Honor’s latest flagship, the Honor Magic5 Pro, packs in a huge feature list that clearly marks it out as a flagship, but at an attractive price that undercuts similarly specced phones. It’s a large phone, and it doesn’t try to hide this. Instead, it revels in its substantive style, an eye-catching large display, and a reliable triple-lens main camera.
I’ve spent time with the Magic5 Pro to get a good feel for Honor’s latest flagship.
If there’s one thing that catches your eye about the Magic5 Pro is the curves. While there are straight edges on the device, where possible, the surfaces curve away from you. The screen is curved at the edges (which is aesthetically lovely but personally I’m not one for the slight distortion it offers with full-screen video), the raised camera island itself is circular, but with edges that curve away into the rear of the handset, and with the light playing off the very reflective rear the eye is drawn to the circular lens cover.
How you feel about this camera island is going to be indicative of the whole experience. It dominates the rear of the smartphone and is far from subtle. Honor, like many Chinese manufacturers, ships handsets with a TPU plastic case; even popping the Magic5 Pro into this case does not diminish the overpowering structure. This is not a svelte phone, and if that is something you are looking for, the Magic5 Pro is going to disappoint you.
The camera island does offer a physical advantage, though. Given its positioning, I can rest the island, and thus the phone, in my hand and have some purchase. It’s still a slippy phone, but the tactile island helps support it in your hand – and if you do decide to use the supplied case, you get more friction and most of the raised camera island.
I like some heft in my phones, and I’m pleasantly surprised how well Honor’s new handset sits in my hand.
Like many flagships, the screen dominates the front of the handset with as small a set of bezels as possible. The pill cut-out for the selfie camera is off-center, but given the amount of room the main camera needs, a centreline design may have simply been out of the question.
I’ve already mentioned the curved edges of the screen, which is not unusual but something I would have to compromise on when considering a purchase. The screen itself has variable refresh, moving from 1Hz to 120 Hz as required. It’s a bright OLED display, going up to 1300 nits brightness on normal screens but punching up to 1800 nits with HDR playback.
One of the interesting additions is a dedicated chipset to upscale video. With a resolution of 1312 x 2848, even 1080p HD video needs to be upscaled to fill the screen. Move down to 720p or even smaller, and this hardware delivers.
And again, that ridiculously sized camera island comes into its own. Watching landscape video, I don’t need to grip the device; I can just let the edge of the camera island rest in my hand; it’s more comfortable in the long term and more secure in the short term.
In terms of audio output, the twin stereo speakers have a good bass reproduction and higher tones are very clear, but it does get a but muddy in the middle ranges. Given the visual focus on video, having the speakers not ‘firing forwards’ out of the screen is a touch disappointing… it’s easy to mistakenly cover up one or both of the grills and muffle the sound.
Honor has joined several other flagship smartphones and pushed the battery capacity over the 5000 mAh level. That means the “all-day battery life” is achievable (assuming you stay away from any ridiculously power-hungry games. Charging with the bundled 66W wired charger takes around 50 minutes to go from empty to fully charged, although it’s just 15 minutes to hit fifty percent. Curiously the charger is slower than last year’s 100W bundled charger. Faster wireless charging is also supported at 50W, and once more, the convenience of wireless charging, at least in my day-to-day life, is welcome.
Honor has made some smart choices with the three lenses in the main camera; a fifty megapixel primary lens, a fifty-megapixel ultrawide, and a fifty-megapixel telephoto lens which uses a periscope-styled set of mirrors for improved zoom. It offers x3.6 optical zoom, and then software takes over to push it up to an ungainly x100.
I found the zoom performance weak in comparison to the competition, with a washed-out grainy look. Perhaps that’s to be expected at x100 zoom (which feels like “big number hunting” in the specifications sheet, I’ve never found a practical use for this scale in many years of taking pictures), but even the x10 zoom shows a touch more color washout and grain than I would expect.
One other area that stands out is Honor’s attention to capturing fast-moving images. There’s been a drive to speed up as many of the elements in the chain as possible. Think faster shutter speeds, quicker app code, and quicker scanning across the sensor,#. These all add up and have come together under the ‘Falcon Capture’ feature set.
As with all manufacturers, the real strength lies in pairing good hardware with good software. The sensors may not be the biggest in the flagship class smartphones, and the optical zoom isn’t as large as some of the competition, but it all comes together into a camera that feels reliable. Much of that comes down to the software processing. Honor is not punching up the vibrancy or saturation that some smartphones favor; there is a lightness of touch here to keep scenes feeling natural, but the main camera still picks out the colors to keep the photos feeling lively. It’s a nice balance point.
One of the weaker points of the Magic5 Pro is MagicOS. This is Honor’s flavor of Android, and while there’s nothing per se wrong with it, it has traditionally followed the UI conventions favored by Chinese smartphones rather than those focused on Europe. Switching to an Honor handset from another manufacturer will have a bit more ‘mental workload’ than, say moving from a Nokia to a Pixel. It’s not a huge transition, and if this is your primary phone, you’ll get used to this in a week or less.
This is most obvious on the home screen, with the option to resize folders of shortcuts, and widgets with app suggestions automatically populated. You also have Honor’s multitasking window system, so you can pop out smaller versions of each app in a window that floats over your main app… useful to look up something on a website when composing an email. I know a lot of people find this useful on a smartphone screen. It’s not one that works well with how I use a phone – I’ve always been a full-screen user – but I can appreciate this in the larger tablet screens, so I can see where it would come in useful.
Thankfully MagicOS is Google Play certified, so you have access to the Play Store, Google’s key apps such as Gmail and YouTube, and as much software compatibility as other popular Android flagships.
Google Play certification means that a number of apps have to be pre-installed on the phone when it ships – the aforementioned Gmail and YouTube, for example. And I get why Google would insist on this (and why regulators look at agreements such as this with a close eye). Naturally, Honor bundles its own apps as well, such as its Theme app, which allows you to customize your device or download for free (or for purchase) third-party themes. What I rarely appreciate are random apps that are bundled – presumably, there are agreements that make these arrangements worthwhile for both parties – these are thankfully able to be uninstalled… unlike the bundled Google apps.
The Honor Magic5 Pro feels balanced. The software may not be exactly as expected, but it does work, and I rarely found myself fighting it. Honor’s own software additions are minimal and are not forced on you; it’s an easy matter to make other choices rather than rely on first-party titles.
I’m still not sold on the idea of the curved display. Yes it creates a better tactile feel in my hand but is that worth trading the guttering at the side of the screen? This is very much a personal note, the curved screen is here to stay, and it does fit in with the rest of the curvy chassis… which I do like. There’s no getting away from the large camera island, but it actually helps the ergonomics of the handset
In considering the Honor Magic5 Pro, you also have to consider the price… here in the UK, this is priced at £949. For that, you get a premium system on chip, a massive 512 GB of storage, and a phone that can be with you throughout the day. That’s an intoxicating mix when you put it next to the competition. Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro Max with that same 512 GB of storage, and you’ll be paying £1529.
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