Honor Magic4 Pro review

Magic UI 6.0 based on Android 12

The Honor Magic4 Pro comes with Magic UI 6.0, which is based on Android 12.

If you've used Magic UI or Huawei's EMUI before, you will probably feel right at home. There are no major changes in the design, and the iconography in the drop-down menu and the general settings menu remain the same.

Home screen, recent apps, notification shade, settings menu

The OS provides quite a bit of customization options. You've got a wide selection of themes, Always-on display styles, lock screens, icons and it even lets you choose between a simple Home screen style or аpp drawer-based one.

Customization options

Most of the Android 12 and Android 11-intrinsic features are at hand as well. You have the Privacy Dashboard, granular app permissions, notification bubbles, a green dot indicating if an app is currently using the camera or microphone, etc. However, we didn't find notification history, which should have been around since Android 11.

Privacy dashboard, notification bubbles

Honor takes security seriously, judging by the privacy features it offers on top of Android's standard security layer. You can lock away pretty much everything you'd like - apps, folders, files, images and videos, passwords, etc. All of those can be accessed with a fingerprint or with one's facial data. The system lets you choose what type of security can be used for either of those scenarios. It's important to note that not many handsets offer app unlocks or password autofill using facial data, as Android's standard face unlock can be easily fooled. The Magic4 Pro uses 3D ToF sensor for extra security so it's arguably as secure as your fingerprint data.

Security features and biometrics

Speaking of the fingerprint sensor, the Magic4 Pro boasts an ultrasonic reader previously used only by the Samsung Galaxy lineup. The implementation here is just flawless. There are a couple of key advantages of the said tech over the conventional, widely used optic fingerprint readers. This one is more reliable with dirty or wet fingertips, performs just as well in bright environments, works even if the fingerprint area isn't lit up (just placing your finger on the right spot works fine), and it feels a tad snappier and more reliable in the long run. The downside is the screen protection. There are only a few if any at all, screen protector manufacturers that make compatible glasses that won't render the ultrasonic fingerprint reader useless. Even thin, plastic display protection can mess up the scanner's performance.

Under the Accessibility tab, we found a couple of advanced features. Aside from the usual shortcuts and gestures, you can reduce the ring volume just by taking a quick glance at the screen or keeping the screen on while the system detects your face.

Gestures and shortcuts, Smart sensing

Honor hasn't neglected the advanced multitasking features. Swipe from the left or right edge of the display and hold to open up an app of your choice in a small, interactive window, which can be moved around, minimized or maximized. Opening more apps at once is possible, but they are moved to a separate side panel for quick access during multitasking. You can pin a lot of apps, too.

Multi-window feature

Some under-the-hood features are provided as an extra layer on top of the already existing Android 12 optimizations. There are systems in place (which Honor calls OS Turbo X), which regularly take care of storage defragmentation and make sure the phone stays as fast as it was in the beginning.

The OS would also suspend apps in the background to free resources but still allow you to continue where you've left off when you return to the app as if it was never closed.

Unfortunately, we found the OS to be really aggressive in app closing in the background. Honor really needs to do some tuning so it doesn't put off European uses. Sure, you can easily whitelist the apps you don't want to be killed by the OS, but it's an advanced feature that not every user will be up to.

All in all, we liked the new Magic UI 6.0. It offers sensibly more customization options and features than the older version, or at least the one that ships with the mid-range Honor 50 and Magic4 Lite. Despite some of the small annoyances, we liked the overall experience. It's smooth, snappy and reliable.

There's still some work to be done, though. For example, you can't change the swipe-down gesture from the home screen to show the notification shade, and you are stuck with global search. The context menu is limited to just "Uninstall" when you tap and hold on an app icon. There is no way to quickly kill the app or clear the cache. There's no easy access to the said menus through the recent apps menu either.

Honor search, context menu in app drawer and home screen

And finally, we would really appreciate an auto brightness button or toggle in the notification shade as well as sensitivity adjustment for the navigation gestures. The aggressive curvature of the display feels like you are swiping from the edge of the display but instead of a back gesture, we found ourselves swiping left or right without initiating the back gesture itself. It's not a big deal as you can get used to it rather easily.

