Honor Magic4 Pro and Magic V hands-on review

Honor Magic4 Pro

Even though Honor has been independent of Huawei for a year now, the Honor Magic4 Pro still has that Huawei feel.

The phone's razor-thin bezels mean that it has a very slim frame - which can make it difficult to hold. The overall design feels very curvy, from the rounded corners to the 3D rear glass panel, down to the super curvy quad-curve display and the round camera cluster on the back - no right angles here.

The pill-shaped cutout houses a 12MP selfie camera with 100-degree FoV, and a ToF depth sensor helps with portrait selfies while also enabling 3D face biometric unlock. Meanwhile, the lower half of the display houses Qualcomm's Ultrasonic 3D in-display fingerprint scanner, the same one used on the Galaxy S22 series. Honor says this fingerprint reader is 40% faster than the Magic3 Pro's optical reader.

The display is also marketed as the first LTPO panel in the industry to offer 1,920 Hz PWM dimming (for reference, the iPhone 13 Pro does PWM dimming at 480 Hz). LTPO also means that it offers an adaptive refresh rate in the 1-120 Hz range, while the touch sampling rate is 360 Hz. This sizable 6.81" OLED display has 1,224 x 2,664 px resolution and renders HDR10+ imagery with 100% DCI-P3 coverage.

The phone is running the latest Magic UI 6 (based on Android 12) and includes the Google Play Store, of course. It is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 coupled with 8-12 GB of RAM and 256 GB or 512 GB storage (no expansion slot). The new Honor Share feature simplifies file transfer between the phone, a tablet and a laptop.

The Magic4 Pro features an independent security chip, which securely stores passwords, biometric authentication data (face ID and fingerprints) and helps other services like electronic payments.

The battery capacity is the same as on last year's model, 4,600 mAh, however, wired and wireless charging speeds both went up to 100W (from 66W). Using the wired charger, you can get up to 100% in 30 minutes, a quick 15 minute top-up on a wireless charger takes the battery from zero to 50%. Wireless charging isn't as efficient as wired (even at the same power rating), so getting to 100% is a slightly slower - but only slightly, it takes 5 minutes longer.

The back of the Magic4 Pro bears a resemblance to the Magic3 Pro. There are also slightly thinner bezels - just 0.94mm, compared to the Magic3 Pro's 1.89mm. Even the front-facing pill-shaped cutout for the dual front cameras is also smaller. Honor managed to shave off about a millimeter in length and height of this opening.