Honor MagicPad 4 review: One serious tablet to take on Samsung
A great Android tablet that's more cost-effective than key competitiors
The Honor MagicPad 4 is top of the tablet class for ravenous media consumption thanks to its excellent OLED screen, fantastic handling and quality speakers. It’s almost as good for more creative stuff too, even if other tablets do have greater power and more elaborately designed keyboard add-ons.
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+ More affordable than an iPad or Galaxy Tab S11
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Very thin and unusually light design
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Top quality OLED screen
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Unremarkable rear camera
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Lower-power CPU compared to Apple rivals
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While speakers are fab, bass floor could be lower still
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The Honor MagicPad family has quietly become one of the key series for folks who want a serious, big-screen tablet. Its latest MagicPad 4 is pretty strong competition for an iPad Pro or Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, particularly if you want to spend less.
The MagicPad 4 is also unusually thin and light, and does not leave out any key features – bar a fingerprint reader. So what's the catch?
The Honor only has an upper-mid-table processor, but a lot of the time you’d be hard-pressed to notice. And some tablets in this class last a bit longer off a charge, too. But that's nitpicking, as the MagicPad 4 really is magic.
Price and Availability
The Honor MagicPad 4 was announced in February 2026, and comes in two colours, plus two spec flavours.
Mine is the silvery metal version with 256GB storage and 12GB RAM. It costs £599 before any discounts. This colour comes in a 16GB RAM and 512GB storage version too, at £699.
Honor makes a white edition – only in the lower-spec load-out. It will feel less metallic than this review model's finish, though, so bear that in mind.
There's also a £170 keyboard and stylus accessory package. If you bought the equivalent for an iPad Pro 13 you'd be looking at £1727 total; or £1038 for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 bundle.
Design
- 4.8mm thick, 450g
- Aluminium casing
The Honor MagicPad 4 is the first tablet I’ve used to truly exploit silicon-carbon battery tech to get really, really thin. It’s just 4.8mm thick, down from 5.8mm in the last generation, outside of the thicker camera housing section.
That’s a rather undramatic-sounding 94% of the thickness of an iPad Pro 13. But it feels ultra-thin in person, even by modern tablet standards.
Weight is arguably more impressive. The MagicPag 4 weighs 450g, which is far lower than the 555g of the MagicPad 2 from 2024 – last year’s model was larger, so does not make for a fair comparison.
Considering it’s a 12.3-inch tablet, it’s surprisingly manageable, without any build compromises to get there. It’s effectively a 12-inch tablet at the weight of an 11-inch one.
Much like other high-end tablets, the MagicPad 4 has an aluminium casing and toughened glass screen. There’s no official water resistance, which is part of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 series, if at significantly greater expense.
This is an unusual case where using tech that makes a device thinner has some real practical benefit – it improves the Honor MagicPad 4’s handling no end, and I really do feel the difference in person.
It’s also available with a keyboard case and stylus. Compared to the keyboard of the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro, this one is a little perfunctory. There’s no touchpad, no laptop-style hinge or keyboard backlight. It’s a fairly simple fold-over case that uses magnets and a couple of strategically placed grooves to let the screen sit at one of two angles.
That’s not quite enough to fool my brain into thinking I’m using a laptop, but the actual key quality is very solid. There’s as much key travel as plenty of laptops, and nicely defined feedback as each key hits its actuation point.
Software and Stylus
- Android 16 platform
- Pressure-sensing stylus (optional)
Honor also makes some effort to try and trick you into feeling the MagicPad 4 is closer to a laptop in the software, compared to smaller tablets. But you do have to seek these features out.
The top one is called PC mode, which you can switch on from the settings drop-down toggle screen. It alters the scale of the app shortcut bar, so many more icons fit in, sticks to landscape view, and opens up apps as landscape-aspect windows too.
Honor’s aim is to make it feel like you’re using something at least close to a traditional laptop or Windows hybrid. And while Android is going to trip up those efforts a bit every now and then, it does at least offer multi-tasking that doesn’t seem basically the same as you get on a 6-inch phone.
The supported (but not bundled) stylus is good too, and is far more complex or feature-packed than it looks. From a glance the Magic-Pencil 3 appears as simple these styluses come, bar having a replaceable screw-in tip. But there’s more to it.
While there’s no clicky button, the side of the pen is a touch surface. It can be used to switch between pen and eraser tools in supported apps (sadly limited to Honor’s ones), or to scroll through articles or flick through slides in a presentation.
The pen can also be used as a laser pointer of sorts, as it’s a Bluetooth pen, not one that relies solely on close proximity with the Honor MagicPad 4’s screen. There’s no haptic feedback for those interactions, though, and the scrolling can feel a little awkward.
Most important, though, it feels great while working as a digital pencil or paintbrush. There’s no obvious latency, it’s pressure-sensitive (4096 supported levels) and can detect the angle used, for more naturalistic pencil shading in arty apps.
You can also use the pencil to write into Honor MagicPad 4 text input boxes directly using OCR (optical character recognition).
Display
- 12.3-inch OLED panel
- 3000 x 1920 resolution, 165Hz refresh rate
- 2400 nit claimed brightness (730 nits tested)
The Honor MagicPad 4 has a large 12.3-inch screen, sitting between the 11-inch Xiaomi Tab 8 Pro and the iPad Pro 13 in terms of scale.
Its aspect ratio is a little wider (landscape orientation) than either of those, even though you may hear all three described as 3:2 aspect ratio devices. That means you get fractionally less perception of size for your apps per screen inch – or at least I felt that. The screen size to square inch of this tab is stellar thanks to the ultra-skinny borders.
The Honor MagicPad 4 screen basically feels a bit smaller than that of an ordinary laptop. Image quality is above that of any laptop near this price, though.
