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Honor has established itself as one of the brands to keep an eye on in the premium flagship space, with last year’s much-celebrated Magic6 Pro winning a bunch of awards and topping plenty of year-end lists.
This year, the former Huawei spinoff is out to make a name for itself once again with its latest flagship, the Magic7 Pro, which promises to bring a more intelligent and intuitive user experience through AI. And for the most part, the phone does indeed live up to that promise, albeit with a few caveats.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the internal hardware, the Magic7 Pro more than delivers. This is a flagship through and through, packing a large 6.8-inch OLED display, a versatile camera system, and an ultra-fast processor. But, as with even the best phones in the market, it’s not perfect. Then again, those few drawbacks aren’t significant enough to bring the whole package down.
At first glance, it doesn’t look like much has changed from the Magic6 Pro to the Magic7 Pro in terms of design. Upon closer inspection, however, you do see some subtle differences. And these differences, in my opinion, give the Magic7 Pro a sleeker and more refined form factor compared to its predecessor.
Chief among them is the overall flatter design. Both the front and the back of the Magic7 Pro are flatter than the Magic6 Pro, which gives it a better in-hand feel. The Magic7 Pro’s camera array also has a more symmetrical four-hole arrangement, which I prefer over 6 Pro’s triangular three-hole arrangement.
The Magic7 Pro’s weight is reportedly unchanged from the Magic6 Pro, but it does feel slightly heftier than its predecessor — at least to me. It’s probably because it’s a tad bit wider. I wouldn’t say it’s unwieldy or anything, though I would have preferred a much lighter phone.
AI refinements
In terms of performance, the new flagship is expectedly speedy. After all, it’s powered by a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which is currently Qualcomm’s fastest and most capable processor found in this year’s flagships. It can handle just about any task you throw at it with relative ease.
What’s perhaps more impressive to me in the performance department is the use of AI to improve the processor’s efficiency. In gaming, for example, the Magic7 Pro can use what I assume is an AI upscaling feature to increase frame rates and improve visual fidelity without putting extra strain on the GPU. And as a result, you can enjoy better-looking and better-performing games with less heat output and battery drain. You can access these settings via Honor’s Game Manager overlay.
That’s just one example, of course. I’m sure the onboard NPU also works its AI magic — pun intended — in tasks outside of gaming. And I believe it’s this clever use of AI, along with good software optimization, that allows the Magic7 Pro to have such great battery life. I was able to push the battery close to two days on a single charge with moderate usage that included social media, video streaming, and a fair bit of gaming. Your mileage might vary, but I don’t expect battery life to be an issue regardless of how heavily you use your phone.
I must point out though that the review unit I have is the variant with a 5,850 mAh cell, not the one with 5,270 mAh. That could be a factor in battery life, so do make sure to check the specs of the unit you’re getting.
When you do eventually drain the battery, you’ll be glad to know that the Honor Magic7 Pro doesn’t take long to fully juice up, with it supporting a maximum wired charging rate of up to 100W. Using the included cable and charging brick, I was able to power it back from 2% to 100% in about 30 minutes. That’s pretty fast. The Magic7 Pro also supports up to 50W wireless charging.
AI magic
Being a flagship release, the Magic7 Pro has a bunch of nifty AI tricks up its sleeve. Most of these work as advertised, though I would say not all are as useful as I had hoped. Others, meanwhile, could probably use more time in development.
For example, the Honor Notes app supports AI transcription and summarization, but its accuracy can be hit-or-miss. Sometimes, the AI can add information not part of the transcribed or summarized media, while other times, it misses key information. The whole process is also prone to delays.
One feature I find very useful is Magic Portal, an AI-powered searching system that lets you easily copy and paste content between different apps. Let’s say, you’re interested in buying an item you found on a website.
Instead of manually typing the name of the item in the shopping platform of your choice, you can simply highlight the photo of the item by tapping the display with your knuckle and dragging it to the shopping platform’s app. And it works pretty well, especially for apps supported by the feature. I’d even go as far as to say that Honor’s implementation of the feature is one of the better ones that I’ve had the chance to try.
Maybe too much AI magic
The Magic7 Pro’s triple-rear camera system also benefits from some AI magic, for better or worse. On paper, that system is fairly solid, even for flagship standards, consisting of a 1/1.3-inch 50MP primary lens with a f/1.4 to f/2.0 variable aperture, a 200MP telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom, and a 50MP f/2.0 ultra-wide lens. In practice, however, it’s sort of a mixed bag.
Let’s start with the good. Generally, the Magic7 Pro’s 50MP main lens performs very well in both daylight and nighttime, capturing a good amount of details with rich and vivid colors. In some photos though, the colors can come out too rich, which gives them a more processed look. On the one hand, your photos can come out looking more dramatic. On the other hand, they are not accurate to what your eyes see in real life. Still, if I were to assess the overall performance, the main lens remains very strong.
The 50MP ultra-wide lens, meanwhile, is fairly capable as well. But it is perhaps the least consistent lens among the three, when it comes to color and details.
Last is the 200MP telephoto lens, which is what I’m most torn about. I always love the inclusion of a telephoto lens in a phone’s camera system. Sure, they never perform as well as a dedicated lens, but they do make the phone’s camera system more versatile. And the telephoto lens here works very well when you’re using the optical zoom. It’s only when the AI kicks in that the experience goes from good to not-so-good.
When you zoom at 30x onwards, you get the option to use AI Super Zoom, which uses cloud computing to sharpen your photo. That’s if you have a working internet connection. The results are — to use the word again — hit-or-miss. Some photos come out fine, while others look straight up like they were generated by an AI from scratch. So my advice is to cap zoom distance at 10x, if you want to maintain the quality of your photo.
Overall, the Magic7 Pro’s cameras are, as I said previously, a mixed bag. I love the system’s versatility, especially the inclusion of camera features like Studio Harcourt portrait shots, which debuted on the Honor 200 series. But I also don’t like how the AI can take some less-than-subtle creative liberties with your photos and make them look unnatural and overprocessed. The good news is that these AI features are optional, so you always have the option to turn them off.
Even with the few downsides, I do still think the Magic7 Pro is an impressive flagship. And spec-for-spec, it has all the hardware power to compete with the current heavy-hitters in the Android market, including the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Its speakers are also especially loud, which is a big win in my book. (The S25 Ultra’s speakers are nicer too this year than last year’s S24 Ultra — good job, 2025 flagships!)
As often the case, your choice of which to get has to ultimately come down to what features are most important to you. Priced at P59,999, the Magic7 Pro is a premium phone, and there are a couple of more affordable alternatives that can deliver a similar experience.
If you want an equally capable phone that has a smaller, more pocketable form factor, the Xiaomi 15, which starts at P45,999, is an easy choice. Meanwhile, if you want another strong, feature-rich all-arounder, the OnePlus 13, which starts at P54,990, is a good choice.
If flagships are more your style and you can overlook some of the downsides mentioned in the review, the Magic7 Pro is for you. Its price is a lot more reasonable compared to the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which starts at a whopping P84,990. You can also throw the base S25 and the S25 Plus into the mix, but I very much think you’ll get more value out of the Magic7 Pro compared to those two. – Rappler.com
