Honor Magic 7 Pro review: AI zoom makes this flagship part brilliant, part bizarre

Introduction

Honor wasn’t exactly punctual with bringing its last few flagship smartphones to the wider world, but has gotten its skates on for 2025. The Magic 7 Pro arrives just a few months after it debuted in China, bringing Snapdragon 8 Elite power, a fresh design that follows current tech trends, and one of the highest pixel count zoom lenses of any phone – which then adds generative AI into the mix for extreme magnification.

It succeeds the well-received Honor Magic 6 Pro and arrives early enough in the calendar to beat Samsung’s Galaxy S25 series to the punch – but so have a bunch of other would-be class leaders from the likes of Oppo, OnePlus and Asus. The Magic 7 Pro retails for £1099 in the UK and €1299 in Europe (sorry America, Honor still has no official there), so lands at the spicier end of the smartphone price range – can its photography focus and unique use of artificial intelligence help it claim the top spot?

After several weeks of testing, I’m convinced in some respects – but doubtful in others.

Design & build: face in the crowd

On one hand, the Magic 7 Pro’s near-flat 2.5D glass feels like a breath of fresh air after years of curved-edge Honor flagships. The flat metal frame is also a departure, yet one that’s on trend with the current crop of top-tier rivals. But when you factor in the giant circular camera bump around back – even if it’s surrounded by a rectangular bezel – it looks very similar to almost every other Chinese brand’s recent efforts. Only the pill-shaped selfie cam cutout stands out.

At least my Lunar Shadow Grey review unit stands out with a pearl-like rear panel, which has a slightly frosted finish that makes it grippier than other glass-backed handsets. It also helps hide fingerprint smears surprisingly well. I do wish Honor would find somewhere else to stick the ugly CE information, though, even if it’s only noticeable from certain angles.

The flat sides means this is a slightly wider phone than the outgoing Magic 6 Pro, but only just; I could still comfortably use it one-handed. At 8.8mm thick and weighing 223g it’s a substantial handset, but one that feels well balanced. It’s sturdy, too, with both IP68 and IP69 resistance ratings. I’ve never accidentally stuck a phone in the dishwasher, let alone dropped one in the sink, but it’s reassuring that the Magic 7 Pro could now survive both. I dropped it into snow banks, dipped it in a lake and ran it under a tap with no ill effects.

IR blasters are all but extinct outside of China, but the Magic 7 Pro still flies the flag for the tech. Honor hasn’t skimped on security either, supplementing its familiar 3D face unlock with an astonishingly speedy and accurate ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. The Magic series remain some of the only Android phones outside of Google’s Pixel that can use facial recognition to unlock your banking apps. Both performed brilliantly in my testing, with the depth-sensing camera working even in extreme low light and the finger scanner taking just three taps to set up, not the 20+ taps optical sensors can require.

Screen & sound: bring on the brightness battle

The Android world has largely decided that big, bright AMOLEDs with LTPO adaptive refresh rates are the benchmark for a flagship phone these days, and the Honor Magic 7 Plus duly delivers. Its 6.8in panel has a wonderfully crisp 2800×1280 resolution (not the highest out there, but more than enough to do justice to Full HD video), and can scale between 1 and 120Hz depending on how much action there is onscreen.

It’s an OLED, so naturally colours look brilliantly vibrant and contrast is simply epic. Viewing angles are top notch, too, with the subtle 2.5D glass largely keeping light reflections at bay. They’re certainly nowhere near as distracting as with proper curved-edge display – like, say, the outgoing Honor Magic 6 Pro.

The two Magic generations claim the same impressive 5000 nits peak brightness, but that only really applies to a small part of the screen when showing HDR content (both are Dolby Vision certified). The 1600 nits typical brightness is a lot more realistic, and only falls short of the blindingly bright Google pixel 9 Pro XL – it’s otherwise up there with the best high-end handsets. Even on very sunny days I had no trouble seeing what was on screen.

More importantly, this phone does its very best to protect your retinas – and not just by dialling down the brightness once the sun sets. Automatically adjusting colour temperature, stripping out sleep-sapping blue light and dimming at a high frequency are nothing new, but the clever defocus setting is unique. It subtly creates the effect of content being further away than it actually is, by changing colours at the edge of the screen and adding a blue-yellow tint to text edges; not every app supports it, but eye strain should be reduced in the ones that do. It didn’t exactly make me feel refreshed at the end of the day, but I didn’t have any aches or strains either.

I was also impressed with the Magic 7 Pro’s sound setup. Stereo speakers, one at either end of the phone, produce loud and engaging audio, with a lot more body than I’m used to from Android phones. This is comfortably up there with the iPhone 16 Pro Max for balanced audio with plenty of depth.

Cameras: brings the zoom

On to what’s arguably the main event. The Magic 7 Pro starts strong on the camera hardware front: the first of its three rear snappers has a large 1/1.3in sensor, 50MP pixel count, optical image stabilisation and a variable aperture lens. The 50MP ultrawide has autofocus to double as a macro shooter, and Honor’s Eagle Eye processing is on hand to accurately track fast moving subjects.

