Honor steps up to the big leagues with the Magic 8 Pro

I have a simple gut check I use when reviewing phones, especially ones that rely on their cameras as a selling point: how often do I wish I had another phone with me instead?

These days, it’s mostly the Vivo X300 Pro I miss when I’m testing something else, a phone whose camera remains unmatched. Some phones may best it on battery life, or have smoother software, but there’s always a moment when I’m shooting a portrait, or framing a dimly lit photo for my food blog, that I think: “The Vivo would have handled this better.”

In the month I’ve spent testing Honor’s Magic 8 Pro, I scarcely remember thinking that once.

The Magic 8 Pro is Honor’s newest flagship phone, launched in China in October but only getting its European release now. At £1,099.99 (around $1,500) it’s meant to rival the likes of the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Galaxy S25 Ultra, along with similar flagships from Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo.

Honor has long pitched its hero devices as photographic powerhouses, the same strategy that brought its former parent company Huawei success, but I’ve rarely been entirely convinced. It’s made plenty of phones with good cameras, but never best-in-class. I don’t think the Magic 8 Pro is quite that either, but it’s closer than the company has ever been and could happily outshoot any of the handsets available in the US.

At the heart of the triple rear camera is a 50-megapixel, f/1.6 main lens. It’s joined by a 50MP, f/2.0 ultrawide and a 200MP, f/2.6, 3.7x telephoto. It’s this last lens where phone photography battles are being fought these days, with companies competing not just to produce the sharpest, longest distance zoom possible, but also cameras that excel at 2-4x, the range that’s perfect for shooting portraits, or pets, or unexpectedly dramatic photographs of that great sandwich you just ate.

The Magic 8 Pro’s telephoto follows recent trends, adopting a large sensor and fast aperture, which are primarily intended to help the phone deliver well in darker lighting, even with moving subjects and variable light sources. But they have a welcome side effect: giving the camera a narrow focal range, producing natural depth of field in photos. It avoids the flat effect that plagues most phone photography, making shots out of this phone more like shots from a larger camera.

None of that is unique to the Magic 8 Pro — flagships from Honor’s domestic rivals use similar hardware — but the actual quality of the shots here is impressive. The dynamic range is excellent, colors are warm and rarely oversaturated, and there’s little noise. That holds true across all of the Magic 8 Pro’s three rear lenses, though the ultrawide struggles a little more than the others in tricky lighting.

So what holds this back from being best camera in a phone? Some shots come out oversharpened, others amp the contrast up a little much. Fast-moving subjects are hit or miss — I’ve taken some great photos of cats, dogs, and my nephew, but also plenty with unwelcome blur. And I slightly prefer the color tuning in Vivo’s X300 Pro, but that’s because I’m a sucker for its efforts to produce photos that feel a little more like film. But these are mostly questions of personal preference, not of outright quality, and the Magic 8 Pro feels about as good as any phone camera out there on purely technical terms.

While Honor hasn’t followed its rivals in producing hardware add-ons like the telephoto extenders that have become popular with Chinese OEMs of late, it has joined in on the trend for a dedicated camera button. The touch-sensitive side button here can be used as both a zoom control and a shutter button, but it also plays double duty as an “AI Button,” a shortcut to open up some of Honor’s many AI-powered features. These are mostly the sort of things you’d expect: photo editing, transcription, translation, and so on, and they largely duplicate features also offered by Google Gemini. Sadly, while you can customize the button shortcuts to a limited extent, you can’t use it to open apps beyond the camera and AI stuff.

I can’t say I’m much of a fan of the phone’s design either. The not-quite-circular effect can’t save the camera island from being an eyesore — not a problem unique to this phone, of course — and the back panel has a strangely plasticky feel I’d expect from a phone that cost much less. Stick it in a case and you’ll never notice of course, but at this price, look and feel have to matter. MagicOS isn’t my favorite take on Android either, with a few too many preinstalled own-brand apps and unintuitive design choices, but there are rarely more than minor irritations. Honor is promising a reassuring seven years of software support for the phone in Europe, with at least four elsewhere in the world, and the phone ships with Android 16.

Outside of the camera, the Magic 8 Pro has one other major selling point: its enormous battery. I’ve been testing a global model, with a 7,100mAh capacity, though the version going on sale in Europe will be just a little smaller at 6,270mAh. The larger cell hasn’t lasted me quite as long as the recent Oppo Find X9 Pro, but it’s easily a two-day phone, freeing you from the requirement to plug in to charge every night. Like other silicon-carbon phones, there’s some reason to worry about how fast that battery will degrade — we haven’t had these phones around long enough to know either way — but at least it’s coming from an impressive starting point.

The rest of the performance is predictably premium: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset has handled everything I’ve thrown at it with ease, and the 6.71-inch 120Hz OLED display looks a treat. There’s fast 100W wired and 80W wireless charging, IP68 and IP69K ingress protection ratings, and up to 16GB RAM and 1TB storage, depending on the market. But for an Android flagship right now, most of those are just table stakes.

Honor has sometimes felt like a bit of an also-ran in the annual Chinese flagship contest, delivering on the core specs but falling a little behind where it counts. The Magic 8 Pro is the first of its phones I think is truly competitive at that level. For European buyers, it will be helped by the fact that Oppo and Vivo’s most recent flagships have only had inconsistent, limited international launches, while Xiaomi’s new 17 Pro and 17 Ultra haven’t yet released outside China. Depending on where you live, that might make this the most powerful phone around right now, in more ways than one.

As for me, my month testing the phone is up, and soon I’ll switch to the next model. I don’t know what phone that’ll be, but now I wonder: the first time it frustrates me, or its camera lets me down, will it be the Magic 8 Pro I wish I was using instead?

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge