Honor Magic5 Pro review: Celebrating the return of a dragon

Enter the dragon

The Honor Magic5 Pro, on paper, is incredible.

With a 6.81-inch 120Hz refresh rate LTPO OLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, a triple 50MP rear camera array, 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM, UFS 4.0 storage, and 66W fast charging, it seems like an absolute steal starting at just S$1,249 for 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.

If you go back in time, you'd also recall Huawei selling off Honor to ensure the sub-brand’s survival back in 2020 due to the U.S. trade bans.

It seemed like a logical move as Huawei’s own phone business seemed to be in a highly precarious situation, with phone sales dipping due to the loss of the Android operating system and services, along with the mobile chipset purchasing ban from the U.S.

TL;DR: The Honor Magic5 Pro has great hardware, and its value proposition is made even better by having Google Mobile Services and that low price point.

While there are claims that Huawei might soon be returning to global markets, it’s unlikely their phones will sport any Android OS due to the license suspension. It’s a shame because Huawei was consistently producing some of the best hardware in the smartphone market at incredible value before the ban came into effect. 

Now, it's down to Honor to take on the mantle, replete with the full suite of Android OS, GMS compatibility, and an official Singapore presence to bring back a dragon of a smartphone. 

This review will see if it can live up to those expectations. 

Beautiful design, eye-catching bump

The Honor Magic5 Pro looks stunningly gorgeous. Coming in either Meadow Green or Black with a glass back, the phone feels fantastic in hand.

The frosted glass provides some nice texture and fingerprint resistance while blending seamlessly into the glossy, colour-matched aluminium rails. 

The massive circular camera bump on the rear houses the triple camera array, and it’s eye-catching. Thankfully, it doesn’t compete with other rear elements and the circle is relatively clean with just a 100X branding for the phone’s digital zoom functionality.

While the bump juts out, the phone doesn’t rock on a surface because it's big enough to offer some stability.

On the front, the large 6.81-inch display supports a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, although it only goes down to 60Hz instead of 1Hz like some other smartphones do to save battery. It’s uses a Quad-Curved Floating Screen with curved edges on all sides, although the left and right edges are steeper. There’s an optical under-display fingerprint reader which is placed a little low, but it’s quick and accurate. 

The panel is bright and vibrant and legible under bright sunlight thanks to a peak brightness of 1,800 nits for HDR content. Watching content on it is great, with a nice colour accuracy and a slight saturation boost.

The power and volume buttons are on the right side of the phone, so there’s no need to stretch to reach the buttons on the other side if you’re operating the phone with just one hand. The speaker grilles are located on the top and bottom, and the lower rung is also where you’ll find the SIM card tray and the USB-C 3.1 port for charging and data transfer.

For connectivity, we feel obliged to point out that the Honor Magic5 Pro even supports Wi-Fi 7, which is great for futureproofing a device. You will, of course, require a Wi-Fi 7 router to make use of it. The phone also has IP68 dust and water resistance rating, which is excellent and expected on a flagship phone. Taking its design into account, the Honor Magic5 Pro is certainly shaping up to be a premium offering, even if the price isn't at that point.

Full Android and Google Mobile Services support

This is an often asked question for Android phones that hail from China, and as such, we felt it was necessary to point it out again in a proper sub-section.

The Honor Magic5 Pro is running on the company’s MagicOS 7.1 skin of Android 13.

As mentioned earlier, the phone supports the full suite of Google apps, which means you’ll have access to standard Google apps like YouTube, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Photos, and more. 

The MagicOS reskin resembles Huawei’s EMUI interface quite closely, with the same feel to the Settings menu, task switcher and other minor areas. There’s also plenty of customisation here, and I enjoy having large folders that can contain up to 9 apps which can be opened with a single tap, rather than having to tap into a folder and then the app itself. 

The software is fluid and responsive, and I didn’t encounter any lag or glitches during my testing, which is great. There's no doubt the Magic5 Pro owes its day-to-day fluidity to the hardware.

Imaging Quality

The Honor Magic5 Pro holds its own magnificently, living up to the high imaging standards that Huawei set in the past. The phone comes with the following cameras:-

• 50MP main (8P lens, 1/1.2-inch sensor, 4-in-1 pixel-binned 1.4μm, f/1.6 aperture, OIS)
• 50MP ultra-wide (f/2.0, 2cm macro, 122° FOV)
• 50MP Periscope Telephoto (f/3.0, 3.5x optical zoom, 100x digital zoom, OIS)

The rear plate also features an 8 x 8 dTOF (direct time-of-flight) laser focusing module and a separate LED flash with anti-flicker and multi-spectrum colour temperature sensors. When combined, they provide good, colour-accurate photos with plenty of detail regardless of whether you’re using the standard pixel-binned 12MP or full 50MP shooting modes.

