Table of Contents
Introduction
The Snapdragon 8 Elite is keep rolling out. We’ve seen the OnePlus 13; we’ve seen the Xiaomi 15 Pro and today it’s time to take a look at Honor’s 8 Elite flagship the Honor Magic 7 Pro.
It’s got that Snapdragon 8 Elite of course, A Unique Look for the camera array, a very large and high resolution telephoto camera, one of the fastest fingerprint scanners around.
In today’s review let’s first get the Magic 7 Pro unboxed and then take a look at everything Honor done with a latest Flagship.
Unboxing
This Honor Magic 7 Pro comes in two variants, I’ve picked up the 16GB/512GB variant the base is 12GB/256GB. Once we open up the box the first thing you see is the Magic 7 Pro itself, so this time I picked up the white variant. Honor also offers this phone in black, blue and grey.
If you ask me the grey with the Shady patterns underneath, I’d say that’s the best looking phone here though this phone doesn’t look all that bad.
Next up is this black insert which has a SIM tool, a quick start guide and a frosted TPU case. This is a soft case, it looks and feels nice. We then have a USB Type A to Type C cable with white colour and finally there’s this 100W on a supercharger.
Build and Battery
Now the Magic 7 Pro also supports wireless charging at up to 80W which is faster than the 50W that we typically see on Chinese flagships these days now. Honor also packed in a 5850 mAh battery here and the Magic 7 Pro it’s 8.8 mm thick and weighs in at about 225 grams.
Now the display here, it’s got almost symmetric bezels and there’s curves on all four sides. Now if you look closely, you can see that the back does the same too and the sides, they are chamfered at edges just meaning the Magic 7 Pro it sits quite well in the palm of your hand, it’s comfortable to hold and use.
The back Honor has used frosted matte glass here, so it’s very resistant to fingerprints and smudges. That said the metal sides, they have a polished glossy finish, so they pick up smudges and fingerprints very easily.
Now this white skew, it’s milky white when you look at it, but when it catches the light, when it reflects it, it’s got an almost pearlish look which I kind of liked. This camera array here, I’m not sure how I feel about it. It definitely is unique I’ll give it that, but it’s a circular array that’s fit into a rounded rectangle that kind of smoothly melts into the glass pack. Now I do like it more than the camera array design on the Magic 6 Pro.
Now this phone has an IP68 or IP69 rating for dust and water resistance and both the fingerprint scanner and the display they can be used with wet hands. That’s possible because there is an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner here and I love the placement. It needs just three presses to register a fingerprint. Right after that the lightest of touches seem to be enough to get accurate scans. This definitely is among the fastest scanners have come across in a while.
Selfie
The ugly pill-shaped cutout here, it’s here because Honor has added a Time of light sensor with the regular 50-megapixel selfie camera, so you get more secure 3D Face Unlock that can also be used in a dark room at night.
Now regular selfies, they turned out fine too, they were detailed with accurate skin tones and pretty good Edge detection. For video you can shoot 4K 60FPS at the selfie camera.
There’s some AI integration here like some fun styles to generate images based on what you’ve already shot, also if your eyes were closed in a selfie, Honor will help you get them open as long as you have other pictures taken off the face. it’s a little unrealistic, I mean it’s not quite perfect yet.
Display
Now the display is 6.8 in OLED with a 1.5K resolution, meaning a pixel density of 453 pixels per inch. So, it’s quite a sharp panel and it’s covered by Rhino glass for protection.
It also has a refresh rate of 120Hz with 8T LTPO Tech that lets you very refresh between 1Hz and 120Hz as needed on a boast of a brightness peak of 5,000 nits, but that’s for HDR. In my testing this display maxed out at 800 nits under manual mode and 1,600 nits under Auto. So, it’s a bright panel very easy to use Outdoors.
Honor also has provided a lot of options for eye protection and under low light this panel uses 4320Hz PWM Demming for those who are sensitive to OLED flicker. Additionally, under developer options you can also find a toggle to enable 8T LTPO or single stripe mode if you want to.
Now to complement this awesome display Honor has included a pair of stereo speakers that sound really good. Now the S24 Ultra has good stereo speakers. If you listen closely to this side by side, you’ll notice that the Magic 7 Pro actually just ahead. If you listen closely, you can notice it. It’s very good Even for dialogues. I also love how these speakers are asymmetric meaning no matter how you hold the phone when you say gaming, you’re still going to have at least one uncovered.
Performance
Now talking about gaming this phone like I’ve mentioned already is powered by Qualcomm’s Flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite. This chip uses Qualcomm’s new custom Orion core and brings with it a huge boost in performance over the 8 Gen 3.
