Honor Magic 7 Lite review: a new endurance standard

Introduction

You’ve got to be pretty confident to ship your new affordable smartphone to testers with instructions to use it as a nutcracker – but that’s exactly what Honor did for the new Magic 7 Lite. The first member of the Magic 7 family to make it to Europe makes bold claims about being the toughest and most damage-resistant generation yet – and it doesn’t skimp on battery capacity either, thanks to some cutting edge chemistry.

Elsewhere on the spec sheet, though, the Magic 7 Lite has an awful lot in common with its forebear, the Magic 6 Lite. Reusing a processor that wasn’t exactly setting speed records when it was new is a brave move, as is launching with an outdated version of Android. The £399 price might make up for it, especially with a generous 512GB of on-board storage – but there’s no shortage of strong budget competition either. Can the Magic 7 Lite impress in areas other than battery life and durability?

Design & build: Magic by name, not by nature

Put the Magic 7 Lite side by side with the Magic 7 Pro (on sale in China only at the time of writing) and you’ll wonder how the two are related. Honor’s flagship is thoroughly modern, with a flat frame and 2.5D glass so subtly curved it might as well be flat as well; the Lite, on the other hand, sticks with the properly curved-edge front and rear glass that used to be the height of phone fashion – but hasn’t been hip for a year or two now.

The long and short of it is this phone is effectively a rebranded version of the China-market Honor X9c, so the name is about the only similarity. It does carry across a giant circular camera bump at the rear, but there are only two sensors hiding inside, and they’re nowhere near as high-end as the ones you’ll find in the Magic 7 Pro.

You’ll be able to pick one up in Titanium Purple or Titanium Black colours. My review unit was the former, looking hot pink from certain angles and almost silver from others. Face on, I get Porsche frozen berry metallic vibes – appropriate, I guess, given Honor sells a line of Porsche RSR-badged special editions elsewhere in its line-up.

I’ve got to give Honor top marks for the Magic 7 Lite’s sturdiness. It’s a scant 7.98mm thick and weighs just 189g, yet has been built to survive 2m drops onto hard surfaces – I’m talking marble floors and concrete pavements – with no damage. Corner protection in particular has come on a long way from the previous generation, and should give some confidence to anyone that insists on using their phone with out a protective case or cover. I gave it some pretty harsh treatment during my testing, and it was no worse for wear afterwards.

The Honor X9c’s tougher IP65M water and dust resistance doesn’t carry over to the Magic 7 Lite, which gets a slightly lesser IP64 rating. That means it won’t cope so well against water jets – but how often are you subjecting your phone to one of those? It’s still an improvement on the IP53 rating seen on last year’s model.

Screen & sound: brightness boosted

On the surface there’s not much to separate the Magic 7 Lite’s 6.78in screen from its predecessor – and that wasn’t a big upgrade on the phone that came before it. You’re getting a marginally higher pixel count (which at 2700×1224 is still plenty crisp enough at arms’ length and does justice to Full HD content) and the curved edges haven’t gone anywhere.

I can’t deny they help minimise the bezel thickness, and I wasn’t bothered at all by unwanted light reflections either. The slim central frame just isn’t as comfortable to hold as the new influx of flat-sided smartphones, though. One of which being Honor’s own Magic 7 Pro, making it pretty clear to me this phone wasn’t set to be its baby brother from the outset.

There’s still an AMOLED panel underneath, because only absolute bargain basement handsets use LCD these days. As you’d expect the colours really pop and contrast is fantastic. Black levels are up there with the best affordable phones, and the dynamic refresh rate was speedy to switch to 120Hz whenever I started scrolling through apps. I never felt I needed to force it on 24/7 for a better user experience.

Brightness is where this screen shows any meaningful upgrades over the previous-gen model. Honor’s claimed 4000 nits peak puts the Magic 7 Lite on par with the pricier Honor 200 Pro, and while in real-world use it doesn’t shine nearly so strongly, I was still able to use it outdoors with no complaints. I’ve used mid-range phones that look brighter, but there’s not a lot in it.

After being underwhelmed by the Magic 6 Lite’s downward driver and earpiece combo, I was happy to see the Magic 7 Lite’s earpiece putting in a lot more work. The sound the pair produce is a lot more balanced, and not short on volume either. This is still a phone, so you shouldn’t expect anything in the way of bass presence and higher frequencies sound quite sibilant when you crank it up – but no more so than its closest cut-price competition.

Cameras: 108 not out

After (rightly) getting flack for fitting the Magic 6 Lite with a superfluous macro shooter, I’m actually glad to see the Magic 7 Lite arrive with one less lens. The remaining two aren’t much of a departure from last year, meaning a modest 5MP ultrawide and a far more capable 108MP lead shooter – but the latter does finally gain optical image stabilisation. That’s a big win for low-light shooting.

As with the outgoing phone, I wasn’t that impressed by the ultrawide. It has a decent field of view, but really struggles to capture finer details and shows plenty of image noise, even in good lighting. Dynamic range, exposure and general colour treatment can’t match the main sensor, so I only ever reached for it when I physically couldn’t fit my subject into the frame.

I had a lot more luck with the main camera. It has an f/1.8 aperture that lets in a respectable amount of light, and the phase-detect autofocus was quick enough to lock onto subjects. A new AI-assisted highlights capture mode helps freeze moving subjects, which weren’t always easy to capture using the Magic 6 Lite.

