Honor Magic7 Pro: A feature-packed flagship with a strong focus on AI photography
Honor Magic7 Pro. Picture: Noel Campion.
The Honor Magic6 Pro was one of my top three camera phones from last year, so I was very excited to have the opportunity to test its successor thoroughly. As a flagship device competing in the premium smartphone segment, it has compelling features, including a top-class chipset and innovative photography AI features.
The Magic7 Pro is a premium handset that follows the Magic6 design. The back of my review loan unit features a matte marbled glass finish that feels premium to the touch, with an elegant texture and a subtle grip. The glass panel tapers elegantly into a slim aluminium frame, creating a seamless and sophisticated profile that feels substantial without being overly heavy.
A prominent circular camera bump dominates the rear, making a bold statement about the device's photographic capabilities. This design choice serves a functional purpose and acts as a visual centrepiece that distinguishes the device from its competitors.
The build quality is exceptional, and the IP68 and IP69 ratings ensure robust protection against dust, water, and even heated water jets — a crucial consideration for those who demand durability from their high-end smartphones.
The Magic7 Pro’s display is one of the smartphone's most impressive features, although it hasn’t changed much from that of the Magic6. The 6.8-inch LTPO OLED screen is a visual feast, offering a crisp 120Hz refresh rate that can dynamically drop to 1Hz to conserve battery life. This adaptive refresh rate ensures smooth scrolling and animations while optimising power consumption.
Maximum brightness reaches an impressive 1,600 nits in auto mode and 5,000 nits in peak mode, making outdoor visibility a non-issue even under direct sunlight. The screen supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, delivering vibrant colours, deep contrasts, and a visual experience. Colour accuracy and consistency are remarkable, with the screen reproducing content with near-perfect fidelity.
The iPhone-inspired pill-shaped cutout houses the front camera and 3D ToF sensor. This sensor enhances portrait mode depth and enables secure 3D face unlock.
Another notable upgrade is the fingerprint reader, which is now an ultrasonic sensor instead of an optical one. This change results in faster, more reliable unlocking, improving speed and accuracy.
Like Apple's Dynamic Island, the area displays status icons for timers and media playback. You can tap these icons to quickly access relevant apps, creating a more intuitive and engaging user experience.
Powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, the Magic7 Pro delivers top-notch performance across everyday tasks and intensive applications. Its impressive benchmark scores are borne out in real-world use with smooth multitasking, gaming, and productivity capabilities that will satisfy even the most demanding users.
Whether editing photos, streaming high-resolution video, or engaging in graphically intensive gaming, the device remains cool and responsive.
The Magic7 Pro's battery life is solid. With its 5,270mAh battery, I could comfortably last a day without reaching for a charger. The Magic7 Pro features 100W wired and 80W wireless charging. However, a charger isn’t included in the box, so you may have to buy an Honor charger to achieve 100W of charging power.
The dual aperture lens on the main camera, along with its 50MP sensor, has been carried over from the Magic6 and is one of my favourite hardware features. It allows switching between f/1.4 and f/2.0, helping control depth of field. This happens automatically depending on lighting conditions, but you can choose the apertures manually in Pro mode. The physical aperture blades give you stunning sunbursts like a DSLR camera lens.
In daylight, images are vibrant, detailed, and well-balanced, with excellent skin tone reproduction. The camera performs well in harsh lighting, maintaining natural contrast and good dynamic range. The main sensor produces well-exposed shots with superb colour accuracy in low-light conditions. Details remain sharp, and white balance adapts well to different environments.
Portrait mode captures flattering photos. Even with beauty enhancements turned off, I found that enabling AI processing subtly smooths skin and reduces wrinkles while enhancing details like eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair.
The telephoto sensor gets a bump from 180MP to 200MP with a slightly larger sensor, using a periscope zoom lens with 3x optical zoom. The telephoto camera maintains good colour and dynamic range at night, but fine details appear softer than expected.
Between 30x and 100x zoom, an AI enhancement feature kicks in — something Honor hopes will be a game-changer. The phone uploads the highly cropped image to the cloud, where powerful servers use generative AI to reconstruct details. The AI-generated image appears sharper and cleaner, with well-defined lines and enhanced detail. However, upon closer inspection, the AI can generate fake details.
The effect is striking at first glance, but small details can look unnatural. For example, when zooming in on a bird or animal, the AI tries to recreate missing details, often producing results that deviate from reality. The final image can resemble a painting rather than a photograph. While 200MP sounds impressive for capturing fine details — and it certainly can — I’m not convinced it can outperform the physics of a longer optical zoom lens. The good news is that Honor lets you choose whether to use AI or not, and you can compare the original with the AI-enhanced version to decide which one to keep.
About 200 of the 800-plus photos I shot on the Magic7 Pro were taken to test the telephoto camera. While AI occasionally produces impressive results, most of these test shots wouldn’t make it into a personal album. In real-world use, I’m not sure how useful 100x zoom really is because the AI has so little actual information/detail to work with from a 3X optical lens.
The 50MP ultra-wide lens captures detailed and well-balanced images in daylight, with minimal distortion at the edges. However, in low-light scenarios, detail takes a noticeable hit, with shadows appearing soft.
Selfies from the 50MP front camera look sharp and natural, with excellent colour reproduction. Thanks to autofocus, close-up shots and different angles are well-handled.
All cameras support 4K 60fps recording, delivering excellent colour accuracy and dynamic range. The main downside is that details can look over-processed. Stabilisation is impressive, smoothing out walking motion and pans effectively.
Honor's MagicOS 9.0, based on Android 15, introduces some intriguing AI-powered features. The Magic Portal allows extracting text, searching, or taking actions by long-pressing images or highlighted text – a genuinely useful tool streamlining digital interactions.
Google's Gemini AI integration provides context-aware assistance and translation capabilities, turning the smartphone into a more intelligent companion.
The Honor Magic7 Pro is a premium flagship smartphone that ticks most boxes for a flagship device. It offers excellent display technology, top-notch performance, stellar battery, versatile cameras, and innovative AI features.
€1,300 – Harvey Norman and Three.
