Honor Magic 5 Pro review: The Smart Alternative

Back at MWC 2023, I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Magic 5 Pro, the successor to last year's Magic 4 Pro which had great hardware but was sadly let down by clunky software. Thanks to a couple of big software updates in the time I've spent reviewing the phone, the Magic 5 Pro has improved beyond measure. So much so, that we are awarding it our Editor's Choice award. It's simply that good.

Design

Sporting a neat glass finish (satin-like to the touch) on its rear panel that is dominated by the large but smooth circular camera housing, the Magic 5 Pro is a slippery devil on flat surfaces which demands that a case be applied. Other than that small issue, the mix of glass and aluminum materials of the Magic 5 Pro is rather pleasing to the eye. The display has curved edges on the sides but Honor thankfully refrained from messing with the top and bottom edges which are nice and flat to the touch.

The power button and volume rocker are located on the right-hand edge while the SIM tray and speaker chamber are housed on either side of the USB-C port. Everything is just where you would expect it to be, which is rather comforting.

Hardware

Performance

The 6.81-inch AMOLED display is bright and excellent in direct sunlight thanks to the 1800 peak brightness, with vibrant colors and highly responsive thanks to the 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate and 480Hz touch sampling. While the display defaults to a 60hz refresh rate we had the phone use 120Hz all of the time which helped keep everything moving smoothly. The display benefits from a ‘Discrete Display Chipset' which helps to improve the visual quality of moving images by delivering a higher frame rate whilst still achieving lower power consumption when gaming.

Those that suffer from PWM sensitivity may find benefit from the LTPO display's 2160Hz backlight dimming, although that depends on your particular level of discomfort. For what it's worth, the Magic 5 Pro has been awarded a ‘Circadian Friendly Certification' by testing body TUV Rhineland, the first phone to receive such an award.

As with the OnePlus 11 5G, the Magic 5 Pro is powered by Qualcomm's excellent Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and thus has bundles of oomph whilst still being incredibly power efficient. Coupled with 12GB of RAM and a handy 512GB of built-in storage, the processor produces a premium user experience. Whether it's gaming, browsing, or watching YouTube, I've not experienced any issues with performance; it's been lickety-split smooth in every scenario. I've included the usual benchmarks below for your perusal.

Battery

With a 5,100mAh capacity, the Magic 5 Pro will power through the day with enough left in the tank for you to catch up on emails and news the morning after. When you switch the resolution down to FHD+, enable dark mode, and reduce the refresh rate down to 60Hz, you'll be able to squeak through a second workday before you need to top up. That's without using any of the power-saving options available within the Magic UI software.

While the Magic 5 Pro makes do with 66W wired charging instead of the 100W that its predecessor enjoyed but it will still get you a full charge in just 45 minutes. The Magic 5 Pro also sports 50W wireless charging which achieves a full battery in around an hour.

Software

Having received a couple of big software updates, the Magic 5 Pro's MagicOS 7.1 is a pleasure to use. Based on Android 13, MagicOS 7.1 is much slicked to use than we experienced with the Magic 4 Pro in 2022. While it still takes inspiration from Huawei's EMUI interface, it's flatter, slicker, and more user-friendly. Everything is where you would expect it to be, and there are loads of options and customizations to be found. One thing we would like to see in future versions is the option to adjust the layout of the app drawer to match the 5 x 6 grid of the home screen.

Other than the presence of the Honor App Store and Honor Health app, MagicOS is pretty much bloatware-free.

Camera

As Samsung and others move towards 200MP sensors, Honor's Magic 5 Pro shows that it's not how many megapixels you have – it's rather what you do with them that counts. Its trio of 50MP modules consists of a main camera with OIS and a large sensor for increased light-sensing performance, a 50MP ultra-wide lens, and a 50MP telephoto lens that is capable of 5x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom. The telephoto lens benefits from an algorithm called Ultra Fusion Computational Optics which improves the clarity of images at 3.5x-100x zoom. The new ‘Falcon Capture’ tech aids the capture of fast-moving objects.

It sounds good, but how does the camera setup perform in real-life situations? In a word – superbly. The images produced from any of the three lenses are punchy with dynamic colors. Honor has gone easy on over-sharpening the pictures, and the results are pretty consistent regardless of which camera is in service.

The main camera is a joy to use, it's reliable, saves every photo and video, and the resulting images are exemplary. Low-light photography is also excellent, a word that applies to pretty much everything about Honor's Magic 5 Pro. There's plenty of detail and the images don't look like they've been shot in full daylight, they are representative of the scene in front of you but with nuanced details and lighting.

Using the 50MP periscope telephoto lens produces stunning results at 5x zoom and the typically difficult-to-use 100x digital zoom is still difficult to use consistently. It's a case of getting lucky and pressing the shutter button at the right time due to the somewhat erratic nature of full 100x zoom, much like it is on other flagship smartphones. 20-30x zoom is the sweet spot in terms of results and usability. We've included a few examples above.

Above is a sample of the Magic 5 Pro's video (and zoom) in 1080p resolution while below is a video in LOG format that has had LUT (classic mode) added to it post-production. Other than that, there are no edits or tweaks. All other sample pics and videos are, as always, in their original and unedited form.

Conclusion

Having learned its lessons with the Magic 4 Pro which suffered from a somewhat dated UI, Honor has come up trumps with the Magic 5 Pro. It's a superb meld of high-performance hardware, competent and slick software, stellar battery life, and a camera setup that simply works for any occasion. Currently priced at £869 (usually £949) in the UK, the Magic 5 Pro stacks up favorably against the likes of the Galaxy S23 Ultra in both performance and affordability.

If you want a phone that looks a little different from Samsung's offerings but with the power, performance, and versatility of a flagship it's a no-brainer to consider the Magic 5 Pro, especially when you consider the savings to be had.