Honor Magic 8 Pro review: Potential for greatness

After its initial debut in China last October, the Honor Magic 8 Pro has been on a world tour of sorts, with a staggered global release that culminated in its arrival in the European region in early January 2026.

Fans of the brand who've been hankering for a true rival to the latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-powered phones – like the OnePlus 15 and upcoming Samsung Galaxy S26 series – now have their champion.

While it may look like its predecessor at first blush, the more time spent with it, the more it becomes apparent that Honor has made all sorts of subtle tweaks and upgrades between Magic handset generations to offer all the performance you could want from a 2026 Android flagship – but one that also addresses some of the previous 7 Pro's key weakenesses.

Price & Availability

The Magic 8 Pro first launched exclusively in China, back on October 15, 2025. It didn't start its global rollout until late November, reaching markets like the UAE by mid-December, before finally arriving in Europe and the UK, starting January 8, 2026.

While you can pick the phone up in a variety of storage configurations in China and other international markets, as with the last two generations of the Honor flagship, in Europe it comes in a single RAM / storage pairing, attached to the same price tag as before: £1,099 / €1,299.

In the UK, decide to buy the phone up direct from Honor before the end of January and you can nab a £200 'early bird' discount (using the code 'AM8PUK200' at checkout), knocking the price down to a more palatable £899.

To put the 8 Pro's asking price into perspective, its most like-minded rivals – the OnePlus 15, Oppo Find X9 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro, start at £849, £1,099 and £1,099, respectively.

Honor doesn't operate in the United States, so you'd only be able to pick the Magic 8 Pro up as a grey import, which means no warranty or customer support, as well as possible carrier incompatibility. Honor phones are sold in Australia, but the Honor Magic 8 Pro isn't available from known retailers at the time of writing.

Honor Magic 8 Pro vs 7 Pro: What's New?

• Magic 8 Pro has a smaller display
  • 6.71-inch (1256 x 2808, 120Hz) vs 6.8-inch (1280 x 2800, 120Hz)
• Magic 8 Pro's display is brighter
  • 6,000-nit peak brightness (great for HDR content) and a panel-wide high brightness of 1,800nits (up from 5,000nits and 1,600nits respectively).
• Magic 8 Pro features the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip
  • Up from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite (4th gen)
• Magic 8 Pro has a larger Si-C battery
  • 7,200mAh vs 5,850mAh (China) | 7,100mAh vs 5,270mAh (Global) | 6,270mAh vs 5,270mAh (EU & UK)
  • Now uses 15% Si-C, up from 10%

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Honor isn't looking to reinvent the wheel with the Magic 8 Pro compared to its predecessor, but there are some small changes that make a meaningful impact between generations.

The drop in display size might seem like a downgrade at face value, but paired with a larger camera module, smaller dimensions all-round, plus a lower weight, this latest flagship is much more comfortable to handle and easier to live with.

The new 200MP telephoto sensor promises better low-light performance, while Honor's AI-backed image editing toolset has been greatly expanded upon for this generation.

As before, Honor varies battery capacity by region, with the Chinese model getting the largest silicon-carbon type power pack, the global version landing in the middle, and the UK/EU version coming in with the smallest cell size (thought to be a measure to avoid certain regional taxation).

Generationally, the global model offers the biggest increase versus the 7 Pro's battery (jumping from 5,270mAh to 7,100mAh), while the European version is only 1,000mAh larger. It's still a big battery, just not to OnePlus 15 or Oppo Find X9 Pro levels.

Design & Display

• Measurements: 161.15 x 75 x 8.4mm
• Weight: 219 grams
• 6.71-inch LTPO OLED display
  • 1256 x 2808 resolution (458ppi density)
  • Up to 6,000-nit peak brightness
  • Up to 120Hz refresh rate
  • HDR10+ & Dolby Vision support
• Finishes: Sunrise Gold, Sky Cyan, Black

Less OnePlus and more Samsung, the Honor Magic 8 Pro displays iteration, not reinvention, in its design this year.

As already touched upon, the drop in screen size between generations makes for a more comfortable hand feel, helped by the phone's persistence with a convention-shirking micro-curved edge front and back.

