Honor Magic4 Lite review

Magic UI 4.2 and Android 11

Although Honor's current state of Magic UI 4.2 looks and feels like Huawei's EMUI 12 we've tested on the nova 9, it's actually far from it. The same aesthetics, icons, themes, etc., might be enough to fool you, but the visual similarities are the only common ground. Sadly, the Magic UI 4.2 skips pretty much all of the major EMUI features. At least we can confirm for sure that the Magic UI 4.2 here runs on Android 11.

And that's a bit hard to swallow. The Honor 50 was released almost a year ago, while the Magic4 Lite's global debut was quite recent, and it's unacceptable that it still runs Android 11 when Android 13 beta is already seeding. Almost all of the recently released mid-range handsets are running the latest version of Google's OS.

Anyway, almost all of the default apps, aren't Google's stock ones. They are proprietary. We are talking Gallery, Phone, Weather, Calculator, Files, Notepad, etc. There are also a couple of pre-installed ones that can be removed at your wish.

Home screen, notification shade, settings menu

Unlike EMUI 12, the notification shade isn't separated into two parts, but it's instead of the usual design with re-arrangeable quick toggles and notifications. Unfortunately, you can't get to it with the usual swipe-down gesture on the Home screen. Some finger gymnastics require you to reach for the status bar to pull it down. We also couldn't find the toggle for automatic brightness control - you have to dig deep into the general Settings menu to switch it on or off.

Tapping and holding on an app shows only the "Uninstall" button in the context menu, so once again, you are forced to open the Settings menu to clear the cache, force stop a misbehaving app, adjust the background usage, etc. Lastly, we noticed that there's an aggressive background app handling, and as a result, we often found the apps we used to be killed by the system within seconds of minimizing them. Luckily, Honor seems to have whitelisted some of the most popular apps, which play well with the advertised RAM Turbo feature. The feature itself dynamically expands the available RAM by allocating a chunk of the internal storage and compresses the apps, so it can keep more of the said whitelisted apps open in the background.

UI customizations

We would go as far as saying that the current state of the software feels rather unfinished. Basic features are missing along the ones that used to make Magic UI unique. Gone are the multi-tasking features with the floating windows.

The good news is that the Honor Share feature is here to stay as long as you have an eligible Honor MagicBook to use it with. And we still have the screen-off gestures for waking the screen, for example.

Gestures

In addition, Honor gives you a choice between touch-to-unlock the fingerprint reader or unlocking only after you press the button itself. The second option is handy if you want to prevent accidental misreadings, which may otherwise lock the fingerprint reader, requiring PIN/pattern input to unlock the screen.

And to finish this section on a high note, we would like to point out that the Magic UI feels snappy, and responsive, and animations don't really get in the way. Mostly a clutter-free experience that may appeal to many Android users that are not necessarily after the high feature count.

Performance

This isn't the first time we meet the new Snapdragon 695 5G chipset, which is a successor to the Snapdragon 690. Despite the small incremental numeric change in the model name, this chipset is actually totally revamped. Along with the newer, more powerful CPU cores and GPU, the chip boasts 5G connectivity support and is based on a more modern 6nm manufacturing process by TSMC, unlike the older Snapdragon 690.

The main two Kryo 560 Gold (Cortex-A77) cores are replaced with Kryo 660 Gold (Cortex-A78) cores clocked at 2.2 GHz, while the six energy-efficient Kryo 560 Silver (Cortex-A55) clocked at 1.7 GHz remain the same. There's only a change in the name, now called Kryo 660 Silver. The Adreno 619L GPU has been replaced with a full-fledged Adreno 619. The SD695 now supports faster LPDDR4X memory at 2133 MHz as well.

The whole hardware upgrade is supposed to boost CPU performance by up to 15% and GPU by 30%. We put that to the test in our usual synthetic benchmarks. We've also put it against other competing SoCs available in similarly-priced rivals.

There's one considerable drawback to it, though, and that's the ISP. It doesn't support 4K video recording, so phones with this chipset lack the feature - downright unacceptable in 2022, if you ask us.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  2971
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  2225
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  2157
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  2063
• Realme 9 Pro
  2020
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  1906
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  1891
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  1848
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  1662

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  787
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  743
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  736
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  728
• Realme 9 Pro
  694
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  687
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  666
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  608
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  376

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  470348
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  437872
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  436640
• Realme 9 Pro
  401894
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  387218
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  384646
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  379313
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  244526

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  27
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  22
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  19
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  19
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  17
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  17
• Realme 9 Pro
  16
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  13
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  6.8

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  33
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  25
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  24
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  23
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  21
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  20
• Realme 9 Pro
  19
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  14
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  8

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  48
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  38
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  35
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  35
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  30
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  29
• Realme 9 Pro
  29
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  23
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  12

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  56
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  43
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  40
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  38
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  35
• Realme 9 Pro
  35
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  34
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  26
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  15

3DMark SSE ES 3.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  5061
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  3722
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  3631
• Realme 9 Pro
  2946
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  2899
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  2166
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  1316

3DMark SSE Vulkan 1.0 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Honor 50
  4071
• OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G
  3661
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  3570
• Realme 9 Pro
  2773
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  2746
• OnePlus Nord N10 5G
  2012
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  1267

The Snapdragon 695 5G shows great CPU performance in multi-threaded and single-threaded tasks. It even managed to get ahead of some Snapdragon 700-series and Dimensity 8xx and 7xx rivals with ease. It maintains the lead in combined workloads as well, getting closely behind the Dimensity 920-powered Realme 9 Pro+ and the Poco X3 Pro's Snapdragon 860 chip.

In heavy GPU-bound tasks, the SD 695 performs similarly to the Snapdragon 750G and the Snapdragon 480+, which is to be expected given that they all share the same Adreno 619 GPU. And it even takes a modest lead over some of its competitors. The Dimensity 920 on the Pro+ model, though, is still the more powerful solution with its Mali-G68 MC4.

Sustained performance

Sustained performance isn't really an issue with mid-range devices as modern budget SoCs are built on efficient manufacturing processes, and the CPU clock speeds are not high enough to produce much heat. In any case, we had to check if the Magic4 Lite's Snapdragon 695 chipset implementation was successful.

CPU throttle test: 30 min • 60 min

And we are happy to report that the sustained performance is excellent. The chipset didn't throttle for the first 30 minutes, and the curve seems reasonably flat without many sudden drops in clock speeds.

Once we got close to an hour, the CPU toned down to about 86% of its maximum performance. Still a good result after such long testing. Additionally, the surface temperature of the back panel was pretty low. No issues there.