Honor Magic7 Pro review: On the edge of excellence

Arriving a little ahead of expected schedule, the Honor Magic7 Pro drops at a busy time in smartphone world. But as with any good magic trick, it arrives with some flair.

When it comes to specs, the Magic7 Pro more than delivers the goods, especially with its cameras and display. Honor has also managed to squeeze a lot of potential out of the phonoe's chipset, while delivering a lower price for the Magic7 Pro than you might think.

But there are some weak spots — a short upgrade schedule and disappointing battery life compared to the previous model, chief among them. Add in the fact that Honor phones are harder to buy in places like the U.S., and it's hard for the Magic7 Pro to stand out in a crowded field of Android phones right now. The Galaxy S24 Ultra, OnePlus 13 and Google Pixel 9 Pro XL are all excellent options for Android users, and we're also eagerly awaiting the Galaxy S25 Ultra to launch in what should be only a few days' time as of this writing.

For that reason, it's hard to recommend buying this new Honor flagship right now. But when the dust settles after this early glut of new premium Android phones, you may want to return to this Honor Magic7 Pro review and see how it compares to the best Android phones landing in early 2025. Because somewhere in its big box of features could be the one that'll make a big difference to you.

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Specs

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Price and availability

The Magic7 Pro is currently up for discounted early-bird orders, with regular sales opening on January 21. At full price, you'll pay £1,099 for the 12GB RAM/512GB version of the Magic7 Pro, the only one that's going on sale on the global market. Or more accurately, the global market other than the U.S., where you'll need to find a third-party retailer willing to ship a Magic7 Pro to you, as it won't be on sale at any U.S.-based carrier or electronics store.

That £1,099 price puts the Honor Magic7 Pro between the Galaxy S24 Plus and Galaxy S24 Ultra (and likely their Galaxy S25 counterparts), and in line with the cost of a Google Pixel 9 Pro XL. The Magic7 Pro costs quite a bit more than a OnePlus 13, which matches these phones on the specs but is available for £200 less.

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Design and display

Honor has given the Magic7 Pro an iPhone-style pill-shaped cutout for its selfie camera and auxiliary sensors. This enables additional features and also helps give the phone a more distinct front design than other Android flagships, along with the quad-curved screen.

Meanwhile on the back, the cameras sit in a metal-clad black squircle (yes that's a real word), with only the Honor logo decorating the rest of the phone for an extra-minimalist look.

Like many of its rivals, the Magic7 Pro uses a large 6.8-inch display with a 1 - 120Hz refresh rate. Honor tries to differentiate things with its eye care tech. That includes returning features like a 4320Hz PWM dimming rate to minimize eye strain by reducing screen flickering, something other brands like OnePlus are now adopting.

But Honor is also pushing ahead with new screen features like Circular Polarized Display. This addition supposedly helps the display better mimic natural light, while a AI Defocus Display feature subtly blurs and unblurs the display to keep your eyes active.

All these technologies are backed up by Honor's own research, but as someone who doesn't face eye strain problems (as long as I wear my glasses, that is) it's hard to know if these features make much of a difference.

At its maximum settings, the Magic7 Pro hits 5,000 nits of brightness according to Honor's claims. We didn't have the opportunity to send the phone to our labs to verify this, but I did compare the Magic7 Pro side by side with its main rivals. To my eye, the Honor at max brightness looks at least as bright as the OnePlus 13, even if it's not up to the eye-searingly bright maximum of the Pixel 9 Pro XL. And while the Galaxy S24 Ultra was quite a way behind all the other competitors here, Samsung's phone still has a unique advantage with its anti-glare coating.

Durability shouldn't be a problem with the Magic7 Pro, with Honor claiming its NanoCrystal Shield display makes the screen 10 times tougher than regular glass. The phone is also rated IP68 and IP69 for water and dust resistance, matching the OnePlus 13's durability ratings. So have no fear taking this phone out into stormy weather or even dropping it in a few meters of water.

Speakers aren't most people's priority on a smartphone, but Honor is catering for that niche all the same with its new Surround Subwoofer speakers. These feature a larger speaker cavity to help bring out the low notes of whatever you're playing, and boy does it even. Even at 50% of max volume, the bassline of Thundercat's "Dragonball Durag" caused the table I was testing the phone on to noticeably vibrate when I touched it.