The larger, black 'squircular' camera module looks both more imposing and better proportioned on the phone's back – compared to the 7 Pro anyway – but you are at greater risk of smudging the lower two camera sensors with a finger, depending on how you hold it.

You're looking at the Sunrise Gold finish in this review, but in most lighting 'warm silver' feels like a more apt description, as the gold tone is incredibly subtle, as is the molten metal effect surface finish that was so much more pronounced on the 7 Pro.

Internationally, you can also pick the phone up in similarly subtle Sky Cyan, and a tasteful matte black. In China, the phone is available in a white finish too.

It's a subtle adornment, but I like the addition of the Clous de Paris guilloché around the camera, as if inspired by a fine watch.

Honor has also jumped on the same trend as Oppo, by adding a new 'AI button' (Oppo calls its the 'Quick Button'), which is positioned low on the right side of the phone's frame. In both instances, it looks and behaves like the iPhone's Camera Control, with a physical 'click' when pressed, as well as capacitive pressure and swiping functionality.

Ignoring the name, I actually found myself using it as a camera shortcut far more often than to call upon the Magic 8 Pro's AI functionality, but overall I don't think it adds much to phone's user experience.

Despite being a perfectly elegant-looking flagship, Honor doesn't appear to have scrimped on durability, and while I have concerns about that micro-curved edge display, Honor has once again protected it with its own 'NanoCrystal Shield', which the company claims is 10 times more drop-resistant than conventional smartphone cover glass, and comes with SGS 5-certified drop protection to boot.

While I'm yet to drop the 8 Pro, one year on my Honor Magic 7 Pro – which uses the same NanoCrystal Shield tech – doesn't show any noticeable wear, chipping or even micro-abrasions along that exposed curved edge. Both last year's and this year's Pro also come with a pre-fitted plastic screen protector, too.

Honor has also bolstered the phone's IP-rated dust and water protection, first adding IP69-certification to the 7 Pro, atop IP68, and now offering IP69K-rated resilience on the 8 Pro.

While some might fault Honor for dropping the screen size between flagships, I still find it perfectly big enough for streaming media, gaming and multitasking, with the most noticeable difference being how some web pages would format (now looking a little more compressed).

The Magic 7 Pro had an excellent display of its own, and the 8 Pro otherwise has the same 19.5:9 aspect ratio; save for even higher brightness output – its 6,000-nit peak means HDR (high dynamic range) content looks great.

Eye protection has, in fact, been a key part of Honor's mobile user experience for a few generations at this point, so much that it now has a dedicated section in the phone's settings menu. It serves up automatic colour and tone adjustment – relative to your surroundings – combination PWM (pulse-width modulation) dimming (up to 4,320Hz) and DC dimming, and even new colour and contrast eye tests, built right into the 8 Pro's settings menu.

The phone's Full HD+ resolution paired with the new smaller screen size means it's a little sharper than its predecessor and on a par with the pixel density of rivals like the iPhone 17 Pro Max. In contrast, Google's and Samsung's latest and greatest handset offer significantly sharper screens on paper, but in side-by-side tests, I didn't find that the 50ppi difference made any significant impact.

Both the resolution and refresh rate (helped by Honor's use of LTPO tech) can scale dynamically, meaning better power efficiency between 1Hz, right up to 120Hz. OnePlus is pushing the envelope in this department, with its ability to boost to 144Hz and 165Hz when playing compatible games, but despite being a technical edge, supported experiences are few and far between at present – meaning the 8 Pro doesn't feel like it's lagging behind just yet.

A tip of the hat also has to go to the phone's biometrics, with an impressively fast and reliable ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, that's well positioned on-screen and even functions when the screen is completely off.

Honor is also one of the only phone makers beyond Apple to use an IR system alongside its front camera. It makes for quick but more secure face-unlocking experience than most other Android phones' RGB-only solutions.

It additionally supports simple things like attention awareness (keeping the screen on when the phone can tell you're still looking at it), to full-on gaze tracking, which can be used to open apps from notifications and dismiss incoming calls, all with your eyes. I just wish Honour had pushed this technology more since the 7 Pro, as the experience seems identical – with so much greater potential.

