Honor Magic7 Pro review

Nice 6.8-inch OLED display

There's not a lot more to ask out of a smartphone display than what the one on the Magic7 Pro delivers. A 6.8-inch OLED panel with a 1,280x2,800px resolution (19.5:9 ratio, 453ppi density), it has an adaptive refresh rate in the 1-120Hz range, 4320Hz PWM dimming, wide-ranging HDR support, and a bunch of software and hardware eye-comfort measures.

Honor promises up to 5,000nits of brightness under the right conditions (momentary peaks for small patches, we reckon), but that's not what we test for. In our standardized test, we measured a little over 1,500nits with adaptive brightness enabled - sort of a middle ground between the more conservative makers and the overachievers of the day. Similarly, the manually attainable 750nits is sort of just right - not needlessly high, not too low.

Refresh rate

As was the case with the previous model, the Magic7 Pro can dial its refresh rate all the way down to 1Hz even at minimum brightness (around 2nits), so you get to have a reasonably power-efficient full-screen always-on display, if you choose to do so. It's an adaptive refresh rate implementation, of course, continuously adjusting it based on content and interaction with the phone, up to 120Hz.

When it comes to games, it wasn't entirely smooth sailing in our experience - we got some of our usual titles to go above 60Hz, but some remained capped at 60Hz. It didn't appear to make a world of difference whether the mode was 'High' or 'Dynamic' either.

Streaming and HDR

The Magic7 Pro supports all major HDR standards including HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. We got HDR streams from YouTube, and Netflix was happy to oblige as well - in FullHD too, thanks to the Widevine L1 compliance.

It's not quite as great of a showing when it comes to the Ultra HDR standard for displaying photos with enhanced highlights brightness. The Magic7 Pro will indeed amplify the highlights of its photos in its own gallery, but there's no brightness boost for standard-compliant images in Google Photos or Chrome.

Honor Magic7 Pro battery life

The Magic7 Pro that we got for review is powered by a 5,270mAh battery - that's apparently the capacity for versions sold in Europe, both the EU, and the UK. A couple of years back, that would have sounded like a large capacity, but now 6,000mAh is more or less standard, and some of the latest models even go above that. It's even a downgrade compared to the Magic6 Pro's 5,600mAh powerpack.

The Chinese version gets a higher-capacity battery, at 5,850mAh, and that's also going to be the case for some markets outside of China. Either way, it's a silicon carbon anode battery, Honor's third crack at it.

We were more cautious with our expectations, given the capacity at hand, but the phone proved reasonably frugal in its consumption. The gaming test result was even verging on impressive for the chipset/capacity combination, at nearly 9 full hours. Video playback is behind the curve (14:40h), web browsing longevity isn't setting records either (13:13h), and the call time is also on the low end of the spectrum.

All things considered, the Magic7 Pro is doing quite well with what it's got - it's just got less of it than virtually all of its potential competitors. The Active Use Score of 13:45h is good, but it's not quite up there with other recent offerings in the class.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

Honor says the Magic7 Pro supports charging at up to 100W. Since our unit arrived without a bundled adapter (and that's the treatment you'd get in many markets, possibly all), ensuring we get the quickest possible charging time meant finding the adapter we received with the Honor 200 Pro.

Using that 100W unit, we clocked an empty to full time of 36 minutes, with the indicator showing 51% at the 15-minute checkpoint. It's one of the faster-charging phones of this generation, though it's admittedly filling the smallest battery of the bunch.

The above charger recorded a maximum value of 84W on our power meter, so the phone is capable of drawing more than, say, 65W, when there's a brick that can supply the wattage. That said, the 84W maximum was only for a brief instant in the early stages of the process. In practice we got essentially the same charging speeds with various 60-ish-watt adapters (a 66W Honor phone charger, a 65W Honor laptop brick, as well as two more USB Power Delivery adapters). The point is that a decent 65W adapter should be good enough for you to get maximum charging speed out of the Magic7 Pro.

The Magic7 Pro also supports wireless charging, at up to 80W using Honor's proprietary accessories, and the maker's specs claim a 44-minute empty-to-full run. Given that our wired charging test took 3 minutes longer than the 33 minutes promised in the promo materials, perhaps it's safe to assume that you'll be good to go in 50 minutes or less if you take the induction route - with Honor's peripherals, of course.

The Magic7 Pro has a host of measures that you can enable in settings to prolong the lifespan of its battery. When turned on, the Smart Battery Capacity feature stops charging a notch below the cell's actual full capacity. Safe charging, meanwhile, cuts off power once the battery is full and starts over when the level drops below 95% - ensuring you won't be constantly pumping electrons left and right if you have your phone plugged in for long periods of time. Additionally, you can have the phone charge up to 70%, 80% or 90% - we can think of a few people around the office that would be thrilled to have that.

Speaker test

The Magic7 Pro has a hybrid stereo speaker setup, as usual. Where Honor goes against the pack is in assigning the right channel to the earpiece/top speaker - statistically, when in portrait orientation, most other phones send the left channel that way. In landscape, the phone will switch channels to match its orientation in space. Each speaker will also play the opposite channel's track at a lower volume, in addition to its own channel.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker • Earpiece

The Magic7 Pro earned an 'Excellent' rating for loudness in our test, a standout performance in a sea of 'Very Good' results. Indeed, it does sound large and boomy making rivals like the vivo X200 Pro or the Find X8 Pro pale in comparison, though that does come at the expense of some distortion at max volume. That's with the sound settings in the default 'Premium Bass' position - 'Standard mode' tones things down a bit and is cleaner at high volumes.

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.