Honor Magic 7 Pro Review: Refined Flagship

Honor’s Magic 7 Pro is a refined flagship Android phone that weaves the latest AI features with cutting-edge hardware. It excels everywhere that matters. You get an incredibly versatile camera, impressive stamina, speedy charging, silky smooth performance, and an excellent display. Several subtle but important improvements over its predecessor elevate this smartphone to the next level.

Chinese phone maker Honor has impressed me with its hardware of late, from last year’s Magic 6 Pro to the impossibly svelte Honor Magic V3. This year, it has paid more attention to the software with some welcome polish. Its heavy investment in AI is beginning to mature, with features that feel more practical in the Magic 7 Pro than in its predecessors. It’s a pricey flagship at £1,099 ($1,346), and sadly it’s not officially sold in the US. But UK and European buyers shouldn’t sleep on the Magic.

Subtle Refinements

At first glance, the Magic 7 Pro looks similar to the 6 Pro, but I was delighted to find a flatter display and frame, making it far more comfortable to use and less prone to accidental touches than curved glass. Honor has toned down the camera module, though it is still big enough to unbalance the phone a little. While this phone felt large after using the Pixel 9, it’s manageable to handle. I’m not in love with the marbled effect of my Lunar Shadow Grey review unit, but it’s more interesting than the plain blue or black alternatives.

The 6.8-inch screen is as good as any I’ve tested. It’s bright, smooth, and sharp. By the numbers, it has a 2,800 x 1,200-pixel resolution, a variable refresh rate of up to 120 Hz, and 1,600 nits brightness (up to 5,000 nits for highlights). Video looks great on the 7 Pro, with Dolby Vision and HDR Vivid support, and the speakers are nice and loud without distortion. Honor has also included several features intended to reduce eye fatigue and strain, but they’re tough to quantify.

The only slight irritation I had was with the large selfie camera cutout, though you soon get used to it. It’s a compromise I can accept for the convenience of secure face unlock—a rarity on Android phones, as it even works with banking apps.

There’s plenty of power under the hood with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and 12 GB of RAM. As you’d expect, benchmark results are at the top, and this phone can run anything. There’s also a very generous 512 GB of speedy storage, which is more than what most phones offer at this price. The Honor Magic 7 Pro has an IP68 and IP69 rating too, meaning it can be submerged and handle water jets or steam.

Delving inside, a far higher level of polish is evident throughout. Honor talks up the AI in the Magic 7 Pro, and we’ll get into the specific features, but it permeates the phone. AI has seeped into the phone app to reduce background noise and make voices clearer, and there’s a privacy feature designed to prevent sound leakage and thwart eavesdroppers.

I did a fair bit of mobile gaming with the Honor Magic 7 Pro, playing a mix of Diablo Immortal, Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice, and Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance. The Honor Magic 7 Pro remained cool to the touch and then got slightly warm after a couple of hours. Stamina is solid, with around 10 percent of the battery draining in an hour of Frostpunk.

Speaking of stamina, there’s a 5,270-mAh silicon-carbon battery in the Magic 7 Pro, a relatively new battery technology recently seen in the OnePlus 13 that allows for more compact designs. (The phone is less than 9 millimeters thick.) Charging rates are stellar at up to 100 watts wired and 80 watts wireless, but you need proprietary chargers to get those rates, and Honor does not include one in the box. It’s a shame there’s no support for Qi2 to enable MagSafe-style accessories, something I hope to see in more Android phones this year.

The phone runs Honor’s Magic OS9 layer over Android 15. The switch from the Pixel 9 (my daily driver) was surprisingly smooth, and I didn’t encounter bugs that turned me off the Magic 6 Pro. Honor has polished the software. There’s still a bit of bloatware, but you can get rid of most of it. I’m pleased that Honor has committed to five years of Android OS updates and security patches, as it’s a slight improvement over the 6 Pro, if still short of what Google and Samsung offer.

AI Upgrade

Honor first introduced a raft of AI features last year, and while there’s an improvement in the 7 Pro, with more options and slicker performance, it’s difficult to say how useful these features are.

Magic Portal enables you to highlight and drag content, such as a passage of text, an image, or a screenshot, over to the right and drop it into another app. This handy for dropping an address into Google Maps, for example. You can now tap with your knuckle and circle your subject, so you can cut out a photo of a jacket you like and drop it into eBay to search. Magic Text lets you quickly extract text from an image and phone numbers from photos. AI suggestions surface the apps you most often use at particular times.

Eye tracking and smart sensing keep the screen on when you are looking at it, let you expand banner notifications with a glance, and enable you to open the related app if you keep staring at the notification. I also like that you can glance at the phone to reduce the ringer volume, but you need to calibrate and activate all of these features in the settings, and they aren’t perfect.

The revamped AI Translate app lets you carry on a two-way conversation, translating from English to, say, Spanish and vice versa. It covers 13 languages. It does speech-to-text and back again, with a choice of voices, and it worked pretty well in my tests.

Honor’s Notes app supports both AI transcription and summarization via a feature called AI minutes. I regularly use Google’s Recorder app on my Pixel to automatically transcribe interviews, so I tested it side by side with Honor’s AI transcription. I was impressed by the accuracy, but there was a slight delay with Honor’s AI, and it didn’t capture everything. It’s also important to note that Honor’s AI transcription features require you to upload recordings to a third party, which introduces a delay and could be a privacy concern. (Google’s transcription works locally on Pixels, even without an internet connection.)

With AI Minutes, you can select a meeting type (brainstorming, interview, training) and have it create a summary highlighting the theme, a bullet-pointed agenda, and pulling out salient points and quotes, depending on what meeting type you select. Some folks might find this useful, but once again, the service requires you to upload the text to a third-party server for processing.

While you can find similar features on other smartphones, Honor is the only one with deepfake detection, a feature I could not test yet, because it doesn’t roll out until April, though I did get a demo of it at IFA last year. It works with some videoconferencing apps to tell you if the caller is using deepfake technology. I’m not sure how prevalent this issue is, but anything that makes life harder for scammers has to be good.

As if all that wasn’t enough, you also have Google’s Gemini assistant baked in for all your queries and tasks.

Photo Fantastic

The triple-lens camera in the Honor Magic 7 Pro is a versatile beast. The 50-megapixel main lens has a variable f/1.4 to 2.0 aperture with a 1/1.3-inch sensor that ensures fantastic results in all sorts of lighting conditions. There’s a beefed-up 200-megapixel periscope telephoto lens with an f/2.6 aperture and a 1/1.4-inch sensor capable of 3X optical zoom. There’s also a 50-megapixel ultrawide, which is the weak link for me.

My experience with the Honor Magic 7 Pro wasn’t miles away from the 6 Pro shootout I did last year. If you’re just pointing and shooting, the main camera is capable and can produce pleasing shots regardless of setting or weather. The telephoto lens is the biggest improvement in the camera system this year and allows for 3X optical zoom. You can zoom up to 100 times if you want, but the 7 Pro relies on AI to enhance the image, and the results are sometimes weird. Some processed shots still veer toward oil painting.