Continue the company’s momentum

Last year was probably Honor's best year ever, as its foldable Magic V3 won almost every “Best Foldable Phone of the Year” award in the tech media, and the tablet Magic 6 Pro finally established itself – at least in It seems so to me.

So with the new year comes the Honor Magic 7 Pro, the follow-up to the Honor Magic 7 Pro, which brings further improvements to the 6 Pro. What's more, while other Android phones struggled, Honor went ahead and gave us a device that stood out from the crowd.

For example, Honor is the only Android phone brand that still gives us true 3D face unlock like the iPhone does (meaning the phone uses depth mapping sensors to recognize the unique contours of our face). All other Android phones decided to give us the less secure 2D face unlock (which only uses a single selfie camera to recognize the face).

To be honest, under-display fingerprint scanners in all Android phones these days are so good that I wouldn't call 3D face scanning a must-have feature, but it's still nice to have. The Honor Magic phone is the only phone that offers us this feature on the Android side.

In addition, Magic 7 Pro, like previous Magic phones, uses a slightly wider 19.5:9 screen aspect ratio (compared to the 20:9 used by other Android manufacturers), so the Magic 7 Pro's 6.8-inch OLED screen is the first in history. The best ever. For a fast typist like me, the extra width is important. I found that I made fewer typos when typing on the Magic 7 Pro than on other phones because the keyboard isn't as cramped.

camera

Honor Magic 7 Pro is equipped with an impressive periscope zoom lens: 20 million pixels, f/2.6 aperture, 1/1.4-inch image sensor size. These numbers, especially the sensor size, are very impressive – much larger than most other phone zoom cameras. But Honor isn't the first company to adopt such a lens – Vivo has already used it in its two recent flagship phones.

Having such a large telephoto sensor allows the camera to produce natural bokeh and capture more detail and dynamic range. This zoom lens is definitely one of the best zoom cameras.

But not better than the Vivo X200 Pro's zoom lens. Maybe it's because Vivo had more time to fine-tune the lens, but when the two phones are zoomed side by side, the Vivo's images are almost always better. In the example below, note that the Vivo image on the right exhibits more bokeh and dynamic range. The image of Glory is not bad at all – this is a 10x image! It will almost certainly perform better than the iPhone. But Vivo's images almost look like they came from a real camera.

Still, we have to remember that Vivo phones have been dubbed the best camera phones by phone geeks for years, so there's no shame in Honor taking second place here.

Thanks to Honor's partnership with Studio Harcourt, the Magic 7 Pro can capture beautiful images in a vacuum (I'm not nitpicking), especially black and white portraits of people.

The Magic 7 Pro's main camera is also very good, but I've come to the conclusion that in 2025, the only real differentiating factor between a good phone camera and a great phone camera will be the telephoto lens. The difference between flagship phone main camera quality is getting smaller and smaller, because every phone, whether Apple or Asus, Samsung or Xiaomi, will have a very powerful main camera.

Software and performance

The Magic 7 Pro is powered by the latest and highest-grade Qualcomm chip, the confusingly named Snapdragon 8 Elite (this is the second time in four years that Qualcomm has overhauled the naming scheme of its flagship chip series).

Obviously, the performance is excellent because mobile chips have already exceeded 99% of people's needs for mobile devices. Whether you're stitching together video clips on CapCut, browsing Instagram, sending emails, or uploading archives to Slack, this phone never misses a beat.

The software – MagicOS 9.0 – has a new look, and I love it. There's more customization than before, and the UI overall has a fresher, more vibrant vibe. The phone also comes with a suite of AI features, such as generative AI photo editing and AI translation, as well as connectivity with Windows laptops and Honor devices, but these are really nothing new in 2025 as most phones offer some versions.

To me, battery life was decent, but not surprising. On average, the phone lasts about 10-11 hours outdoors before the battery drops below 10%. That's a few hours shorter than the iPhone 16 Pro Max or Vivo X200 Pro, but acceptable. I'm a heavy user who talks on the phone a lot. My 10 to 11 hours took me all over the city instead of sitting in one place with WiFi.

Overall, the Magic 7 Pro is a very refined and comprehensive Honor phone. As mentioned, I like that the Honor is different from other Android phones in some ways, like true 3D face unlock and a slightly wider form factor, but beyond that, the best Android phones are starting to feel very feature-wise. familiar. For most people who use a phone for a year or three, this isn't a big deal. But for someone like me who plays with my phone a lot, I started to feel like I could recite the latest updates from these phones in my sleep.

The good news is that Honor has an entirely different area where it's innovating – foldable devices. If I had to bet, I would say Honor will be the first brand to launch triplex into the international market.