Honor Magic 7 Pro Preview: The Android flagship to beat?

After the Galaxy Note Edge started the curved display revolution exactly 10 years ago, the industry has gone full circle. The S25 Ultra is expected with a much flatter screen, and all other non-Chinese flagships have already moved back to flat displays. The Honor Magic 7 Pro is the latest to follow this trend (after the OnePlus 13 was announced in China with an almost completely flat screen).

We appreciate this trend as flat screens are much easier to work with, plus they are not as fragile as their curved counterparts. The flatter screen of the Honor Magic 7 Pro has led to a slight increase in the width of the device compared to the previous generation: 77.1 mm versus 75.8 mm.

This is one of the more substantial design and display changes, as the Honor Magic 7 Pro closely follows its successful predecessor on both of these fronts. The display has the same specs; it's a 6.8-inch OLED LTPO panel with a dynamic refresh rate up to 120 Hz, FHD+ resolution, and 5000 nits peak brightness.

The back of the phone is also very similar to the previous model, and the camera housing is again mimicking the Jade Cong shape—a circle inside a square with rounded sides. It's much more subtle this time, and there are four camera openings instead of the three on the previous model (although one is just a depth sensor, it looks symmetrical).

On the front, there's a pill-shaped cutout in the screen for the selfie camera and the 3D ToF sensor backing up the facial recognition. Finally, we have some interesting hues to pick from.



Honor Magic 7 Pro colors:

• Black
• White
• Gray
• Blue

Biometrics deserve a separate paragraph here, as the Honor Magic 7 Pro features a sophisticated 3D facial scan tech, similar to what the iPhone has. Furthermore, this model moves to an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner under the screen, just like the latest Galaxy models.

The Honor Magic 7 Pro’s three-camera setup boasts a combined resolution of 300 MP. It includes a 50 MP main camera with a large 1/1.3-inch Super Dynamic HONOR Falcon Camera H9000 HDR sensor, likely a rebranded OmniVision OV50H sensor familiar from the previous generation.

Additionally, there’s a 50 MP ultrawide sensor, and a powerful 200 MP 1/1.4-inch telephoto sensor completes the array. This telephoto sensor is suspected to be the 1/1.4-inch Samsung S5KHP9, the same one found in the Vivo X100 Ultra’s telephoto module.

Supporting the camera hardware is Honor’s Image Engine 3.0, which enhances images through algorithms for portrait refinement, light and shadow adjustments, snapshot quality, and telephoto optimization. The Harcourt Portrait mode is also available for further portrait enhancement.

We need to snap some samples to see how this new Image Engine 3.0 works on images and what the final result is. The 200MP telephoto is also very interesting, as this many pixels would allow for hybrid crop-optical zoom with very good quality.

As expected, the Honor Magic 7 Pro is equipped with Qualcomm’s highly anticipated latest chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Numerous leaked benchmarks of this chip have already surfaced, and the results look very promising. Some analysts even suggest that Qualcomm may finally have surpassed Apple in smartphone chipset performance.

It's too early to say what the exact scores will be, but the Honor Magic 7 Pro is joining an Elite club (pun intended) of Android flagships with the potential to overthrow the current champion, the Apple A18 Pro.

In terms of RAM and storage, the Honor Magic 7 Pro comes with a wide array of configurations, starting from the base 12GB RAM, 256GB storage mode, and going all the way up to the most expensive 16GB RAM plus 1TB of storage option.

There's no microSD card slot, but in 2024 this is not a surprise.

Honor was the first brand to bring this technology beyond China, introducing it with the Magic 6 Pro. Now, with the third generation of the silicon-carbon battery, silicon is incorporated into the carbon anode, enabling greater capacity.

Another great feature of the Honor Magic 6 Pro was its stereo speaker system. It was by far the best phone we've heard, beating gaming phones and other flagships. We expect the audio on the Honor Magic 7 Pro to be at least as good, if not even better.

When it comes to haptics, the previous model scored strongly in that area as well, and there's no reason for the successor to downgrade the pretty good haptic motor. Of course, there's no 3.5 mm headphone jack here, so you need to rely on wireless headphones or use an adapter.

It is, indeed, too early to say, especially as we don't know the global prices of this flagship yet. The Honor Magic 7 Pro features some upgrades to the camera system, both hardware and software, a larger battery, and faster charging (at least in China).

The latest Snapdragon chipset is onboard to challenge other speed champions, and this time around the display is flatter. All this adds up to one very potent and interesting device that we can't wait to test.

The most important thing here is pricing and availability. If Honor prices this flagship aggressively outside China, it has the potential to steal even more market share from the big guys.