The periscope telephoto lens has a 1/1.4in sensor – about as big as it gets for a zoom camera right now – with a whopping 200MP resolution. OIS keeps it steady at 3x optical zoom, while cloud-based AI Super Zoom steps in beyond 30x to try and make up for any missing picture information. A lot more on that further down.

I like that Honor doesn’t pick a side when it comes to colour tone. The Natural mode is there for those who prefer true-to-life hues, while Vibrant boosts saturation slightly for something a little easier on the eye. An Authentic mode tries to mimic analogue film, but personally I think it overdoes the vignetting and leans a little too cool on colour temperature. Xiaomi’s Leica Authentic is still my pick of the bunch, with Vivo’s Zeiss Natural Colour a close second. Most of my testing stuck to the Vibrant mode.

The lead lens is a consistently great performer in good light, capturing plenty of detail and creating lots of natural depth blur behind foreground subjects. There’s loads of dynamic range on show, with the HDR processing expertly balancing bright highlights and areas of shadow.

I wouldn’t say the variable aperture adds a great deal here, as there’s not really much difference between f/1.4 and f2.0. It tends to stick to the latter in auto mode until the light levels have dropped significantly. Honor has also overcooked the dramatic sun flares, which are meant to mimic how a lens’s aperture blades capture light rays; they looked obviously fake in quite a few of my test shots.

The portrait mode fares better, preserving stray hairs and loose clothing fibres while blurring backgrounds effectively. I like that Honor has brought the distinctive Studio Harcourt portrait mode across from the Honor 200 Pro, with moodier black and white snaps just a tap or two away.

Its 122 degree field of view isn’t the widest around, but the ultrawide camera was a good match for the main lens in terms of colour and exposure. Detail is preserved right to the edge of the frame, and there’s no obvious fisheye distortion. Those artificial sun flares aren’t present here, either.

The 2.5cm focus distance and very well controlled noise levels make it an excellent macro shooter, if you’re all about close-ups.

The telephoto offers 3x optical zoom, and uses sensor cropping for ‘lossless’ 6x snaps. Everything beyond that uses digital zoom, right the way up to a ridiculous 100x, and you’re offered AI Super Zoom once you go beyond 30x.

At 3 and 6x, this is a great camera – but one that’s not dramatically better than rivals with physically smaller sensors and lower pixel counts. I got similarly crisp and well-defined results from a Google Pixel 9 Pro XL.

Colours could often be wildly different from those seen through the Honor’s main lens – possibly a side effect of sourcing sensors from two different suppliers. My test shots were all still very impactful, with lots of detail on show and well-judged HDR; it’s just that the larger sensor and higher pixel count hasn’t helped it leapfrog the competition to any meaningful degree.

Honor does what many Chinese rivals do once digital magnification comes into play, smoothing out details in order to reduce noise at the expense of accuracy. A Google Pixel will look a lot noisier, but objects aren’t so warped or processed so I’d say the results are more true-to-life – if harder to make out after pixel-peeping. Here things could start to look a little painting-like.

AI Super Zoom takes this to the extreme. It’s done through the cloud so needs an internet connection, taking around 5-10 seconds to spit out a generative take on your shot. Some of my photos ended up looking like poster illustrations or cel-shaded cartoons, being too flat for reality – while others invented objects that absolutely weren’t there in real life. It ignites the “what is a photo” debate more than any other phone I’ve used.

I found that 30x magnification often got me too close to my subject, so there weren’t many situations outside of testing where the AI needed to step in. And if you think the end result looks good, it’s up to you whether you care it doesn’t show what was actually there when you pressed the shutter button.

Once the sun sets the ultrawide camera’s smaller sensor size becomes a limiting factor, struggling with details on distant subjects and exposing for highlights at the expense of shadows. The main and telephoto snappers are the go-tos, being basically on par for detail and stabilisation.

The zoom lens gave night skies a more purple hue, despite using the same settings, and neither managed to quite capture the warmth of the scene. Subjects under artificial light were closer to reality, and Honor has kept noise levels in check. I wouldn’t put it ahead of class leaders, which are both more consistent and a closer match to reality, but it can still produce very pleasing pics.

The Magic 7 Pro’s 50MP front camera gets top marks for clear, colourful and well exposed selfies. Autofocus helps ensure everything looks crisp from arm’s length, and dynamic range is very good. It’ll do 4K/60fps video recording too, though not in HDR like the rear cameras can.

Software experience: AI has arrived

Honor brought the Magic 7 Pro to Europe with the latest version of its MagicOS skin, running on top of Android 15 – a welcome improvement over the Magic 7 Lite, which arrived with last-gen software. The overall look and feel hasn’t changed that much from when Honor was a Huawei sub-brand, with the biggest changes clearly inspired by Apple.

