Once a sub-brand of Chinese phone giant Huawei, Honor has been developing itself since it was launched in late 2020. So far, it has launched the Honor 50 in the middle class worldwide, but various difficulties have prevented the company from coming out with a true flagship smartphone in the West. since becoming an independent company. It even came to the announcement of global prices for Magic3 last August, but the phone was available only in China.
That changes with this year’s Magic4 Pro, which will be available for pre-order in the UK from 13 May and will be available on 27 May for £ 949.99. (Honor says there are currently no plans to launch the phone in the US.) This is a price point that sees Honor’s phone competing directly with Samsung’s excellent Galaxy S22 Plus, a 256GB storage option on the finished Pixel 6 Google’s Pro and the always reliable Apple iPhone 13 Pro. These are three excellent choices for future phone buyers and represent a tough competition for Honor’s latest.
On paper, Magic4 Pro is competitive. It has three rear cameras with high resolution, super fast 100 W cable charging and support for 100 W wireless charging, as well as a large bright, color screen with fast refresh rate. But while I liked many of these features individually, Honor’s software struggled to make ends meet.
Good things
- Fast fast loading
- Wonderful display
- Well-crafted cameras
Bad things
- Lots of software to inflate
- Aggressive smoothing of the camera in low light
- Software quirks
On the front, the Honor Magic4 Pro looks like most other Android flagships in 2022. It has a large 6.81-inch OLED display with a resolution of 1312 x 2848, a maximum brightness of 1000 nits and a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz. It becomes very bright and is beautiful and colorful. In the upper left corner is a pill-shaped cutout for a 12-megapixel selfie camera and 3D face-unlocking hardware, and there’s an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor about two-thirds down the display.
Honer calls this a “quadruple” screen, but it really only curves around the left and right sides of the phone, and I wish it wasn’t curved at all. Of course, the curves probably give the phone a more premium feel and I haven’t had a problem accidentally touching its sides, as with some curved screen phones. But in the end, I just lost the sides of the apps and the top and bottom of the videos around the curved edges, with very little benefit. The phone has an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance, which means you should have no problems using it in the rain.
Outside the box, Magic4 Pro runs Android 12, but Honor is only committed to two years of Android updates and two years of security updates. In contrast, Samsung now offers up to four years of Android updates, Google offers three (or five if you include security updates), and Apple is still releasing new iOS updates for the iPhone 6S from 2015.
The display curves around the left and right sides of the phone.
I don’t usually spend a lot of time talking about the biometric security options built into our phones these days, but the absolutely awful time I had to set up Magic4 Pro’s fingerprint unlock is worth mentioning. During the initial setup, I encountered a software error that led to my attempts to register my right thumbprint failed over a dozen times. Curiously, when I manually added three more fingerprints to the settings after the initial setup, I didn’t encounter such problems, so I suspect the problem is software-based, not the Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor Gen 2 that Honor uses in this phone.
The 3D face unlock function of the Magic4 Pro is more trouble-free and in a parallel test with the iPhone 12 Pro was only a fraction of a second slower under ideal conditions. But when conditions were more challenging, such as unlocking in a dark room, watching from a corner, or wearing a hat, Honor’s face unlock sometimes stumbled, and its overall application didn’t feel as reliable as Apple’s.
Unlocking with a face is fast in good conditions
Battery life with a 4600 mAh cell is reliable, and 100 W fast charging of the phone is even more. I spent an average of just over five hours on time from Honor Magic4 Pro and routinely ended the day with over 40 percent remaining charge. It took me a day of intense use, including a half-hour video call and an hour and a half of using the phone for cycling directions to see the phone reach zero in about 23 hours. When I did the charging test, the 100W charger that Honor provides in the box did a great job. It reached 46 percent in just 15 minutes after I charged it to 0 percent (also known as enough time to take a shower) and reached 100 percent in exactly half an hour.
Honor Magic4 Pro also makes 100 W of wireless fast charging, which in my test charged the phone up to 54 percent in just 15 minutes of charging and up to 100 percent at the 31-minute limit. But I would be surprised if many people actually take advantage of this feature, because actually getting these speeds involves buying both the Honor 100 W wireless charging stand and its 100 W power brick separately (the power brick that comes in the box for the wireless charging stand can only handle 80W fast charging). Honor did not answer questions about the prices of these two accessories, but I would bet they are unlikely to be cheap.
This is a relatively large phone in hand. USB-C, without headphone jack.
Honor’s Magic UI 6 software adds some interesting features to Android 12, but for the most part I was disappointed with the bloating. For starters, the phone comes pre-installed with about half a dozen third-party applications of dubious usefulness, such as Booking.com, TrainPal, Trip.com and WPS Office, along with first-party Honor applications such as the Honor Store and Honor Club. Elsewhere, I kept coming across supposedly useful shortcuts when I wasn’t looking for them. For example, your phone asks you to slide your finger up on the display to access the home screen once it is unlocked. But if you start dragging too far down, you’ll open a shortcut menu with links to a voice recorder and calculator app instead, and I accidentally activated this annoying amount shortcut.
One feature tries to make phone calls unheard of for others
Another feature is the phone call technology, which it calls “Just Tell Me”, which aims to adjust the sound coming out of the phone’s handset during conversations to make it unheard of for people around you. Honor says the feature works with AI Directional Sound technology, using the screen itself to transmit low and midrange sounds, leaving the handset to handle high frequencies, which it claims leads to less sound leakage. To my ear, it sounds as if it adjusts the equalizer of the incoming voice, reducing the volume to lower frequencies that can continue. The trick is that it only works when the phone’s volume is set to 60 percent or less. I signed up to use it, and it was certainly harder to hear the person on the other end of the call with the feature on, but it’s hard to figure out exactly how much of it was due to the fact that I had to turn down the volume, to activate the function.
In some cases, it was possible to remove some of my annoyances with Honor software. There’s a simple switch to re-enter the standard Android app drawer (disabled by default), and SwiftKey is easy enough to replace with Gboard. Honor software also aggressively shuts down background apps if you don’t think you’re using them, which triggers a jogging app I used to keep up the time – but fortunately, you can manually turn off all or just some of the apps. from this behavior.
His shot on camera is love-or-hate-it.
But even when I set up the software to my liking, using Honor’s Magic UI often didn’t feel like using a nearly £ 950 smartphone equipped with Qualcomm’s latest flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. His app drawer stuttered slightly when I opened it, and apps sometimes went awry and had to reload when I quickly switched to them. They’re small hiccups, but considering how good mid-range phones are, it’s not great to see them in a first-class flagship. Internal Magic4 Pro has 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, which puts it on par with the Pixel 6 Pro.
This neatly takes us to the Honor Magic4 Pro camera, which is housed in a large round camera protrusion on the back of the phone. The people I showed the phone to were divided on the design, but I like the way it makes a statement from the rear camera hit, instead of trying to minimize it. You get three Magic4 Pro rear cameras: a 50-megapixel main camera; 50-megapixel ultra-wide with 122-degree field of view; and a 64-megapixel telephoto with 3.5x optical zoom. It’s good to see that Honor is fighting the tendency for manufacturers to connect a high-resolution primary sensor to secondary cameras with much lower resolutions.
Network view
In fact, daylight photography is good, where most smartphone manufacturers …
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