, on YouTube and Netflix, it will dial down to 60Hz or when the screen is not in use.

The 144Hz option acts as the auto mode but boosts the refresh rate up to 144Hz instead of 120Hz. So, if you are looking for the smoothest possible experience, you should use the 144Hz mode, as it seems efficient enough.

Battery life

The RedMagic 11 Air relies on a 7,000 mAh battery and a power-hungry Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. The setup is very similar to the RedMagic 10 Pro, so it's no wonder battery life is comparable.

Either way, the RedMagic 11 Air earned a solid 17:20h Active Use Score with particularly strong showing in the web browsing and video playback test scenarios.

Charging speed

Even though the RedMagic 11 Air supports the same 80W charging over Power Delivery as the RedMagic 10 Pro and also shares roughly the same battery capacity, one would expect similar charging times as well. However, no matter how many times we ran our charging test, the phone was significantly slower than the 10 Pro.

Still, the handset is no slouch by any means. It can fully charge in about an hour, while the first 30 minutes give you more than 60% of the charge back. Objectively, that's decently fast, given the battery capacity.

The software also gives you fine control over charging. To preserve battery health over time, you can limit the charging to 80% or disable the fast charging altogether. Additionally, the RedMagic supports bypass charging when gaming while plugged in.

Speakers

The RedMagic 11 Air has a pair of hybrid stereo speakers. The one on the bottom is a full-fledged speaker, while the top one is also an earpiece. Naturally, the bottom-firing speaker is louder.

When it comes to loudness, the 11 Air scored an Excellent -21.6 LUFS, making it one of the loudest devices around. A lot louder than the RedMagic 11 Pro. Unfortunately, that comes at a cost - sound quality. We found it very flat, while the highs and even the vocals sound a bit screechy. Lowering the volume helps, but tuning is still somewhat suboptimal.