You don’t earn a place among the best smartphones these days without a cracking set of cameras. Honor has taken that to heart for its latest flagship effort, adding one of the highest pixel count telephoto sensors I’ve ever seen on a phone. The Honor Magic 7 Pro also doubles down on AI smarts, and promises oodles of power courtesy of a Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU.
The replacement for the rather brilliant Honor Magic 6 Pro was announced for China, ahead of an expected rollout in early 2025. It looks every bit the worthy successor at first glance. There’s a 6.8in quad-curved screen up front, an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor underneath, and Honor’s familiar 3D depth-sensing selfie camera cutout up top for facial recognition. With a peak 5000 nits, the OLED panel is one of the brightest of any smartphone, while LTPO tech brings an adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate.
IP68 and IP69 elemental protection makes this one seriously durable phone, and satellite communication (for the Chinese variant, at least) should mean you’re never stranded without a way to message home. The 5850mAh capacity battery should last upwards of two days between top-ups, and it can handle either 100W wired or 80W wireless refuelling.
It’s photography that should see the biggest gains. The lead 50MP snapper has a variable f/1.4-f/2.0 aperture, while the telephoto increases its pixel count to a massive 200MP. Both get optical image stabilisation, while the 50MP ultrawide can double as a macro lens. Honor’s Eagle Eye tech should mean it can take crisp shots of fast-moving subjects, and there are a bunch of AI-assisted shooting modes on board.
AI is also the star of Magic UI 9.0. The firm’s Android interface has a YOYO smart assistant that can control apps with your voice, like ordering a takeway from your favourite fast food app, and can recognise onscreen text. At least, it can in China – there’s no word on how much functionality will stick around for the global launch, and how much will be handed over to Google Gemini.
Expect the Honor Magic 7 Pro to arrive with a choice of 12GB or 16GB of RAM, and 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of on-board storage. It’ll be available in Moon Shadow Grey, Snowy White, Sky Blue, and Velvet Black colours. Prices are set to start from 5699 RMB (bout £620/$800), though expect them to almost double by the time the phone gets a global launch.
Honor also pulled back the curtain on the regular Magic 7, which steps down on screen size (6.78in) and uses a flat OLED panel. It uses 50MP sensors for all three of its rear cameras. Battery capacity also dips to 5650mAh, and it does without the 3D depth sensor for facial recognition.
It’s arriving in the same three colours as the Magic 7 Pro, along with a bespoke Morning Glow Gold option. The Magic 7 goes on sale in China on November 8, at 4499 RMB (roughly £480/$630) for the 12GB/256GB variant, rising to 5499 (about £600/$770) for the 16GB/1TB model. The outgoing Magic 6 never made it outside of China, so I’m not expecting this new model to travel very far either.