That said, this focus on bass doesn't come at the expense of the other end of the frequency graph. Even though the iPhone 16 Pro Max captures elements like the hi-hats or Thundercat's falsetto more clearly, the Magic7 Pro still does a good job of keeping the sound balanced despite its subwoofer tech.

For the Magic7 Pro, the color selection includes either grey, blue or black (the version you see here). Sadly in the U.K., the blue edition isn't being sold, limiting your choice to the two plainer tones. Fortunately, the matte-textured black version does still look smart, and the grey version actually comes with a swirly pattern that makes it look like a billowing silk sheet.

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Cameras

Honor has stuck to the same basic camera sensor arrangement as last year: 50MP sensors for the main, ultrawide and selfie cameras, but a 200MP 3x telephoto camera instead of a 180MP one. That's a lot of megapixels to be working with.

But let's see what the samples show rather than just the specs, starting as always with the main camera, and beginning with the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL as our comparison phone.

Shooting a statue in Hyde Park's Italian Gardens, the Pixel produced a far brighter image, especially of the sculpture itself and with good color, too. The Honor's image has a good sense of drama with its exaggerated lighting, but I wish it showed more detail.

Moving to a night mode shot of Paddington Central, it's the Honor that has the richer colors this time, while the Pixel shot looks a little brighter.

In a different comparison against the iPhone 16 Pro Max looking up a path in Hyde Park, the Honor's gone to extremes to stop the sky from getting blown out. In exchange, the rest of the shot's very dark, whereas the iPhone's stuck a balance between the two ends of the scene's dynamic range for a much more pleasing image.

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One last thing to cover with the Magic7 Pro's main camera is its adjustable aperture, accessible in Pro camera mode. This lets you switch between f/2.0 and f/1.4, giving you a deeper or shallower field of view (the in-focus part of the photo) as you like.

Leaving the main camera behind, we now go to the 50MP ultrawide camera, which I compared against the Pixel 9 Pro XL with this shot of Queen Anne's Alcove. The Honor shot is warmer, and with more intense colors, while the Pixel shot looks more natural. The Google image is darker, though, which makes it harder to see the shadows of the shot.

Next, the 200MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, 6x lossless hybrid zoom and a 100x maximum zoom. For fun, let's start with the max magnification shot.

Above 10x, Honor's AI Super Zoom system kicks in to sharpen up the resulting images. This sample of a street sign (you can see how far away I actually am in the preview in the top right corner) shows how well this can work, aside from one of the letters being interpreted incorrectly.

You'd still be better off just walking closer to the sign in this case, but when you have no choice where to stand in relation to something you want to snap, AI Super Zoom does work somewhat.

But let's do a zoom range comparison now with the OnePlus 13, which uses a similar 3x optical/6x lossless telephoto camera system. At 3x, the fountain is blurrier on Honor, while sharper and brighter on the OnePlus.

At 6x, neither phone does a particularly good job of capturing the water droplets. In terms of color though, the Honor has given us a flatter-looking shot, while the OnePlus has gone in for brightness.

We will wrap this up with a selfie camera portrait mode shot. In Honor's case, the phone is using algorithms developed with French photography studio Harcourt.

This comparison, again against the Pixel 9 Pro XL, shows that Honor's gone for quite an exaggerated look, rather than the more natural, brighter approach of the Pixel. Like the rest of the shots we've tested, the Magic7 Pro's images are not bad — far from it in fact. But they're different enough from its rivals to be noticeable, and sometimes not for the best reasons.

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Performance

The Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset inside the Magic7 Pro puts it on the same level as other 2025 Android flagship phones released so far — at least on paper. But phone makers can still choose how hard to push the chip, leading to performance differences.

The Magic7 Pro isn't the outright best performing phone we've tested, but it's one of the best. It outdoes every other phone we've tested to date on 3DMark GPU benchmarks, and it's close to the top on the CPU Geekbench tests, even with the ROG Phone 9 Pro using its high-performance X mode. The only area in which the Magic7 Pro didn't score well was the Adobe Premiere Rush test, where it was pretty slow to turn a 4K video into a 1080p one.