Picture quality is really rather good for a budget phone, with a true-to-life colour treatment and a respectable amount of dynamic range on show. Fine details are neatly preserved, and optical image stabilisation means you don’t need as steady a hand when the shutter speed slows down as you did with the last-gen model. I think Google and Samsung have more nuanced processing overall, and rivals like Nothing do more with fewer pixels, but the Magic 7 Lite still puts on a decent showing for an affordable phone.

The camera app gives 2x and 3x zoom options, but both rely on sensor cropping and pixel binning – there’s no optical magnification going on. Still, the image processing uses a light enough touch to preserve lines and finer details. I found the 3x magnification did a better job than 2x, with greater definition and overall clarity.

Zoom snaps less convincing in low light, where noise creeps in and the Night mode has to take over. Stick to 1x shooting, though, and there are definitely improvements over the outgoing phone. It’s still not going to embarrass phones costing even a few hundred more, but it copes very well for an affordable handset.

Software experience: that’s magic

The Magic 7 Lite continues Honor’s trend for launching affordable handsets with a previous generation of Android, rather than the latest and greatest version. That means there’s Android 14 lurking beneath the firm’s MagicOS 8 skin, while rivals have been rocking up with Android 15 since last November.

Keep in mind, too, that the firm only commits to three new Android generations for its phones. Sure, it’ll keep releasing security patches for a year or two longer, but that still doesn’t bode well for long-term support when a similarly-priced Samsung Galaxy A55 could theoretically still be getting new software in 2031.

MagicOS hasn’t changed all that much between generations (and if you ask me is still overly similar to the UI used by ex-owner Huawei), but the icon-heavy interface is easy enough to get around. It borrows liberally from the Apple camp, with separate pull-down drawers for notifications and quick settings, multiple home screens filled with apps instead of an app drawer, and an extensive selection of own-brand software.

Magic Capsule, Honor’s take on Apple’s Dynamic Island, also makes the cut – a first for one of the firm’s budget models. It’s still pretty basic, and the larger camera cutout is purely for show, with no clever face recognition tech hiding inside. Alarms, music controls and call timers appear here, but it’s nowhere near as useful as the iOS original. I found Magic Portal a lot more useful. The context-sensitive tool lets you drag text or images onto a sidebar to quickly add them to other apps.

There’s an awful lot of pre-loaded dross here, which admittedly isn’t uncommon on budget-friendly phones. They don’t eat a noticeable amount of storage space either, but it’s still annoying to have to delete unwanted apps straight out of the box.

Performance & battery life: it’s how big?

Qualcomm has been laser-focused on its top-tier mobile chipsets lately, so Honor didn’t have much choice when it came to the Magic 7 Lite’s internals. It stuck with the same Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 CPU as the Magic 6 Lite, paired with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of on-board storage for UK variants.

This wasn’t a bad combo last year, and translates to decent enough performance here. Android doesn’t stutter or feel sluggish, with smooth animations and no major delays when opening apps – though more demanding ones do open faster on more expensive rivals. Multitasking is decent enough, even if I noticed apps would redraw or refresh a little more often than a Pixel 8a did when swapping between open apps.

Gaming hasn’t seen any improvement either, so load times aren’t the fastest and many titles default to lower graphics settings. Simpler, 2D games ran just fine, and more demanding 3D titles could still feel smooth for the most part, just with fewer visual bells and whistles than you’ll get if you spend a little more cash.

On the flip side, this is an efficient chip – and gives the Magic 7 Lite’s simply colossal battery the best opportunity to impress. Silicon carbon cells are currently rewriting the rule book on how much capacity can be squeezed into a phone, which here results in a mental 6600mAh. That’s a 1300mAh step up from last year, and almost 20% more than you’ll get from Western rivals that top out around 5000mAh.

Unsurprisingly that means this phone can comfortably deliver two full days of use before you’ll need to plug it in. This would’ve meant staying away from battery-sapping games and using the power saving modes on last year’s Magic 6 Lite; do the same here and a three day stint is doable. Those wanting a sensibly-priced smartphone for weekend trips or festivals, look no further.

Wireless charging still doesn’t make the cut, which is a bit of a downer given the tech is a lot more common under the £400 mark now, but it’s great to see wired charging speeds creep up even higher. 66W refuels are a welcome upgrade over the 35W seen on last year’s model.

Honor Magic 7 Lite verdict

In a few ways, the Honor Magic 7 Lite doesn’t make any meaningful progress over its predecessor. The entry-grade chipset is unchanged, the firm’s software upgrade commitments still lag behind rival brands, and now the styling feels that much more out of step with the rest of the phone world.

It’s not all bad though. Some might argue the rear cameras have gone backwards by dropping the third snapper, but the Magic 6 Lite’s macro lens was a token inclusion at best, and adding optical image stabilisation has upped the Magic 7 Lite’s night-time performance among affordable rivals. This is also a much tougher handset, which will be great news for accident-prone shoppers.

Ultimately you’ll buy the Magic 7 Lite for its colossal battery; there’s simply no other affordable option out there with such a high capacity. If you’re after a long-lasting handset that doesn’t look like an actual brick, you’ll be able to forgive the limited generational upgrades everywhere else.

Honor Magic 7 lite technical specifications

Screen	6.78in, 2700×1224 AMOLED
CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1
Memory	8GB RAM
Cameras	108MP, f/1.8 w/ PDAF, OIS + 5MP, f/2.2 ultrawide rear 16MP, f/2.5 front
Storage	512GB on-board
Operating system	Android 14 w/ MagicOS 8.0
Battery	6600mAh w/ 66W wired charging
Dimensions	163x76x8mm, 189g