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

I have a simple internal check I use when reviewing phones, especially those that rely on their cameras as a selling point: How many times do I wish I had another phone instead?

These days, it is mostly Vivo X300 Pro When I experience something else, I miss a phone whose camera remains unparalleled. Some phones might be better in terms of battery life, or have smoother software, but there’s always a moment when I’m taking a selfie, or framing a dimly lit photo for my food blog, and I think: “Vivo would have handled this better.”

In the month I spent testing Honor’s Magic 8 Pro, I barely remember thinking about it once.

The Magic 8 Pro is the latest flagship phone from Honor. It was launched in China in October But only get its European release now. At £1,099.99 (about $1,500) it should compete with the likes of it iPhone 17 Pro Max and Galaxy S25 Ultraalong with similar flagship phones from Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo.

Honor has long promoted its flagship devices as a photography powerhouse, the same strategy that brought success to former parent Huawei, but I’ve rarely been entirely convinced. They made a lot of good camera phones, but they were never the best in their class. I don’t think the Magic 8 Pro is quite like that, but it’s closer than the company has ever been to and could outperform any of the phones available in the US.

At the heart of the triple rear camera is a 50-megapixel main lens with f/1.6 aperture. It is joined by a 50MP, f/2.0, ultra-wide camera and a 200MP, f/2.6, 3.7x telephoto camera. It’s this last lens that the phone photography battles are taking place these days, with companies vying to produce not only the sharpest and longest possible zoom distance, but also cameras that top out at 2-4x, which is the perfect range for taking portraits, pets, or unexpected dramatic photos of that wonderful sandwich you just ate.

The Magic 8 Pro’s telephoto follows recent trends, using a large sensor and fast aperture, which is primarily intended to help the phone perform well in dark light, even with moving subjects and variable light sources. But it has a welcome side effect: giving the camera a narrow focal range, which produces a natural depth of field in images. It avoids the flat effect that plagues most phone photography, making shots from this phone more like shots from a larger camera.

None of this is unique to the Magic 8 Pro – flagships from Honor’s local rivals use similar hardware – but the actual quality of the shots here is impressive. Dynamic range is excellent, colors are warm and rarely oversaturated, and there is little noise. This applies to all three of the Magic 8 Pro’s rear lenses, although the ultrawide lens struggles a bit more than the others in difficult lighting.

So what’s stopping this from being the best camera in a phone? Some shots appear overly sharp, others have slightly increased contrast. Fast-moving subjects are hit or miss – I captured some great photos of cats, dogs and my nephew, but also a lot of them with unwelcome blur. I slightly prefer Vivo’s X300 Pro’s color tuning, but that’s because I admire its efforts to produce images that feel more like movies. But these are mostly questions of personal preference, not absolute quality, and the Magic 8 Pro appears to be as good as any phone camera out there from a purely technical standpoint.

While Honor has not followed its competitors in producing hardware add-ons such as Close extensions Which has become popular with Chinese OEMs recently, it has joined the trend of a dedicated camera button. The touch-sensitive side button here can be used as a zoom control and shutter button, but it also plays double duty as the “AI Button,” a shortcut to unlocking some of Honor’s many AI-powered features. These are mostly the kind of things you’d expect: image editing, transcription, translation, etc., and they largely replicate the features Google Gemini offers as well. Unfortunately, while you can customize the button shortcuts to a limited extent, you can’t use them to open apps outside of the camera and AI stuff.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the phone’s design either. The not-quite-circular effect can’t save the camera island from being an eyesore – which isn’t a problem unique to this phone, of course – and the back panel has the odd plastic feel I’d expect from a phone costing much less. Stick it in a box and you’ll never notice, of course, but at this price, look and feel should matter. MagicOS isn’t my favorite on Android either, with quite a few pre-installed own-brand apps and unintuitive design choices, but there are rarely more than minor annoyances. Honor is promising a reassuring seven years of software support for the phone in Europe, with at least four years elsewhere in the world, and the phone ships with Android 16.

Outside of the camera, the Magic 8 Pro has another major selling point: its massive battery. I tested a 7,100mAh global model, although the version on sale in Europe will be slightly smaller at 6,270mAh. The larger cell didn’t hold up as well with me as the last one Oppo Find X9 Probut it’s a phone that easily lasts two days, freeing you from having to plug it into the charger every night. Like other silicon and carbon phones, there’s reason to be concerned about how quickly the battery will degrade — we haven’t had these phones long enough to know either way — but it’s at least coming from an impressive starting point.

The rest of the performance is excellent as expected: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip It handled everything I threw at it with ease, and the 6.71-inch OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate looks great. There’s 100W fast wired charging and 80W wireless charging, IP68 and IP69K ingress protection ratings, and up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, depending on the market. But for the Android mainstream right now, most of these things are just stakes on the table.

Honor sometimes seemed to be part of the competition as well in the annual Chinese main competition, Delivering basic specifications but lagging a bit where it matters. The Magic 8 Pro is the first of its phones that I think can truly compete at this level. For European buyers, they will be helped by the fact that the latest flagships from Oppo and Vivo have only seen limited and inconsistent international launches, while Xiaomi’s new phones 17 pro and 17 Ultra It has not yet been released outside of China. Depending on where you live, this could make this the most powerful phone out there, in more ways than one.

For me, my monthly testing of the phone is over, and soon I’ll be moving on to the next model. I don’t know which phone it will be, but now I wonder: The first time this phone frustrates me, or its camera lets me down, will it be the Magic 8 Pro I wish I had instead?

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge