Honor Magic 8 Pro review: A proper flagship

The Honor Magic 8 Pro is a proper flagship. What does that mean? It means the company hasn't slacked off and delivered in every possible area - display, hardware, camera, battery life, charging, software and AI tricks, design, security.

To people familiar with the Magic Pro series, the statement above doesn't come as a surprise, but the Magic 8 Pro has the potential to attract new fans and give Samsung and Apple a serious run for their money. 

Speaking of complete packages, the Magic 8 Pro comes with a large silicon-carbon battery, very fast charging, one of the brightest displays we've ever tested, the fastest chipset on the Android market, a capable triple camera system with clever AI tricks and focus on low-light performance, a new AI button, and a compact and stylish design. What's not to like?

Well, the price is one of the pills that are somewhat hard to swallow, as well as the fact that you can't get it officially in the US on any major carrier (you'll have to look for unlocked global version on sites such as Newegg and Amazon). But if you're willing to part with 1,100 euros (or the equivalent in USD), you'll get an amazing phone that will serve you well for seven long years.

Let's start with an overview of the Honor Magic 8 Pro specs and a quick comparison with the previous model:

It's quite surprising when flagship phones shrink in size. Normally, it's the other way around, and we're constantly getting bigger and bigger devices with each generation. Not this time. The Honor Magic 8 Pro is smaller, thinner, and lighter than its predecessor. This is mainly due to the smaller screen diagonal—6.71 inches compared to the 6.8-inch panel in the previous generation.


It's a positive change, as the phone is very comfortable in the hand, and one-hand operation is a breeze. The back has a very gentle curvature near the edges, which further helps with comfort and ergonomics. The display is flat, for the most part, at least. It has that 2.5D feel near the edges, giving it a premium feel and look, without the usual drawbacks of a curved panel.

The camera bump is pretty substantial—it's circular with that "Jade Cong" shape around it (kind of a square with rounded sides). A big portion of the 213 grams the phone weighs can be attributed to the camera system, so the phone is a bit top heavy, but nothing extreme or unmanageable. There's also a new dedicated AI button on the frame (more on this later in the software section).

There's nothing surprising in terms of materials—the back is made of frosted glass (Honor's proprietary NanoCrystal Shield), and you can find the same glass protecting the screen. The frame is aluminum, and the phone comes with IP68, IP69, and IP69K water and dust resistance, as well as SGS 5-Star drop resistance certification (protection against accidental drops from up to 1.5 m).

In terms of colors, the Honor Magic 8 Pro comes in three hues globally—Sunrise Gold, Sky Cyan, and Black. We tested the gold version, and it looks very stylish with a slight 3D effect under certain light.



The 6.71-inch display is one of the centerpieces of the phone. Honor claims up to 6,000 nits of peak brightness, but we all know that this number depends on how small the portion of the display being tested is, so we're gonna check these claims at 20% APL and 100% APL in our display tests.

The panel is an LPTO and can dynamically switch between a 1-120 Hz display refresh rate, and the resolution is 1256 x 2808 pixels, resulting in a solid 459 PPI pixel density. Honor equips its flagship phones with a slew of eye protection features, and the Magic 8 Pro is no exception. 

We have 4320 Hz PWM dimming (less flicker and eye strain), chip-level AI defocus display tech (subtly blurs the peripheral vision on a screen, mimicking defocus glasses to slow eye elongation and reduce nearsightedness), circadian night display (adjusts the tone and filters blue light), motion sickness relief, and more. Time for tests!

Display Measurements:

The Honor Magic 8 Pro wasn't able to hit 6,000 nits, but it's the brightest phone we've tested to date! It got to almost 4,000 nits at 20% APL, which is an amazing result. What's even more impressive is that Honor has managed to keep the minimum brightness at 1 nit. The color accuracy is also excellent, as is the white balance. We can't fault this panel, it's one of the best we've tested so far.

In terms of biometrics, Honor is one of the few smartphone brands other than Apple offering TOF 3D-based facial recognition. It's backed up by an ultrasonic fingerprint reader, and both work very fast. No complaints here.

There's a potent triple camera system inside the Honor Magic 8 Pro. The main camera uses a 50MP 1/1.3" sensor under a lens with an f/1.6 aperture. Gone is the variable f/1.4-2.0 aperture system with a physical diaphragm. The resulting images are 12MP, and through pixel binning, the resulting 4-in-1 pixel size is 2.4μm.

The new 200MP telephoto camera is the centerpiece in this system with 3.7X optical zoom and 85mm focal length equivalent. This periscope zoom system uses the Samsung ISOCELL HP9 1/1.4" sensor, and on top of the optical zoom, it can achieve even higher magnification through additional cropping from the big megapixel count of the sensor. 

The ultrawide camera has been carried over from the previous generation - it's a 50MP snapper with a 122° field of view and macro capabilities up to 2.5cm. Looking at the camera score of the phone, it's clear to see that the telephoto camera is the star of the show here. The main camera score is also decent, and the final score is dragged down by the ultrawide camera. But let's take a look at some real-life samples, shall we?

Main camera samples look quite good, with a nice level of detail and wide dynamic range. Colors are also pleasant, a tad boosted but nothing extreme. Shadows look natural, and overall, the main camera produces pleasant samples, albeit we don't see much of a difference compared to the shots from the Magic 7 Pro.

Telephoto samples are where this phone shines. There's a lot of detail at 3.7X, and the quality is great; it's on par with the images from the main camera, if not better. Even at 10X, the Magic 8 Pro manages to retain details—take a look at the cats' photo—the fur looks very detailed, as well as the eyes of both cats.

The ultrawide is where the phone drops the ball a little.  There's some loss of detail and a certain "softness" to the samples. The dynamic range is not as wide as on the other two cameras, and there are some crushed shadows in some scenes.

Video Quality

The Honor Magic 8 Pro caps at 4K while recording video, but you can record with up to 120 frames per second. We find the best results at 60fps, the videos look good, with nice colors, good details, no tearing, and no other artifacts present. You can zoom in and out while recording, and the image stabilization is also great.

Being a true flagship, the Honor Magic 8 Pro comes equipped with the latest Qualcomm silicon—the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The European version of the phone comes with 12GB of RAM, but there are 16GB available in other regions.

Using the phone in day-to-day tasks is a breeze—smooth and fast—but that's not surprising given the potent chipset. Outside of synthetic benchmarks, we didn't notice any thermal throttling issues, and the phone stayed relatively cool. Speaking of benchmarks, it's time to pit this new Honor flagship against the best and most popular competitors in the business.

CPU Performance Benchmarks:

The single-core performance of the Honor Magic 8 Pro is great—it's second only to Apple's A19 Pro chipset inside the iPhone 17 Pro Max. In the multi-core test it's a flawless victory for the Magic 8 Pro—the phone came out on top of all the competition with an impressive 10K+ score.

Graphics tests paint a similar picture—on the first run, the Honor Magic 8 Pro was able to topple all the big guys, including the iPhone 17 Pro Max. However, here's where the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 starts to display some thermal throttling, and we've seen this across the board in other flagship phones as well. 

In terms of onboard storage, in Europe the phone is available in a single memory configuration—12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Globally, you can (try and) get the Magic 8 Pro with up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

The Honor Magic 8 Pro comes running Android 16 out of the box with Honor's MagicOS 10 on top. The custom skin has a dedicated transparency mode where you can adjust the transparent/opaque look via a slider, and it reminds us of the Liquid Glass interface Apple introduced with iOS26 (especially in the notification shade). 

Couple that with the Magic Capsule Honor's been using around the front camera duo, and you get a strong iPhone inspiration across the interface. And speaking of inspiration, there's a new AI button on board of the Magic 8 Pro, doing some clever stuff.

You can customize this new button to launch the camera app, go straight into Google Lens, summon Circle to Search, or take you to Honor's own AI agent. When you're inside the camera app, this capacitive AI button serves as a zoom slider, you can hold it down to focus and do burst shots, and a single press acts like a shutter. 



There are other AI tools baked inside the interface, such as the Magic Portal—a useful feature that allows you to drag content contextually to different apps and services. AI writing tools are available, you can translate text, subtitles, and calls, extract text and images, etc. There's also the eye-tracking feature that allows you to open notifications by gazing at them, and there's an AI editor too.

Last year Honor joined the seven year software update party and the Magic 8 Pro will receive seven major OS updates just like flagships from Samsung and Google. 

Honor was the first company to bring silicon-carbon battery tech outside China, and the Magic 8 Pro features the fourth generation of that tech inside. Sadly, due to regulations, the battery inside the European version of the phone is 6,270 mAh. 

That's a decent capacity in and of itself, but the global version comes with a 7,100 mAh cell, and the Chinese one features a 7,200 mAh battery, so if you want the maximum battery life, you should try and get the global version.

We're starting to see phones from China pushing the 8,000 mAh mark now, and clearly Samsung, Apple, and Google are lagging behind in this regard. Let's take a look at the detailed battery benchmark.

The European version of the Magic 8 Pro is more or less on par with the competition—it scored 8 hours in our aggregated battery test, identical to the overall score of the Galaxy S25 Ultra. There are differences, however—the S25 Ultra lasts longer in the browsing part of the test, while the Magic 8 Pro can do more video content on a single charge. 

Overall the battery life is quite decent, but it could've been great if not for the smaller battery compared to the other versions of the phone.



The Honor Magic 8 Pro supports 100W fast wired charging and 80W wireless, though you need a proprietary wireless charger to take full advantage of both. The phone ships with a cable and no charging brick inside the box.

Charging times are quite good with the right charger—the battery fills from zero to full in about 48 minutes on a cable and under one hour wirelessly.

Another area where Honor has been really strong with its flagships is audio. We've been quite impressed with the clarity and loudness of the speakers inside the Magic Pro series ever since the Magic 6 Pro, and this generation doesn't disappoint as well.

The audio is surprisingly rich and detailed, and it can get quite loud too. This phone is on par with the BOSE-powered Poco F8 Ultra and sounds great at any volume level. You can feel the whole body of the phone vibrating from the rich bass, and the overall soundscape is wide and really pleasant.

The haptics are also very good, tight, precise, and strong enough so you won't miss a call while in vibration mode.

The Honor Magic 8 Pro is a proper flagship, worthy to go against top dogs from Apple, Samsung, and Google. The phone sports all the right ingredients and ticks all the right boxes to deliver a true flagship experience.

From the super bright AMOLED display to the fast chipset and the powerful camera system, the Honor Magic 8 Pro delivers. Some might find the interface a little derivative and the new AI button not the most original thing out there, but the implementation is great, and all the AI features are actually quite useful.

The Magic 8 Pro is not a cheap phone, and it can be hard to get in specific regions of the world, but if you're willing to take a chance and try something different than your popular flagships from the big three, you'll be pleasantly surprised.