Honor Magic7 Pro review

MagicOS 9 over Android 15

The Magic7 Pro is running the latest Android 15, with a layer of the in-house MagicOS on top, v9 in this case. Honor is promising 5 years of software support for this one - for both OS releases as well as security patches.

It's the first time we're seeing this particular MagicOS version, but the Magic V3 foldable we had in the fall already showed us the direction Honor is going. Not a lot has changed going from 8 to 9, and we're getting a visually pleasing experience overall. The basics are covered in more or less standard ways, with the most notable generational change being the now rounder and more bubbly quick settings buttons.

Magic OS basics

MagicOS also has some features that we don't get to see everywhere, like the iOS-like pill-shaped Magic Capsule notification - useful for stuff like timers, and background music and video playback. Large folders can be seen on most Android builds by now, but on the Magic7 Pro you can even resize them. The cards functionality is also present - the widgets that you can add for in-house apps, indicated by a bar under the app icon.

More Magic OS

Then there's the Magic Portal functionality - Honor's system wide copy-paste solution. You long-press on, say, an image, and a bar appears on the side with pre-selected apps and actions allowing you to search, email, and put down a note about the highlighted item.

Magic Portal

Naturally, you get Google's Circle to search feature, as well as the Gemini assistant, and a live translation capability. AI summary for texts and AI minutes for voice recordings are also available.

Google AI bits

There's also some AI-based photo editing in the gallery, but it's limited to just erasing stuff - we didn't get a reflections eraser or a detail boost feature like we've seen on some other phones (not that their success rate and general usefulness makes them essential or anything).

AI Editor

Honor is also promising an AI Deepfake Detection feature for video calls - to be released with an OTA update in April. We're holding our collective breath.

Performance and benchmarks

It's the Snapdragon 8 Elite that powers the Magic7 Pro, Qualcomm latest high-end chipset that can be seen in the majority of Android flagships this year. We've had a bunch of them over for review already, so we have a pretty good idea of what numbers can be expected from the Elite and its custom CPU cores, as well as how it compares to Mediatek's top-tier SoC, the Dimensity 9400 that ticks inside major Magic competitors like the vivo X200 Pro or the Oppo Find X8 Pro.

Memory configurations of the Magic7 Pro vary by market, as usual. China gets 12GB/256GB, 16GB/512GB and 16GB/1TB tiers, while our global version has 12GB of RAM (LPDDR5X) and 512GB of storage (UFS 4.0).

The Magic7 Pro's benchmark results were pretty high for its hardware in our experience. It was near the top of our charts in the 3DMark GPU tests, and in both Antutu and GeekBench its numbers were above average for this year's crop.

Things take a turn for the worse under sustained load, particularly in 3DMark. The Honor couldn't complete a 20-minute Wild Life Stress test, calling it quits after nine or ten runs of the minute-long 3D rendering sequence. We did several tries both in Performance mode and in 'regular' mode, to no avail. The phone did successfully complete a one-hour CPU Throttling test, returning an almost impressive (for a flagship) result of 86%, with a very good-looking graph too.

CPU Throttling test