Honor Magic 8 Pro has sky-high ambitions but isn’t | Tech News

I do know each tech company on the earth is speaking a lot about AI, but I want Honor wouldn’t. In the press release for its new flagship Android smartphone, the Honor Magic 8 Pro, Honor refers to itself as an “AI device ecosystem company”. The cellphone itself, which I’ve been utilizing for properly over a month, is stuffed to the gills with AI, and never all the time in a great way.

On the face of it, options like AI deepfake detection are helpful, but in day by day use, the cellphone feels prefer it’s dealing in gimmicks that detract from simply how strong this cellphone is. 

After attending to know the cellphone, which is out there to buy immediately at a price of £1,099.99, I imagine Honor should not rely a lot on the synthetic smarts it insists are the machine’s USP. The Magic 8 Pro is a very highly effective smartphone with an wonderful digicam, great battery life and intelligent software program that’s properly value contemplating as an alternative of equally priced high-end telephones akin to Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra or Google Pixel 10 Pro XL.

It runs the most recent prime of the vary Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset with 12GB RAM and a beneficiant 512GB storage, making this one of essentially the most highly effective telephones on the market.

The 50MP digicam on the Magic 8 Pro can take unimaginable photographs, significantly of people and in low gentle. Perhaps that’s down to the cellphone’s “human-centric AI Photo Agent”, as Honor places it. I’m more impressed by the 200MP telephoto lens, which improves upon final 12 months’s Magic 7 Pro’s 3x optical zoom with a stretch to three.7x. It kicks out amazingly detailed portraits of people, objects and landscapes.

“The Honor Magic 8 Pro reimagines a new future for AI Photography that provides more choice for customers,” Bond Zhang, CEO of Honor United Kingdom and Ireland stated.

Honor speaking about AI all of the time provides me the ick, and it places me off utilizing the wonderful Magic 8 Pro. I fear that this type of messaging and advertising can also be off-putting for the potential clients Honor is attempting to woo away from more standard manufacturers.

Thankfully, I can let you know that the Magic 8 Pro is value your money in case you worth what it has to offer in design, digicam and battery (and in case you don’t balk at spending more than £1,000 on a cellphone). The design may be very fairly, sticking with curved edges and glass the place nearly each different flagship cellphone lately has gone with flat screens and flat sides. Aside from being barely prime heavy with that huge digicam, it is a win.

The cellphone’s 6,270mAh silicon-carbon battery can also be a main plus level, simply giving me two days of life. It’s not fairly nearly as good because the OnePlus 15, although, which might stretch to a few. Either approach, this new tech places your iPhone’s battery life to disgrace.

It’s additionally one of the one Android telephones with absolutely secure 3D face unlocking and biometrics, akin to Apple’s Face ID. All different Android manufacturers keep on with much less secure 2D tech.

But it’s arduous to fall in love with the cellphone when Honor makes missteps. Though the firm’s tackle Android 16, MagicOS 10, is usually great, one of essentially the most annoying software program selections is with notifications. When you view them within the notification shade, they typically disguise all of the textual content, and swiping down on a single notification does not broaden it prefer it does on different Android telephones. Instead it’s important to faucet to broaden.

Honor additionally solely shows notifications on the lock screen the primary time they arrive in. If you unlock the cellphone after which lock it again, the notification disappears from the lock screen without end, even when you have not opened it. I can not discover any strategy to change both of these behaviours, and it makes me not need to use the cellphone. It’s the identical with Samsung’s pesky persistent Now Bar on the lockscreen of its current telephones. Stop it!

Good factor then that the show on the 8 Pro is great. The 6.71-inch OLED is beautiful to take a look at, and Honor stays one of the one corporations with an e-book mode for studying and several other very customisable choices for tweaking the screen to your liking.

Despite the digicam’s excellence, AI makes it worse. It’s non-compulsory, but there may be an AI enhancement mode you’ll be able to toggle on within the digicam app if you zoom previous 10x, which makes use of AI to upscale the standard of blurry zoom photos. It doesn’t work properly and creates an unrealistic, oil painting-like mess.

Honor’s Magic Portal is best. Touch and maintain an image in any app, and the system picks it up and allows you to drag it to a toolbar on both aspect of the screen to share to that app. It works properly, but is annoying in Instagram Stories if you wish to faucet and maintain to stop an image skipping forward, because the cellphone thinks you need to share it.

After stepping out of the shadow of former dad or mum company Huawei, Honor is doing properly to supply telephones that compete on the high-end with the incumbents like Samsung, Google and Apple. In reality, Honor tells me many of its cellphone clients are earlier iPhone house owners. I like the very fact the Magic 8 Pro has curved edges and a slim design, and if you’re not utilizing AI, the digicam is phenomenal, all on a cellphone with two-day battery life.

But the software program may do with some polish across the fundamentals. Deepfake detection and AI upscaling is perhaps prime of some people’s record, but I wrestle to need to use this £1,099.99 cellphone full time when the notifications are so annoying to deal with. You must nail the fundamentals, and too typically Honor forgets to concentrate to them.

The Honor Magic 8 Pro is out there to buy now from Honor within the UK.