The phone's hidden power translates into the real world too. I was able to play Ex Astris, a demanding mobile RPG, smoothly and without stuttering, even at maximum settings at 60fps. I've not managed to get that kind of performance on any other Android phone at the time of writing.

The Magic7Pro's single available memory spec of 12GB RAM and 512GB of storage means you don’t get the option of a cheaper version or one with more storage. But I’m okay with that, since that's a lot of memory for the price. The basic spec of other phones only come with 256GB of storage space, with 12GB RAM common but not guaranteed by all brands.

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Battery and charging

Honor has put a 5270mAh battery into the Magic7 Pro in Europe, but in further-flung markets without legal restrictions on battery density, the phone gets a 5850mAh cell instead. Worse still, last year's Magic6 Pro had a 5,600 mAh battery, making the European version an obvious downgrade.

After my usual test of 3 hours of 1080p YouTube video playback at medium brightness, the Magic7 Pro lost 20% of its battery, a reasonable result. However with the OnePlus 13 losing only 14% on the same test, and the Magic6 Pro 18%, it's annoying that Honor couldn't make a larger battery work in Europe while OnePlus could with the OnePlus 13's 6,000mAh power pack.

Honor lists the max charging speed of the Magic7 Pro as 100W wired and 80W wireless. We were unable to test the speed for ourselves as there is no charger in the box and previous Honor phones used a different charging tech, but Honor's claim is that the phone will charge to full in 33 minutes when plugged in and in 44 minutes if you use a compatible wireless charger.

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Software and special features

Honor elected to switch out the Magic6 Pro's optical fingerprint scanner with a new 3D Fingerprint Scanner on the Magic7 Pro. This worked very well, requiring only three taps to verify a fingerprint and then unlocking promptly every time I used it. Not that I ended up using it much, as the 3D scanner in the front camera block still enables secure facial recognition. This is a rarity on Android phones, but works similarly quickly and at a similar range of angles to the well-established Face ID system on the latest iPhones.

Debuting on the Magic7 Pro, MagicOS 9 (based on Android 15) contains the rest of the phone's unique abilities. In keeping with recent trends, Honor offers various AI tools on the Magic7 Pro, such as AI image editing, translation (both in voice calls and if you’re face-to-face with the other speaker), text transcription, summaries and minutes. The phone also features Google's Gemini assistant.

Unique to Honor is its Magic Portal, a speedy sharing and searching system that works with text and images, including a Circle to Search-style lasso tool for specifying an area of the screen to send, accessed by tapping the screen with your knuckle.

Honor’s also proud of its AI Deepfake Detection system, which it claims will flag suspicious video calls within seconds. But this is not coming until later this year in a future update, so we can’t say for ourselves if the feature matches Honor’s promises or not.

Honor looks to be sticking with its current update policy of four years of Android updates and five years of security updates. That almost matches what OnePlus offers with the OnePlus 13, which is due to get four years Android and six years of security, but still lacking compared to Google and Samsung, which both offer seven years of Android and security updates for their flagship phones.

Honor Magic7 Pro review: Verdict

There are a few scenarios where my recommendations for buying the Honor Magic7 Pro are clear. If you're considering it against the OnePlus 13, then unless you're very concerned about pricing, the Honor likely wins out for you. And if you're thinking about the Magic7 Pro against a Pixel 9 Pro XL, then it'll depend on if you want to spend your 1.1 grand on better hardware now with Honor or smarter software down the line with Google.

The problem is if you're also weighing up buying a Samsung flagship phone. The Galaxy S25 Ultra isn't here yet, and while it'll presumably be more expensive again, it could offer upgrades that leave the Magic7 Pro in the dust. And the fact you'll have to order Honor's phone in from overseas in the U.S. makes the Honor less appealing for American buyers, too.

None of this detracts from the Honor's high points — the Magic7 Prois feature-packed from front to back, and performs and snaps photos on a par with any other flagship phone. Even the downsides of shorter battery life and software support could be forgiven by large groups of users depending on how they use and buy their phones.

Cross your fingers that the Honor Magic7 Pro doesn't get lost in the Galaxy S25 tide. Because its features — both the cutting-edge and the familiar but refined — should earn it a place on many a shopper's shortlist.