Performance & Battery

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor
  • CPU: 2x 4.6GHz, 6x 3.62GHz / GPU: Adreno 840
• 12GB RAM + 512GB storage only (EU/UK)
  • LPDDR5X RAM + UFS 4.1 storage
• 6,270mAh battery capacity
  • 100W wired charging (EU/UK)
  • 80W wireless charging

The main reason the Magic 8 Pro even exists is to make sure the company maintains relevance in the competitive flagship phone conversation, and there are few chips more befitting of its station than Qualcomm's current top mobile SoC: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

That comes paired to 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM (as tested here, but in some markets the phone can be had with 16GB), and 512GB of storage (some markets offer a 1TB option too).

As well as better power efficiency and marginally faster read speeds, the move to UFS 4.1 storage also means it's better optimised for AI functionality (thanks to technologies like Zoned UFS or 'ZUFS').

In artificial tests, the Magic 8 Pro's 8 Elite Gen 5 chip doled out almost 20% better multi-core performance than its predecessor's processor, while scores were essentially identical to its most similarly-specced rivals currently on the market – and one of the most powerful entries to boot, the OnePlus 15.

With the Galaxy S26 series expected in the next month or so (at the time of writing), it's now a case of seeing whether Samsung's 'for Galaxy' tuning of the 8 Elite Gen 5 will grant it a tangible edge over rivals like the Magic 8 Pro.

All this does, of course, mean that in real-world use, the phone is completely comfortable with pretty much anything you throw at it, with headroom to spare.

As such, you're future-proofed for years to come, which is just as well, as Honor upped its software support commitment last March from 5- to 7-years of both OS and security updates for devices like the Magic 8 Pro.

That's now comparable to the industry's best, as found in Google and Samsung. Long-time Honor users have also confirmed that the brand pushes out these updates in a timely enough fashion, so you shouldn't be waiting around for the latest features.

The biggest sting for users like myself in the UK has to be the phone's battery capacity. While the region's 6,270mAh battery is still impressively big, it's a damn sight smaller than you'll find inside the Chinese and international versions of the phone.

Not to mention, the new super-sized batteries inside big Android rivals, like the aforementioned OnePlus 15 (7,300mAh with 120W wired charging) and Oppo Find X9 Pro (7,500mAh with 80W wired charging).

That said, the Honor Magic 8 Pro doesn't have bad battery life; in fact, far from it. PCMark's Battery 3.0 test showed that the 6,270mAh doled out a score of 16 hours 45 minutes – which is about a third longer than the equivalent EU Magic 7 Pro mustered.

Real-world use was a little less impressive, effectively matching its predecessor with around 10 hours of screen-on time per charge; rendering this a two-day phone, even with a bit of high-fidelity gaming or other heavy usage.

The phone's 100W wired fast-charging (and 80W wireless charging), is also exceptionally fast. As there's no power adapter in-box, unless you picked one up as part of Honor various bundle deals, you'll likely have to source one separately.

While I don't have Honor's 100W SuperCharge adapter, I do have an 80W unit and even that refilled the phone's sizeable battery in under 50 minutes, being 60% charged after 30 minutes. Those with the same version of the Magic 8 Pro and its top-speed charger have reported a full recharge in just under 40 minutes.

The only fly in the ointment with the Magic 8 Pro's excellent fast-charging is that, again, the Chinese model boasts quicker 120W charging support, which marks a generation upgrade international buyers miss out on.

Software

• MagicOS 10 at launch (atop Android 16)
• 7 years of OS & security updates

As mentioned earlier, one of the big software gains between the Magic 7 Pro's release and 8 Pro's has been Honor's Alpha Plan and, with it, an improved software commitment to 7 years of both OS and security updates. As well as matching industry leaders, this 'upgrade' also helps better justify the value for money the 8 Pro is putting forward.

This is the first Honor phone I've handled with the latest release of the company's own user experience: MagicOS 10 (running atop the latest – at the time of writing – Android 16).

