The Honor Magic 8 Pro: A Premium Phone Photography Experience
The Honor Magic 8 Pro is a powerful smartphone that offers a premium experience for photography enthusiasts and power users. With its exceptional camera array, long-lasting battery life, and class-leading performance, it's a top-notch phone that works hard to earn its price tag.
In this review, we'll take a deep dive into the Honor Magic 8 Pro's features, performance, and value. We'll explore its design, camera capabilities, and overall user experience, as well as its pros and cons.
Design & Aesthetics
The Honor Magic 8 Pro has a premium feel with its aluminum frame and large camera bump. While the plastic rear material may raise eyebrows at first, it's a glass-fibre reinforced material that's more durable than glass or metal backs found on other high-end devices. The phone feels sturdy and rigid, and the screen is a NanoCrystal Shield unit with real durability credentials.
The camera island on the rear is quite large, housing all the camera sensors and providing a design element with a knurled edge. However, this means the phone cannot sit flat while facing the screen. The phone also features IP68, IP69, and IP69K ratings for resistance against high-pressure water jets and dust intrusion.
Camera
The camera suite is one of the highlights of the Honor Magic 8 Pro, offering exceptional detail and highlight/shadow detail in good lighting conditions. In low light, AI brightening features work well without too much loss of detail. The camera is quick to slow down the shutter speed to achieve a brighter result, which can introduce blur if your hands are less than steady.
The phone features a 50-megapixel main lens with optical image stabilisation, a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto lens with 3.6x optical zoom and image stabilisation, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide lens with close macro focus. All three lenses provide great quality, making it hard to decide whether the main lens or the telephoto is the headline feature.
Performance & Reliability
The Honor Magic 8 Pro is powered by the extremely fast Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, making it one of the fastest smartphones we've ever tested. The display provides excellent brightness for outdoor usage and produces lifelike colours for an immersive viewing experience.
The phone managed to max out the 3DMark Wild Life benchmark and achieved an average of 45 fps in Wild Life Extreme, a 4K gaming test. Throughout an extended stress test, I noticed minimal thermal throttling, suggesting the phone can achieve this performance for an extended time without issues.
Practical Considerations
The Honor Magic 8 Pro is rated for wired charging up to 100 watts, or wireless charging up to 80 watts with Honor's proprietary wireless charger. Standard Qi charging will work, but at a slower rate. The phone features a helpful IR blaster that's great for remote control in a pinch.
Value & Alternatives
There's a wide range of alternatives worth looking at around this price point. The Motorola Signature comes in with the same chipset tier, but at a lower price point. The Oppo Find X9 is another natural alternative with a strong focus on the photography experience.
Conclusion
The Honor Magic 8 Pro is an excellent flagship device that doesn't really leave anything to be desired. While there are minor drawbacks like the operating system issues, they will work themselves out over time, and don't detract from a strong recommendation if you're looking for extreme performance.
