Honor Magic5 Pro review: ready to become a flagship

You got to love this brand new Magic5 Series from Honor – it’s hard not to. It’s a Chinese behemoth known in the past for designing some of the most successful mid-range smartphones in the market, but this year they decided to push even further. The Honor Magic5 Pro was announced at MWC 2023, equipped with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor with 12GB RAM and 512GB storage.

Honor Magic5 Pro: Technical specifications

Basic Package:

• Honor Magic5 Pro smartphone
• 66W fast charger
• USB Type-C cable
• Silicone case
• SIM tray remover
• Documentation

Design

Elegance. That’s the first thought that comes to mind when you first open the main package of the Honor Magic5 Pro. It does give an eye chat appearance with a circular camera bump and Honor branding on the back panel does looks classic.

The design is quite familiar, with a big but still easily handleable body with curved edges and a punch-hole cutout in the top-middle of the display. On the back is where we can see however, some main differences from the Magic4 Pro; instead of glossy glass, the back instead uses a matte finish which is both more pleasant to hold and will retain much fewer fingerprints.

At the back we see the three main lenses of the Honor Magic5 Pro and on the original, the three cameras fit well into the overall look. On the upper side there is an infrared transmitter and the speakers. The charging port, SIM card slot, and the six small openings for micro and air intake are placed at the bottom.

The front display is equipped with a curved LTPO OLED 6.81-inch panel, with adaptive refresh rate support. An under-display fingerprint scanner is placed there and Face ID using the 3D TOF lens present on the selfie module. It also includes a 10-bit color panel that will render an impressive viewing experience, while the company also ensures to provide a 120Hz refresh rate with a great touch response. Note also that the brightness level can go up to 1800 peak nits, which is more than sufficient for extended outdoor usage.

Camera

Honor calls it the Star Wheel system (or Falcon Camera System), but to us, it’s the good old camera module. It consists of three 50MP cameras with a wide, ultra-wide, and telephoto. The wide camera is fitted with a larger 1/1.12 sensor with an f/1.6 aperture, the ultra-wide gets a brighter f/2.0 aperture, and the periscope similarly uses a brighter f/3.0 aperture.

For those who love stable photos/videos, the main wide camera comes with OIS support, along with the telephoto, making the ultra-wide the only sensor in the setup without OIS. The new camera system also has a new feature called Falcon Capture, which promises to be able to capture a crisp image of a subject in motion. I tested the continuous autofocus on the main camera and yielded excellent results.

The ultra-wide and telephoto cameras are no slouch either. One can love the ultra-wide lens that has autofocus, though it can be slower than the PDAF system found on the main camera. If you look at the telephoto lens, it has PDAF and can capture excellent images under good lighting conditions. For night mode, the images are still in focus and have great color reproduction. However finer details were lost as a result of image processing.

More Camera details from our review

The 50MP main camera pixel-bins to 12.5MP by default. Images look sharp and colors tones look natural as well. Contrast ratio is not over the top, and I didn’t notice any over-sharpening. Shooting at 50MP captures more detail, however it can look a tad noisy when bumping up the ISO. For those of you who are interested in its video recording capabilities, the Honor Magic5 Pro supports up to 4K60 video shooting at 21:9 aspect ratio. The OIS and accurate continuous autofocus makes for a great video shooting experience.

Software

Our review unit runs on Honor’s MagicOS 7.1, based on Android 13. In terms of software, it’s very fluid and easy to use for someone with little experience. MagicOS has many modes allowing the user to customize various interface functions.

The interface does deliver tons of exciting features that will allow users to interact with different elements with smooth touch response and an advanced refresh rate. Speaking of the storage capabilities, the Magic 5 Pro in our review, comes with a 256GB to 512GB UFS 4.0 space, which will be accompanied by 8GB, 12GB to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM.

Honor Magic5 Pro review:

While I find some of Honor’s UI choices practical, some are strange. For example, I like the Honor Search feature that will bring up a search box when you swipe down from essentially anywhere on the display. But to get to the notification shade, you must swipe down from the top of the display — you can’t even use a two-finger swipe. What bugs me about this is that even if I disable the feature, I still must go all the way to the top to bring down the notification panel.

For the gaming performance, I really love how the Honor Magic5 Pro can keep up with the most demanding of games. Even after playing a variety of titles for hours on end, the phone still has a good amount of battery and is comfortable to play with. I tried a couple of games like Asphalt 9: Legends and Wild Rift for one hour straight on the Honor Magic 5 Pro and it ran smoothly with plenty of battery to spare. I also played Genshin Impact and likewise, there was no issue even when playing online.

To be honest, the software interface reminds me of the great Android launchers, which provide different icon packs and screen transitions. So it’s a plus from me.

Battery life of Honor Magic5 Pro

On a typical day of use during our review, that consists of gaming, taking photos, music and video streaming, the Honor Magic5 Pro easily lasts until the night, with about 20% to spare. If you are more conservative with your battery use, you can squeeze out two days worth of battery life.

To complement however the large battery, Honor has included a 66W fast charger, which can fully charge the phone in less than an hour (during my review tests).

Honor Magic5 Pro review: Conclusion

The Honor Magic5 Pro is a well-rounded flagship smartphone equipped with great specs. The performance is good, offers decent camera lens, higher storage capacity, faster-charging support, and impeccable display quality.  It also has impressive battery life even for a hard-core user.

However, the Magic5 Pro is competing in an increasingly crowded flagship smartphone space. Aside from vivo, other flagship smartphones are equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, offering similar levels of CPU and GPU performance across the board. During my review however, the device performed in an excellent way.

I admit however that, the Honor Magic5 Pro is a solid flagship smartphone, one you should really keep in mind!