Honor Magic8 Pro review
At the risk of writing in the first person, I have a true story to tell.
It was 5.45 am in New York’s JFK airport and I had just jettisoned my “liquids” into the TSA security tray and took out my now-ageing and battle-worn Honor laptop to put it down as gingerly as possible.
“That any good?” asked the TSA agent, to which I replied it had lasted about seven years and was still functional and doing well, despite some heavy handling at tech conferences. He was clearly so sold on machines that are so heavily branded for the American market that he was unsure about anything that looked more esoteric or unknown.
So I’ve been using various items of Honor kit for a while, with the company headquartered in Shenzen as it indeed is. The latest device to be showcased from the company is the HONOR Magic8 Pro. I hadn’t expected to be at a press conference in pretty much the first (wet) week of January, but the device has just been launched for the UK market.
SuperNight Camera
This smartphone has a 200MP SuperNight Camera that aims to redefine low-light photography with human-centric AI photo agent. Paired together with its all-day 6270mAH silicon-carbon battery, this is an interesting combination.
“Honor is committed to creating the most exciting, intelligent and advanced smartphone innovation for premium flagship buyers in the UK. The HONOR Magic8 Pro reimagines a new future for AI photography that provides more choice for customers across our valued partners,” said Bond Zhang, CEO of Hono United Kingdom and Ireland.
The Honor Magic8 Pro introduces an advanced AI telephoto system, featuring a 200MP Ultra Night Telephoto Camera with a 1/1.4-inch sensor, wide f/2.6 aperture, OIS and 3.7x optical zoom. This setup improves light intake, even at longer distances. The 50MP Ultra Night Main Camera (f/1.6, OIS) and 50MP Ultra-Wide Camera (122°, 2.5 cm HD macro) offer vibrant tone accuracy and natural portrait rendering.
Zhang and team point to Honor’s AI Adaptive Stabilisation Model, which makes users “seven times more likely” (or so it is claimed) to produce better zoomed images, even without a tripod or gimbal. It also boasts a 4x improvement in shake detection accuracy and a 1x improvement in dynamic response.
Magic Colour
The Magic8 Pro debuts Magic Colour, an AI-powered colour engine that uses deep learning algorithms to extract 16.77 million colours.
“Through device-cloud collaborative colour migration technology, it achieves efficient colour tracking and processing for both global tonality and local fine-tuning, ensuring both high-quality output and smooth real-time preview. With Magic Colour, users can recreate cinematic styles, apply professional film tones, or build personalised templates from any reference image and use them directly in the camera or via Magic Portal,” notes Honor, in its product launch statement.
The AI Photos Agent enables one-tap or voice-based operations, including AI Eraser, AI Outpainting, AI Colour and AI Cutout. This allows for precise background removal, portrait refinement, artistic restyling and complex image manipulation.
To facilitate the capture of spontaneous moments, the new AI Button, a dedicated key independent from the power button, is mapped by default to launch the camera with a double press, even from a locked screen. Users can customise its gestures to access Honor AI, AI Settings Agent, AI Photos Agent and other features as desired. The Honor Magic8 Pro delivers a balanced mix of creativity, reasoning and contextual task handling by combining Google Gemini for cloud-based reasoning with Honor AI for on-device perception and execution, making every interaction more efficient.
The company says that this “marks a significant step” towards building a truly intelligent AI assistant i.e. one that is conversational, intuitive and genuinely helpful.
Users can access information and answers with fewer steps, using features like Overlay and Screen Context. They can streamline tasks and projects with functionalities such as Nano Banana in Gemini, Veo 3 and Connected Apps. Gemini Live additionally enhances interactions through real-time visual understanding and live translation.
Endurance & display
The device is powered by a mobile system-on-a-chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform, which features improvements in CPU, GPU and AI computing power compared to the previous generation.
It makes use of GPU-NPU Heterogeneous AI super-resolution and frame-generation technology, so that’s key for gameplay with high-resolution and high-frame-rate displays.
A 6,270mAh silicon-carbon battery means you can get a full day endurance out of the device and a 100W Wired and 80W Wireless SuperCharge is included.
Would I get stopped at JFK with one of these with the same kind of questioning? Probably yes, that’s a market flooded with Apple, Dell, HP and Microsoft Surface users, but I’ll keep testing these out for now. In the ever-evolving story of phones becoming more like cameras than cameras ever were, this is a new unit that is fun to use.
The HONOR Magic8 Pro is priced at £1,099.99 at the time of writing.