Photos from the main camera at 12MP are vibrant, sharp and suitable for social media sharing right from the gallery without having to be edited beforehand. Thankfully, the processing that Honor does isn’t too overboard, which means photos look boosted without being too over-the-top.

I can’t say the 50MP images truly offer much in terms of detail, especially when cropped in, and it does beg the question if the increased file size is worth it. To us, it’s not, but if you want a 50MP image, at least the option's available.

Ultrawide images are also great, with the same colour rendition seen in the main camera, and the corners are corrected nicely despite its mild fish-eye effect seen in the image of Meiji Jingu Gaien above.

There is also a super-macro mode, and it does excellently with rendering details on close-up subjects like the markings on a tree stump we found while meandering through a park.

Images from the telephoto camera at 3.5x optical zoom is very well done. The colours are excellent, there’s plenty of detail, and the image processing is fantastic.

Moving up to 10x digital zoom, the images are still somewhat usable, especially if you’re looking to check small text and details. And of course, there’s up to 100x digital zoom as the camera bump on the rear will constantly remind you, but there’s really no need to serve your social media followers with photos resembling oil paintings of whatever you’re looking to snap. 

There is a Night mode available, but the resulting images look identical to standard shooting, so perhaps Honor has taken things into their own hands and saved us the trouble of having to switch to the Night mode tab when we’re taking photos in low-light conditions. 

The photos, regardless of whether they’re taken in normal mode or Night mode, are well-exposed with little noise. 

If there was one gripe, the Magic5 Pro tends to oversaturate photos, but the results we've seen make this mild inaccuracy very well-received.

Benchmark Performance

Although the newest flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip has been announced, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was the leading chipset during this phone's run, and is still a fantastic chip that evidently shows up in the benchmarks, everyday tasks, and general handling. Combined with LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 storage, the Honor Magic5 Pro is a flagship-tier device. 

Putting it to the test

To find out how the competitors line up specs and price-wise, check them out in this link.

To find out more about the tests we conduct and what they relate to, we've jotted them down here.

Benchmark Performance remarks

The Honor Magic5 Pro did admirably in all our benchmark tests, with figures mostly close to or on par with phones like the Xiaomi 13 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. It’s not that big a surprise, of course, seeing as those phones all come equipped with the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip. 

The Honor Magic5 Pro also made it onto our list of best high-end smartphones, and just from the benchmark figures, it quite easily bests the rest of the phones on that list. 

In real-world usage, the phone is an absolute joy to use. There’s absolutely no stuttering or lagging, and web browsing, gaming, or light work on documents and spreadsheets were all perfectly possible.

Battery Life

Our new battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone's battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more. 

Thanks to the massive 5,100mAh battery inside, the Honor Magic5 Pro is one of the top performers in our battery benchmark, with about 13.5 hours of simulated tasks. Across the phones that we’re comparing it with, only the Nothing Phone (2) does better, but that phone did have incredible battery life as it uses an older processor and has a lower screen resolution than other contenders.

There’s also 66W wired fast charging, and it only took 50 minutes to get a full charge from 0%, which is fantastic. There’s also 50W wireless charging, so it’s almost as quick as wired charging, making it an actual charging alternative for the Honor Magic5 Pro.

Conclusion

When Huawei’s troubles started, many of us were worried about the fate of Honor, especially after the brands separated and Honor had to exit from the Singapore market. It appears that Huawei’s choice was the correct one, and Honor hasn’t just been sitting idly by either. Then again, hindsight is 20/20.

The Honor Magic5 Pro itself is a true flagship-level offering that lives up to its old parent company’s hardware standards while giving users the conveniences they expect from a properly Google-backed phone.

The build quality is excellent, the MagicOS UI is intuitive and easy to use, the imaging performance is brilliant, and the phone’s general performance goes head-to-head with even more expensive flagship phones. That's not even factoring in its generous 512GB base storage at its asking price.

It’s tough to even think of a dealbreaker for the phone, but some things that might be nice to see in the next model would be Dolby Vision for the display, 1Hz refresh rate for power savings, and perhaps slightly faster wired charging for even quicker charges. Improving its appearance by moving away from the curved sandwich aesthetic would also make it a more convincing purchase. 

As it is, the Honor Magic5 Pro offers what many would consider as core flagship phone perks at a price well below premium offerings, which pushed us to bestow a Best Value Award to highlight the mileage you can get with the money paid. That, we suppose, is one way to bring about the return of a dragon. 

At S$1,249, the Honor Magic5 Pro is incredible value for money and brands looking to compete in this price range should be taking notes from Honor to see what they can improve on. 

The phone is available via its authorised retailers, its official Shopee and Lazada online stores, and its TikTok e-shop.