Honor has been nailing it lately with its Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6-beating foldable, the Magic V3, and the clip-on-camera packing Magic Book Art 14, a laptop running Qualcomm’s latest X Elite chip (with an Intel version also available).
In 2025, Honor is expected to add the Magic 7 Pro flagship phone to its lineup. In true Honor style, though, we don’t actually have to wait until next year to see what all the fuss is about. The Magic 7 Pro launched in China in November 2024 – and I’ve taken it for a 24-hour test drive.
While there will be some differences between the Chinese and global Honor Magic 7 Pro versions, I'd anticipate the hardware will be virtually identical, with a super-fresh Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset – expected in the Galaxy S25 Ultra – as well as a giant battery, a quad-curved display and, surprise surprise, a lot of features prefixed with “AI”.
On paper, you’d be forgiven for thinking the Magic 7 Pro is a modest upgrade over the Magic 6 Pro. But having used both, I think it feels like a marked departure. While the 6 Pro’s screen curves into the sides and the phone sports a more ornate-looking camera, the 7 Pro is more utilitarian with its flat display and subtly quad-curved glass.
It isn’t just style that sets the Magic 7 Pro apart, though, as this Android phone is dripping in specs and features. If we could bring five features from the Chinese version we tested to the global model, these would be our top choices – with one in particular that I think destroys the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
1. A battery revolution
Imagine being able to fit more battery power into less space – you’d be able to make a long-lasting slim smartphone. This sounded too good to be true before Honor dropped its Silicon Carbon Battery technology – something that also features in Oppo's Find X8 Pro.
Smartphones typically use lithium-ion batteries, and graphite plays a starring role in how they work. Since Sony first developed the tech, there’s been some innovation to hit faster peak charging specs and fit a little extra power, but no one’s been able to significantly up the density without upping the battery size in recent years... until now.
By managing to swap the graphite in lithium-ion batteries for silicon-carbon while maintaining stability, Honor has crammed a giant 5850mAh battery into the Honor Magic 7 Pro without upping the battery's physical scale, so the phone measures just 8.8mm thick – despite trouncing most of the competition’s battery spec.
For context, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, Sony Xperia 1 VI, and Xiaomi 14 Ultra all have 5000mAh batteries, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s modest capacity sits at a lowly 4685mAh. Only Oppo and Vivo have launched phones with silicon-carbon batteries thus far, so while this isn't an exclusive Honor tech, the brand was first to the market with this tech in the Magic V3.
Now, milliamp-hours aren’t everything – battery life is dictated by screen size, interface optimisatio,n and chipset power management, among other factors – but how high-capacity the battery is does lay the foundation for a long-lasting phone. The Magic 7 Pro looks set to be the Duracell Bunny of flagships for 2025 if its battery spec is anything to go by.
Add to the huge capacity the fact it charges at super-fast charging rates – 100W wired and 80W wireless – delivering iPhone- and Galaxy-trouncing recharge times, and it's hard not to be very impressed.
2. 200MP AI Zoom
The Honor Magic 7 Pro has three cameras around the back: an ultra-wide, a primary, and a telephoto camera. While the ultra-wide and primary cameras are the same as 2024’s Honor Magic 6 Pro with 50MP sensors and competitive (but not class-leading) specs, the telephoto camera has been levelled-up with hardware and AI for 2025.
Starting with hardware: the Magic 6 Pro’s zoom camera was no megapixel slouch with its 180MP sensor, but the Magic 7 Pro nevertheless ups the pixel count to a mind-boggling 200MP.
The sensor is also a 1/1.4-inch size, which is the biggest zoom sensor size in a flagship smartphone, matched only by the Vivo X200 Pro's zoom. If you know anything about camera tech, big sensors typically translate to better pictures, boding well for the Magic 7 Pro from the outset.
As for the AI of it all – that's 'artificial intelligence' if the year's trend hasn't reached you as yet – the Magic 7 Pro will be the first smartphone to introduce cloud-based AI zoom.
When you take a photo between 12-30x zoom, the phone uses on-device AI to clean up lines and fill in areas a typical zoom might have struggled with. Beyond 30x, the Magic 7 Pro will beam your snap up to the cloud; it will remove identifiable elements and then end up in Google’s servers for some AI-image upscaling and optimisation that goes beyond what’s possible on-device. The result, I'm told, will be incredible.
Unfortunately, this cloud-based AI Zoom is the one feature I didn’t see in action – as it’s set to drop later in 2024 in China, but I'm especially curious to know if this feature in particular will hit Western shores along with the Honor Magic 7's expected arrival next year.
Now, if you’re thinking the Honor Magic 7 Pro is poised to be the unequivocal zoom champion, hold your horses. The lens is a relatively modest 2.9x zoom equivalent, so while when you’re zooming at 2.9x the results look incredible, zooming into the distance wasn’t class-leading in our early impressions. Whether the upcoming cloud AI zoom changes this remains to be seen when the feature drops.
3. Knuckle to search
Honor introduced a nifty feature for the Magic V3 called Magic Portal. This let you drag items into the side of your screen for super-fast integration with your favourite apps. So if you dragged a photo and set Instagram as a favourite, it would launch the app and get you poised for posting. Another example is text: highlight a block, drag it to the side, and if Gmail is set as a favourite, it will drop that text straight into a new message.
For the Chinese Honor Magic 7 Pro, Honor has combined Magic Portal with a knuckle-recognition feature (first introduced by Huawei when the two phone makers were under the same roof). Using your knuckle, you can draw around anything on-screen, drag the cutout to an app like ChatGPT, and take the mechanic of Google’s Circle to Search to a whole new level.
4. No more dry eyes
Honor loves shouting about its eye-care screen tech, whether it’s PWM dimming, reducing flicker for a more comfortable view, software adjusting the colour tone throughout the day to align with circadian rhythms, or defocusing and recolouring the display to help reduce eye strain. It’s clearly big on eye-care features.
The latest eye-care upgrade which debuts on the Magic 7 Pro is Dry Eye Relief. This actively detects how frequently you blink and, by some wizardry, intelligently guides blinking and softens the display properties to help keep your peepers nice and moist.
In true Honor style, there’s also some third-party accreditation to emphasise just how eye-friendly the screen is in the form of TÜV Rheinland Full Care Display 4.0.
5. Biometric everything
An oldie but a goodie, we’re all used to Face ID on iPhones, but Android phones typically miss out on secure face unlocking. Sure, many let you unlock your phone with a glance, but you may remember the big hoo-ha around Android phones being duped by photos because they don’t have secure, 3D face unlocking.
So, if you want to truly replace your fingerprint scanner with super-secure hands-free unlocking and access banking apps or web browser passwords, you’re out of luck unless you have an Honor Magic 5, Magic 6, or Magic 7. All three phones have 3D Face Unlock, and I’ve tested the feature with multiple UK banks and Google Pay, and it works great.
Unlike the iPhone, the Honor Magic 7 Pro still has a fingerprint scanner, giving you the best of both worlds. And this is not just any digit reader, it’s a fancy ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, so works when wet and is faster to unlock than traditional under-display alternatives.
Initial impressions
After 24 hours, do I think the Honor Magic 7 Pro is the best camera phone I’ve tried? Not unless you shoot a lot of 3x zoom (around 70mm) photos. If you do, it shines, and if you’re wondering what kind of things look best at this focal length, then it’s Insta-worthy food shots and mid-distance portraits. Even if you don’t, though, it’s still a mighty camera phone with excellent-looking video, quality audio recording and impressive speakers.
When you look at the phone as a package, it looks like a mighty all-rounder. The giant battery didn’t need a charge once in my day with it, and that included pounding it with benchmarks and photo and video capture – which you can see examples of in the galleries and embedded video above.
The Magic 7 Pro’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset is also a monster, tearing through Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves at maximum graphics settings. It got toastier than the Mediatek Dimensity 9400 in the Oppo Find X8 Pro and Vivo X200 Pro, but never got uncomfortable and didn’t skip a beat when it came to playback.
Honor’s also cleaned up its user interface, Magic OS 9.0, making most of the pre-loaded apps easy to uninstall, and the phone ships with Android 15, so it should be relatively future-proofed. I haven’t even covered the AI photo editing features; of course, there’s the obligatory AI party trick – object removal – but Honor has also added a new feature that opens a subject’s eyes if they’re blinking in a shot, as well as a clarity enhancer tool to upscale crops and low-resolution images.
Which features make their way to our shores remains to be seen, and with any luck, we’ll get a few new ones that are more tailored to the West. Check back for our full review of the European Honor Magic 7 Pro when it drops early in 2025, and if you can’t wait until then, then check out some of the best smartphones money can buy right now.