Synthetic and sustained performance

The Honor Magic4 Pro employs Qualcomm's latest and greatest - the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC based on Samsung's 4nm process. The chipset hosts an octa-core CPU with three different clusters. The main Cortex-X2 core runs at 3.0 GHz, aided by a second cluster of 3x Cortex-A710 cores ticking at 2.5 GHz, and finally, a third cluster of 4x Cortex-A510 at 1.8 GHz takes care of less demanding tasks to preserve energy. The Adreno 730 GPU takes care of graphically-intensive tasks.

The handset's base memory option is 8GB/256GB, but it can also be found with 12GB/256GB and 12GB/512GB memory. Notably, the Magic4 Pro is one of the few handsets to come with 256GB internal storage as a standard, making pricey storage upgrades redundant.

We ran the usual benchmarks to see if the Magic4 Pro utilizes the chipset's full potential and how it stacks against the competition.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  4706
• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  3682
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  3657
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  3636
• Honor Magic4 Pro
  3512
• vivo X70 Pro+
  3469
• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  3433

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  1741
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  1180
• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  1169
• Honor Magic4 Pro
  1127
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  1126
• vivo X70 Pro+
  1106
• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  1002

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  1012896
• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  985226
• Honor Magic4 Pro
  980755
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  968359
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1080p)
  940400
• vivo X70 Pro+
  837833
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  801691
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  789332

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  55
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1080p)
  46
• Honor Magic4 Pro
  45
• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  37
• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  36
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  29
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  27
• vivo X70 Pro+
  26

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  50
• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  45
• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  44
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  35
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1080p)
  34
• Honor Magic4 Pro
  32
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  31
• vivo X70 Pro+
  29

GFX Aztek ES 3.1 High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  41
• Honor Magic4 Pro
  40
• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  40
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1080p)
  32
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  31
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  28
• vivo X70 Pro+
  27

GFX Aztek ES 3.1 High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1080p)
  51
• Honor Magic4 Pro
  40
• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  36
• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  35
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  30
• vivo X70 Pro+
  25
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  24

3DMark Wild Life Vulkan 1.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Honor Magic4 Pro
  10183
• Oppo Find X5 Pro
  9758
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  9751
• Xiaomi 12 Pro
  9664
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  7437
• OnePlus 9 Pro
  5701
• vivo X70 Pro+
  5332

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 performs just as expected with no major deviation from other smartphones powered by the same chipset. The difference you see in the onscreen, GPU-intensive workloads comes from the screen resolution. The Magic4 Pro's resolution falls somewhere in between - significantly higher than `1080p+ devices but slightly lower than 1440p+ handsets. Refer to the offscreen tests for a more objective comparison.

Still, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 implementation is good enough to outperform the Exynos 2200 and its predecessors, the Snapdragon 888 and 888+.

Sustained performance

Honor didn't explicitly mention that there's some sort of advanced cooling solution, but we are pretty sure there is some in place. We ran the usual CPU throttling test to see how the phone handles extreme workload conditions, although they are not representative of real-life use. No game would utilize the CPU or the GPU at 100% for such long periods of time.

We kick things off with 100% CPU load for an hour. In the first 20 minutes or so, the CPU retained about 80-90% of its maximum performance with a somewhat gradual decrease. As the device got close to the 30-minute mark, the CPU throttled abruptly and significantly to about 66% of its performance. The graph then shows two prominent spikes back to about 90% before defaulting back to 60-something percent.

CPU throttle: 30 min • 60 min

Throttling down to keep things in check is understandable, but those big swings are suboptimal for longer gaming sessions as they will likely produce big sensible FPS spikes.

We also ran the GPU-intensive stress test from 3DMark called Wild Life. It scored relatively low but somewhat expected from a powerful flagship like the Magic4 Pro.

3DMark Wild Life stress test