That includes the iPhone Dynamic Island-like Magic Capsule, which surrounds the selfie camera pill with useful widgets for music playback, timers and audio recording. I like that they stack, so setting a timer doesn’t then stop you from skipping tracks on your playlist, but it’s properly barebones compared to the Apple original. Other iOS nods include defaulting to multiple homescreens instead of an app drawer, and separate pull-down drawers for quick settings and notifications.

There’s no shortage of pre-installed apps, with Honor having its own version of most of Google’s defaults. Gemini is the voice assistant of choice, though, and you get Circle to Search too. Honor has its own version, Magic Portal, which can also cut out parts of the screen to send to other apps as an image. I like how it can quickly pull paragraphs of text into other apps by tapping and dragging to the side of the screen, too.

It’s not a shock that Honor says AI is to thank for these features, as well as the ability to extract text from an image, translate spoken foreign languages in real-time, and even spot deep fakes in your video calls. The Notes app can also summarise long chunks of text and transcribe audio recordings, too. Or at least it will once a final firmware update lands – I’ve only seen it in action on demo units so far. Google and Samsung offer more functionality, but what’s here works as well as I’ve come to expect from on-device AI – it’s handy, even if you shouldn’t always take what it spits out as verbatim.

Honor reckons it’ll bring Magic 7 owners four major OS upgrades and five years of security patches, which is several years less than you’ll get from the latest Galaxy or Pixel device.

Performance & battery life: comes out swinging

With a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and 12GB of RAM, Honor’s latest flagship won’t leave you wanting for power. The Magic 7 Pro absolutely demolishes benchmark apps, with results on par with other handsets using Qualcomm’s new top-tier silicon. MediaTek Dimensity-powered rivals win out in certain situations, but there’s very little in it.

I’m more interested in real-world performance, and on that front the Honor was a superstar. Apps open in a flash, multitasking couldn’t slow it down a jot, and there was never a point where animations stuttered or slowed down. Only synthetic torture tests made it warm up to any noticeable degree (and arguably a little faster than the Vivo X200 Pro), so even heavy users won’t have anything to worry about.

This is a very capable gaming phone, too. I saw smooth frame rates in demanding titles like Zenless Zone Zero and emulated older games with no noticeable dips or drops. This sort of power really is overkill for most 2D mobile titles. Honor has stayed sensible with 12GB of RAM, as while you’ll find other phones with considerably more, I’ve not noticed dramatically better performance on them for the most part. 12GB of system storage is given up for virtual memory to even the playing field here.

Battery life was where the Magic 7 Pro didn’t impress quite so much. Silicon-carbon tech helped Honor squeeze a 5275mAh cell into a phone that could probably only manage 5000mAh of lithium ion battery, but that’s less than the Chinese variant gets – and is also smaller than last year’s Magic 6 Pro. As a result, I was burning through charge at a considerable rate. My daily mix of social scrolling, email, web browsing, video streaming, Bluetooth music playback and photography would put me under 20% before bedtime, which is nowhere near as good as the Vivo X200 Pro or Oppo Find X8 Pro could achieve. This is still an all-day phone, but that’s now not enough to claim class honours.

Honor claws things back with rapid wired and wireless charging, at 100W and 80W respectively. UK and Europe-bound handsets don’t include a power brick in the box, though, and you’ll need a specific wireless charging pad to manage the best possible speeds. Being able to top up fully in under half an hour over USB-C is nothing to sniff at, mind.

Honor Magic 7 Pro verdict

The Magic 7 Pro doesn’t leave you wanting for much. It has flagship performance, supermodel good looks, and features you won’t find on many Android rivals, like secure facial recognition. I wish battery life was just a little bit better, and Honor needs to commit to more years of updates if it wants to match Google or Samsung, but you’re otherwise getting an awful lot of phone for your cash.

I was blown away by its photographic ability at times, with all three rear lenses really packing in detail and having no trouble capturing moving subjects. I wasn’t so sold on the AI super zoom or how it artificially inserted sun flares, and thought colour consistency between lenses could use some work, but there’s no denying the results can look particularly pleasing.

That – and the fact it arrives before Samsung could launch its latest Galaxy – will surely help it reach a wider audience than any of its predecessors.

Honor Magic 7 Pro technical specifications

Screen	6.8in, 2800×1280 AMOLED w/ 1-120Hz, 5000 nits
CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite
Memory	12GB
Cameras	50MP f/1.4-2.0 w/ OIS, dual pixel PDAF + 200MP f/2.6 telephoto w/ 3x optical zoom, OIS, PDAF + 50MP f/2.0 ultrawide w/ dual pixel PDAF rear 50MP f/2.0 front w/ autofocus
Storage	512GB on-board
Operating system	Android 15 w/ MagicOS 9
Battery	5275mAh w/ 100W wired, 80W wireless charging
Dimensions	163x77x8.8mm, 223g