Honor is pulling a heck of a follow-through move atMWC 2023. You may still perceive this Chinese brand being overshadowed by its former parent company, Huawei, but ever since its divestiture, Honor has been working on itself. Late last year, it hit out at the foldable market in China with theMagic Vs phablet. Today, the company is not only bringing it over to Europe, but is also launching new flagship-class slabs for its Magic 5 series.
On first look, the Honor Magic 5 Pro takes after last year’sMagic 4 Proalmost to a tee: there’s the same “Eye of Muse” design for the rear cameras and the same 6.81-inch LTPO display topped with quad-curved glass and made to look like it’s “floating.” Under the hood, though, there are quite a number of change-outs going on.
Honor Magic 5 Pro
As the archstone of the Honor Magic 5 series, the Pro offers three 50MP cameras on the rear, a “floating,” vivid LTPO display, refined, extra hardware for display control, laser focus, color temperature, and more. It’s a minor update from the Magic 4 Pro, but still a whole lotta phone.
Those changes aren’t in the display: Magic 4 Pro already had an impressive panel with better than full HD resolution, adaptive refresh rates of 1Hz to 120Hz, and plenty of hocus-pocus and shiny badges (including an IMAX Enhanced certification) to make it great. The Magic 5 Pro carries most of that forward and edges a few specs forward: the PWM dimming cycle rate goes up from 1920Hz to 2160Hz, color calibration is set at 120 nits and 800 nits, and a peak brightness of 1,800 nits when showing HDR content.
Obviously, theSnapdragon 8 Gen 2steps things up from the Gen 1 on overall performance and efficiency. Honor has set up dedicated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennae infrastructure which the company boasts can produce a 200% boost in Wi-Fi performance and a 30% reduction in latency.
On stage, Honor also announced that its Magic 5 Pro is supposedly the first to have a silicon carbon battery. According to Honor, the technology offers 12.8 percent higher energy density. The company also said that the phone has a 5,450mAh battery, though the press materials we received say 5,100mAh.
Maximum charging rates have come down, though, with wired rates going from 100W to 66W and wireless rates also from 100W to 50W through Honor’s proprietary SuperCharge pad. It’s unfortunate.
Camera-wise, we’re still talking about 50MP primary and ultra-wide units, but a new 50MP Sony IMX858 has replaced last year’s 64MP telephoto unit. Zoom factor remains the same at 3.5x. If you’re looking for more optical gear, you’ve got a direct time-of-flight sensor, a color temperature sensor, and a flicker sensor. All of this is backed by Honor’s upgraded Image Engine with capture optimizations for sharp, quick-time events like, motion sensing, and multi-exposure fusion.
Honor’s arsenal of boasts also includes a first-place DXOMARK display score of 151, IMAX Enhanced Movie Master for viewing and editing video, AI Privacy Call 2.0 that tries to mask private phone calls with inverse sound wave generation.
The Magic 5 Pro also supports Google Pixel 4-like gestures, which allow you to wave your hands in front of the screen for things like screenshots. Here, the feature is enabled by the cameras in collaboration with Snapdragon, though, rather than a radar.
The Magic 5, while no slouch, gets a slightly inferior experience with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, peak HDR screen brightness of 1,600 nits, a (presumably less capable) 54MP main camera, a 32MP telephoto camera. We expect to fill out the picture here a bit more as the company makes information available.
The Magic 5 will come in black and blue colors while the Pro gets black and Meadow Green. The flagship phones will be available from April 6 in Europe and more international regions. The Magic 5 Pro will go for €1200 in its 12+512GB variant, while the Magic 5 costs €900 in an 8+256GB variant.
As for the Honor Magic Vs, other than the fact that it will have cyan and black options, we’ll have to hear more from the company down the line. It will be available in a 12+512GB variant for €1600.