Whilst certainly not alone, the look, feel and features across aspects of MagicOS certainly take a lot of direction from Apple's iOS, and beyond Magic Capsule already aping the iPhone's Dynamic Island, and even cross-compatible AirDrop-style wireless file transfers with iPhone and Mac (a genuinely great feature), MagicOS 10 gets a glassy new coat of paint that looks decidedly iOS 26 coded, too.

You can dial the effect up and down across the home screen, app folders and widgets, and there's some premium responsive UI work going on (the glassy controls in the swipe-down quick settings gain an accent light relative to where you put your finger on screen, for example), however, Honor's visual language can prove pretty inconsistent.

The global version of MagicOS marries a number of first-party experiences with Google's apps and services . If, like me, you're already committed to Google's ecosystem, then there are a lot of duplicate Honor apps you'll likely never have need for (Calendar, Notes, Honor Docs, and so on). Thankfully, there's little you can't silence, disable or uninstall completely.

This also means you have access to features like Google Gemini (including Gemini Live), alongside Honor's various AI efforts. In fact, if there's one area that Honor has expanded upon more than anything else, it's the more expansive AI-backed toolset the Magic 8 Pro offers up, versus its predecessor.

By default, long-pressing the new AI Button gives you context-aware actions, like summarising the web page you're currently looking at, or saving content to the new AI Memories experience (also possible with a three-finger swipe down on-screen).

Similar in style to Nothing's Essential Space, Oppo's/OnePlus' Mind Space and Google's Pixel Screenshots app, you can save screenshots, web pages, YouTube links and images to AI Memories and after analysing your content, the app will then offer summaries or, at the very least let you organise captured content into folders.

As with rivals' competing services, AI Memories has merit as a digital scrapbook of sorts, but I'm not convinced it's an essential part of the MagicOS experience just yet. More functionality across more captured content types, as well as more dynamic and automated actions from Honor's AI, would help add more utility to the experience.

As well as offering yet another way to access AI Memories, the new Honor AI app that you'll find on your home screen also serves up a pair of AI agents: one for changing settings on your phone – allowing for spoken or natural language text entry to achieve a desired action – and one for photos, in AI Photos Agent.

This feels like the most meaningful upgrade to the Magic series' AI feature set; with a host more image editing tools, like object/person erasure, reflection removal, upscaling, out-painting, framing/composition suggestion and more, as well as the ability to restyle photos with generative AI to reimagine them in a cartoon, watercolour or pencil sketch style.

As with most smartphone AI functionality right now, the quality of results can vary widely, but Honor's AI out-painting, in particular, seems pretty solid. I'm always for more creative tools in people's hands, I just wish practically all of the Magic 8 Pro's AI functionality didn't rely on an active internet connection (with seemingly zero on-device-only AI processing).

Things also get a little confusing when some, but not all, of the features found in the AI Photos Agent experience are also available from directly within the Magic 8 Pro's native Gallery app.

Cameras

• Triple rear cameras:
  • Main (23mm): 50MP, ƒ/1.6 aperture, 1/1.3-inch sensor, PDAF (phase detection autofocus), CIPA 5.5-certified OIS (optical image stabilisation)
  • Ultrawide (12mm): 50MP, ƒ/2.2, 1/2.88in, PDAF, 122º FoV (field of view)
  • Telephoto (85mm): 200MP, ƒ/2.6, 1/1.4in, PDAF, CIPA 5.5-certified OIS, 3.7x optical zoom
• Front camera (21mm): 50MP, ƒ/2.0, 1/2.93in, fixed focus + 3D depth camera

Honor bills both the main and the telephoto sensors on the back of the Magic 8 Pro as 'Ultra Night Cameras.' Hardware-wise the setup appears very similar to the Magic 7 Pro's, but there are some tweaks worth mentioning.

The 7 Pro's main sensor's variable aperture is gone, with the 8 Pro's lead 50-megapixel snapper featuring a more conventional fixed ƒ/1.6 aperture. In side-by-side low-light tests, it's clear that the Magic 8 Pro's sensor and processing dress shots with better colour depth and are more dynamic at much lower ISO values (meaning a lower risk of noise and grain). The only trade-off is that the Magic 7 Pro's shots sometimes retain more detail, but results were inconsistent in my testing.