But like the other implementations we’ve seen so far, Honor has struggled to cool it. On a 3D Mark stress test, the Magic 7 Pro lost over half its performance. But here’s the thing, a couple of nights back I let this test run and went to bed later on when I got up for a drink of water, I saw this on screen and ended up taking a picture with my tablet. So, I didn’t really get to check out the temperatures then but the next day I got an update and after that the Magic 7 Pro has been able to finish the test and it didn’t get too hot either. The screen was only about 42° which is good compared to say the Xiaomi 15 Pro is 47° and the back was relatively cool at 36°.
Now I did notice something weird here when I was running the test, there was just one Loop where the Magic 7 Pro dipped a lot more. It went as low as 3,000 and the next lowest score was about 4,000 meaning a stability of 61% baring that 1 minute.
So, I reran the test a few more times and I kept noticing the same results temperatures of about 42° on screen 36° to the back and about 47% final stability. Every time when it’s around the 8 or 9 minute mark, the Magic 7 Pro had one big dip which it then recovered from and stayed at about 60% performance for the rest of the test. Maybe this means with another update, stability will improve. Either way despite the throttling the 8 Elite does seem to have enough horsepower to run most games smoothly and there is no overheating to worry about.
Now this chip here it’s paired with 12GB or 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB, 512GB or up to 1TB of fast UFS 4.0 storage. Now for all variants Honor is offering satellite connectivity at least in China. Then there is an IR blaster up top and the USB Type-C port here, it’s USB 3.2 Gen 2 with display port 1.2 which means you can output to a monitor and here you don’t just get to mirror the display which you can if you want to, but Honor actually provides a full-fledged Dex like desktop experience with a phone acting as a trackpad.
Software
Talking about the software, the Honor Magic 7 Pro is running on Magic OS 9 built it up Android 15 and given these specs it’s no surprise the interface is fast, it’s responsive, it’s Snappy while Honor hasn’t confirmed their update policy for this phone. Given they committed to four years of Android version updates and 5 years of security patches for its predecessor of the Magic 6 Pro, I’d say it’s a safe bet that the Magic 7 Pro gets at least that.
Now Magic OS 9 has some AI functionality built in, we already saw a face tune and eye open then there’s some AI Beauty options, the AI eraser that lets you remove objects from images after they’ve been shot, there’s AI out painting that lets you generate an extended image and there’s AI style which again we saw already.
Now most of these don’t seem to happen on device and they need a network connection which I found weird, but hey Honor is the only brand that I’ve used so far that’s not asked me to sign into their account to access AI services, so that’s a pro right.
Cameras
Anyways let’s now talk about the actual optics. Now this camera array is got three sensors, the primary is a 50-megapixel H9000 which is basically a 1/1.3 inch Omni vision 50H, that’s been customized for Honor. It’s paired with a f/1.4 to f/2 variable aperture lens. This I feel is a gimmick because there’s really not much of a difference between f1.4 and f/2 on a sensor this small.
Now guys when you shoot on a full frame camera and you go from f/2 to f/2.2 and to f2.5 you can’t notice a major difference in blur and this is on a full frame camera, so on a 1/1.3 in sensor it’s not a big deal.
Anyways during the day the Magic 7 Pro tends to stick to f/2 almost always. You got to use the pro mode if you want to force it to shoot f/1.4. That said images were fine there, good amounts of detail, excellent dynamic range, slightly boosted saturation with respect to colours.
Though to be fair Honor does offer a natural option. I shot all this on vibrant, they also offer an authentic if you like contrasty shots, so there are options. There now under low light here’s where at times the Magic 7 Pro shoots f/1.4 if there’s extra light needed. The images in low light conditions were again very good, the highlights were controlled, there was ample detail, the noise levels have been kept very minimal.
The secondary camera is a 50 megapixel Ultra-wide. This one has autofocus and can focus as close as 2.5 cm to get macro shots. Now the absolute highlight when it comes to optics here, it’s got to be the periscope telephoto. This is a 200-megapixel 1/1.4 inch sensor which is pretty large for a secondary camera. It’s paired with a 3X telephoto lens with optical image stabilization. The sheer resolution of the sensor coupled with Honor processing gets really good results.
The studio Harcourt portrait options that we saw on the Honor 200 Pro, they are present here too and they seem nice. I particularly like those black and white portraits. For video this phone can shoot 4K 60FPS with all three of its sensors and the studio mode that we’ve seen before with Honor the one that gives you usable footage even when zooming in 10x, that’s also available here and works fine.
Final Thoughts
With that let’s now talk pricing. In China the Magic 7 Pro starts from $5,699 RMB which converts to about $800 us or 68,000 Indian rupees and that’s pretty much everything I have on Honor’s Magic 7 Pro.
What do you guys think about this phone let me know in the comments below.
