Honor Magic5 Lite/Honor x9a review

Flagship-grade, curved OLED

Unarguably, the most significant upgrade over the Magic4 Lite is the new OLED display. Moreover, Honor didn't cut corners with this one. The display uses a 1080 x 2400px, 6.67-inch AMOLED panel with 10-bit color depth and 120Hz refresh rate.

It's a big step up from last year's LCD on Magic4 Lite. The display also has curved sides, and extremely thin bezels and the results from our tests below make us confident enough to say that the screen is indeed flagship-grade.

There are no advanced HDR video certifications.

In manual mode, the display peaked at a respectable 531 nits, while in auto mode, the panel reached 864 nits, which is well above the advertised 800 nits from Honor. It's also enough to rival any modern smartphone, even from the higher tiers.

Color accuracy isn't amazing in the default Vivid color mode as the whites and grays are noticeably blue-ish. Switching over to the Natural color preset, however, will guarantee you excellent color accuracy with an average dE2000 of just 1.1 against the sRGB color space.

While last year's Magci4 Lite offered some sort of adaptive refresh rate, the Magic5 Lite skips it almost entirely. Except for video player apps like YouTube, the system would run the display at 120Hz at all times, no matter the scenario, which may not be optimal for battery endurance.

Battery life

The newer Magic5 Lite offers a slightly bigger 5,100 mAh battery than its predecessor's 4,800 mAh cell, and combined with the more efficient OLED panel, the Magic5 Lite is able to provide longer times away from the socket. Much longer in some cases.

The video playback score, for example, is considerably higher on the newer Magic5 Lite, which is an expected outcome when swapping out the LCD panel for an OLED one. However, web browsing runtimes have fallen a bit, which is a bummer as this test is very much representative not only of general web browsing but also of the use of assorted social media apps. Due to the higher battery capacity, standby and call tests were better, but not significantly so.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Against its rivals, the Honor Magic5 Lite comes out as one of the best in its class, endurance-wise. Some competitors have better standby scores, but Honor's contender's screen-on results are rarely matched.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns, check out our all-time battery test results chart, where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

To our surprise, the Magic5 Lite ships without a charger, and you only get a USB-A to USB-C cable. We weren't able to confirm with Honor which regions don't get a charger, but since we are based in Europe and we didn't find a brick in the box, it's safe to assume that European units don't have it. Additionally, the newer Magic5 Lite supports slower 40W charging compared to its predecessor, which boasted 66W charging.

We ran our charging tests using the Honor 70's charger, and we got underwhelming results, for the most part. From 0 to 100%, the Magic5 Lite is just a tad slower than its predecessor, but it's considerably slower in the 30-minute test, whereas the Magic4 Lite got 20% extra juice in the same time period. Compared to other phones, the Magic5 Lite bests only the Galaxy A53 and the Pixel 6a, both of which aren't very fast, to begin with.

Speaker

The Magic5 Lite features a single, bottom-firing loudspeaker that seems to be borrowed from the previous generation as it sounds similar, and we got pretty much the same loudness score. That's -31.4 LUFS, which is an underwhelming result, to put it mildly.

Unfortunately, speaker quality isn't great either. Tracks sound flat with no bass, distortion creeps in at higher volumes, and overall quality is disappointing. All of the selected competitors feature a stereo speaker setup that's far superior to what the Magic5 Lite has to offer.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.