What is consistent is the colour science and image processing the Magic 8 Pro applies across all its sensors in low-light conditions – including from that new ISOCELL HP9 3.7x (up from 3x on the 7 Pro) telephoto camera. As such, you can get some really beautiful results, even if fine detail under scrutiny doesn't always hold up, and highlights can sometimes blow out in more high-contrast scenarios.

Despite rivals taking sharper images, a tip of the hat has to go to that CIPA-approved stabilisation system, which allowed me to get some great handheld blur-free telephoto night shots that I question whether rivals that resort to longer exposure times would have been able to capture.

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In brighter scenes, the Magic 8 Pro's camera system showcases rich colours, respectable dynamic range and well-managed lens correction, even with one of the widest ultrawide cameras on the market (boasting a 12mm equivalent focal range that's excellent for macro photography).

Where colour consistency between focal ranges does break down, it's actually in brighter scenarios between focal lengths. The sunset samples (gallery above) show cooler image science from the ultrawide; while a warmer, mauve finish appears to dress shots at higher zoom levels.

Speaking of colour, Honor already dressed its camera experience with a pretty creative toolset, but that's been expanded upon with the Magic 8 Pro. As before, the camera experience comes with three main colour profiles: Vibrant (the default and the style used for the camera samples in this review); Natural; and Authentic (modelled on the look of street photography).

There are also profiles that aim to emulate classic film stock, as well as a new Magic Colour mode, which – in similar fashion to Samsung's custom filters feature, introduced with the Galaxy S25 series and OneUI 7 – extracts the key colour information from an existing image to dress your shots to achieve a similar look.

On the flip side, this is a great phone for portrait photography, with Portrait Mode demonstrating good, clean edge detection (and thus subject separation), as well as the ability to capture such shots at more focal ranges than any other phone around (at 1x, 2x, 3.7x, 5.9x and 7.4x).

It's the video results that highlight the camera experience's biggest procesing issue – and this is something that's plagued Honor's phones for a while now. Footage generally looks more washed out compared to stills results, and low-light performance is noticeably weaker too. However, you still get well-stabilised, fast-focusing recording, helped by the addition of 120fps capture at 4K.

Such a versatile set of sensors, offering so many supported focal lengths, helps place the Magic 8 Pro amongst the best camera phones right now, but the discrepancy with video quality, the artifacting AI Super Zoom fills missing details in with at higher focal ranges, and Honor's penchant for aggressive, high-contrast processing with stills, means it still isn't as balanced and consistent as the likes of Apple's latest iPhone models.

Honor Magic 8 Pro review: Verdict

The Honor Magic 8 Pro achieves what it set out to do: serve as the company's flagbearer coming into 2026.

It boasts some of the best performance in the business, a well-rounded (if unoriginal-looking) user experience, with a strong focus on AI, and an improved camera system that addresses some of its predecessor's notable shortcomings (rather than simply just cramming in new features).

I still don't think Honor's strides in new AI functionality are industry-defining, even if some add genuine utility. MagicOS also remains a decidedly unoriginal redressing of Android, which offers a confusing blend of polished and unoptimised tools.

However, the company's willingness to extend software support, plus the phone's long-lasting, fast-charging battery, help to up its value proposition over previous entries in the series. But for UK/EU buyers, it's still a shame we're not getting the absolute best hardware version of this device.

Also consider

There are a few rival flagships that have come up multiple times in this review. The OnePlus 15 is pips the Magic 8 Pro to the post in terms of raw horsepower, but lacks the Honor's camera versatility; and area the Oppo Find X9 Pro is better equipped to compete.

OnePlus' and Oppo's phones also offer unfettered battery performance in markets where the Honor's equivalent longevity has been intentionally neutered.

With so many cues taken from Apple's iOS, plus its superior camera consistency, the iPhone 17 Pro (and by extension 17 Pro Max) make for fitting alternatives, too, despite their weaker execution on AI functionality.

And we can't talk about flagship Android smartphones without including the current 'everything phone': the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (at least until the S26 Ultra arrives).