The Honor MagicPad 2 has just been announced at IFA 2024, and I’ve been testing it for a couple weeks. While we wait for the chance to tell you all about it in a review, I wanted to do something a little different – replace my M3 Pro MacBook Pro with this tablet for a week.
You see, Steve Jobs got a lot of things right, but one that he didn’t quite hit the mark on was this notion that tablets will replace laptops. All his talk of comparing this transition to the way people switched from trucks to cars just hasn’t come to fruition.
No matter how many articles you read that test and ponder whether a tablet can be a laptop, that won’t change the inevitable fact that for peak productivity, laptops have won this war. So that argument would be pointless for me to make.
What I want to do instead is dip back into the world of Android tablets, and see whether they’ve come any further along. There’s a reason why iPads are a solid lock for the top spot of our best tablets list – they have access to a smorgasbord of apps as well as the performance and the capability to not just be binge-watching slabs, but actual productivity devices to help you get things done.
Android slabs have never had the same expansive support in my experience, with a vastly smaller app library and a far less sleek UI. Well, that’s at least what I thought until I used the MagicPad 2 as my daily driver for 7 days.
Smooth operator
And so, I set it up with everything I needed and got to it. I have to say I’m surprised by how much I can get done here. MagicOS 8.0 (built on Android 14) is a sleek UI and you can tell Honor has put time and thought into making this make sense on a tablet.
Multi-tasking options are just a drag and a swipe away, and you have the chance to pre-save your most used side-by-side. Shout-out in particular to Magic Portal becoming something of an AI-infused version of a right-click for me – learning preferred system functions based on where I am on the MagicPad 2 and presenting them in a list for me to activate.
Plus, Honor’s done a bang-up job here with its own apps for getting things done, which have been supercharged with AI.
For example, it can do all the same things you’re seeing with Apple Intelligence, such as fixing your handwriting and solving formulas you doodle down, voice transcription in Honor notes, and more. Put a sleek file manager in the middle of it, and all the apps come together in a fine synergy of productivity.
Combine this with my workflow fortunately benefitting from having tablet-optimized apps for it, such as Slack and Gmail, and I was working hard in no time. Whether it’s sketching out an idea with the Magic-Pencil 3 with super low latency and a huge range of pressure sensitivity, or typing to my heart’s content with the Smart Bluetooth Keyboard case (keys feel amazing with 1.6mm of travel), it’s been a joy to write out this and many other stories.
A feast for the eyes
I’m of course talking about the main event here – that 12.3-inch 3K OLED panel with a 1,600-nit peak brightness and a 144Hz refresh rate. That beats the M4-equipped iPad Pro 2024 in both resolution and refresh rate, while being just as bright.
In use, the UI zooms around oh so slickly, color temperature changes make this a nice display to work on, and that flash flood of color paired with peak brightness make even the most HDR-est of content look incredible
But the magic (pardon the pun) doesn’t stop there as the 4,320Hz Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) dimming sounds super technical, but means that any brightness fluctuations or flickering stripes are basically eliminated. And on top of that, Honor’s bringing something big to the table in the form of an AI Defocus Display.
This will be hard for me to show on camera, so let me explain. A common problem of spending so much time in front of screens is nearsightedness, but myopia glasses (or you may see them called defocus glasses) can help with that by intentionally defocusing everything in your peripheral vision and keeping the screen clear.
Well, the MagicPad 2 is just going to go ahead and use AI to recreate that. Using the camera to judge your distance and angle to the screen, this panel is able to replicate that same defocus glass effect, which can be important in reducing the myopia impacts of this display.
To say it’s better than an iPad would be a “stretch”
But imma stop you right there. Before I start gushing too much, there are some of what I’d like to call the Android Tablet Tribulations. First, we’re not entirely sure how many years of major Android updates this will get. In previous devices, Honor has committed to five years, which isn’t quite iPad-levels of longevity, but it’s good enough. We’ll see if that’s the case here.
Second, for all the work that Honor has done to make an office suite and apps that can give you a whiff of laptop-esque productivity, there’s no getting away from the fact that most of the biggest Android apps aren’t built for tablets. There’s a cumbersome process for these (Facebook is a classic example) where you’ll have to go into the Large-Screen Features settings menu and force these apps to go full-screen. And after all that, you’re left with a blown up phone app. Comparing that to seeing how developers make the most of that extra screen real estate on an iPad, this will always be a bit of a bummer.
And on top of that, while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3S is a great sub-flagship chipset for most of your productivity, if anything more strenuous appeared in the app store (akin to Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro as you see on iPad), this tablet would slow to a crawl. You can configure this to 16GB of RAM, which is a blessing for multi-tasking, but it's a phone chipset slapped into a tablet, and you’ve got to be mindful of that.
Outlook
Now, there’s only so much I can say about the Honor MagicPad 2 before the review (don’t worry, it’s coming sooner than you think). But what you have here is a damn fine tablet – made even sweeter by that iPad Pro beater of an OLED display that is a joy for the eyes.
You can tell that Honor’s been in the tablet game for a while, as the company works around the common obstacles of using this OS to give you something that’s damn slick to use for productivity and entertainment. It’s reign as being the most iPad-est Android tablet you can buy continues strong.
As for this little experiment I was doing, there are for sure still some limitations in use when it comes to the whole “replacing a laptop for a tablet” thing. Those same common problems like the constricted tablet app selection and the lack of a suite for creative work rear their head again. Oh and you’re still contending with stretched out phone apps for everything else.
But Android has come a long way on the big screen, and so has Magic OS – to the point that I know I can get pretty much all of my more standard day-to-day tasks done on here, while having a stunning screen for chilling out after work.
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