Resolution of 3000 x 1920 pixels provides pixel density similar to that of a phone, even though you’ll likely hold this tablet further away. It’s an OLED panel, so colour and contrast are a guaranteed hit, and it has a refresh rate of up to 165Hz for smoother motion.
This is one of those smart panels that can use at a whole bunch of refresh rates when applicable: 60/90/120/144/165Hz, rather than just 165Hz and 60Hz.
The one part where the spec doesn’t quite match the reality is brightness. Honor says the MagicPad 4 can hit 2400 nits, but the best I saw was 730 nits. And that was when playing HDR video in strong lighting. It’s more than decent, though, and the norm for most good OLED screens at present, just not close to iPad Pro levels.
However, at this price the Honour MagicPad 4 is going to be hard to beat for tablet-based movie and video-watching.
There's no option for a matte-etched glass finish, though, which Xiaomi offers as a £30 upgrade in the top -pec Pad 8 Pro. It’s glossy all the way with the Honor.
Performance
- Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 5 processor
- Adreno 829 GPU
- 12GB RAM
The Honor MagicPad 4 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 5 processor, which is a step below the Snapdragon Elite seen in the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro and OnePlus Pad 3.
Annoyingly, Honor has blocked my particular model from running any of the sort of benchmark and testing apps that can (somewhat) reliably tell you how powerful a tablet really is. I do know roughly what we’re dealing with here, though, as the same processor has been used in the OnePlus 15R.
It scores around 10% less than the top-tier Elite in CPU tests, while you get up to around 40% extra graphics performance with the latest Elite for gaming, or 20% higher performance with the rival Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro – which uses the previous-generation version of the processor.
This is no weed, though, it’s just not quite at the level of an iPad Pro or the very top-tier Android slates in 2026.
To see how much this actually matters in the Honor MagicPad 4, I tried a few games of Fortnite, which recently returned to Google Play at the time of review. You can max the visuals out and still have the frame rate mostly dialled in at 60fps. The 120fps mode is greyed out, while being visible in the Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped Xiaomi Tab 8 Pro, though.
There are minor compromises, then, and they are worth paying attention to for gamers, given the Xiaomi costs less than the Honor MagicPad 4 at each’s original price. It’s a question of lower weight and thickness – plus OLED contrast – versus greater power in the Xiaomi.
Don’t focus on this too much, though, as the MagicPad 4 still has a lot of power at its fingertips. It has loads more than the iPad 11, while not being in a totally different galaxy to the – granted – more powerful iPad Air 11in, which costs the same amount at its base spec.
Features and Battery Life
- 10,100mAh battery capacity
- 66W wired charging
- 8-speaker array
The Honor MagicPad 4 has a large 10,100mAh battery. Unusually, Honor doesn’t make any eyebrow-raising claims about its stamina.
When watching video, seven hours and 20 minutes of streaming took 62% off the charge level, suggesting we’re looking at perhaps just under 12 hours per charge. Another test saw an hour of YouTube snip off 7%, pointing to a better result of around 14 hours.
The smaller (but thicker) Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro lasts longer in my experience, but this Honor is still going to power through a transatlantic flight no problem, especially as having pre-downloaded video should in theory take power consumption even lower.
You could argue Honor should have used its silicon-carbon battery tech to increase battery capacity rather than reducing thickness and weight, but it’s such a bonus for handling here that I mostly don’t agree. Especially as the tablet has fairly fast charging.
The MagicPad 4 supports Honor’s Supercharge standard at up to 66W, which sees the tablet reach 100% after 78 minutes. That’s almost 20 minutes swifter than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11.
This thing’s media cred is also boosted by a well-above-average speaker array. The MagicPad 4 has an eight-speaker system with great maximum volume and a top sense of cohesion between mids and treble, which is particularly impressive given the tablet’s size.
I was seriously impressed when I first played some YouTube videos and podcasts through this thing.
Compared to some of its peers, though, including potentially the old MagicPad 2, bass depth is just a little lacking. So while timbre and detail are great for a set of tablet speakers – not to mention how the low-mid beefiness fills out voices – it doesn't quite reach that space where it feels like you’re listening to a (small) Bluetooth speaker.
This may well be a case of Honor’s engineers butting heads with that old unbeatable rival, physics. After all, a 4.8mm thickness isn’t much to work with.
Cameras
- Single 13-megapixel, f/2.0 aperture camera to rear
- 9MP f/2.2 front selfie camera
It does feel like less attention has been given to the Honor MagicPad 4’s cameras, though. Perhaps that’s no bad thing when any half-decent phone will outclass the best tablet, even if some tech novices still mistakenly believe their bigger size somehow makes them better devices for photos.
Look at the rear camera array and you might assume this Honor has two rear cameras. But it doesn’t. There’s a single 13MP camera; the other little circle on the back is a blank. Yes, it's odd.
Photos taken with the camera have the usual solid HDR-boosting that we’ve taken for granted for years now, helping to mostly eradicate overexposure from backlit scenes. But detail really isn’t that impressive, the limits becoming obvious even from a quick pinch-to-zoom explore on the MagicPad 4 itself.
The front camera has a 9.2MP sensor, one sensibly arranged to feel good with the tablet held in landscape. Once again, we don’t really get the pixel count to avoid making the limits of this hardware apparent on the MagicPad 4’s big screen.
Its native pixel count when shooting in an aspect ratio to fill the display is not too different to that of the screen itself. And when you’re dealing with a small sensor, that’s not ideal for photography. Still, it’s going to be ideal for video chats – aside from the fact this screen is going to highlight how bad the person on the other end’s camera is too.
Honor Magicpad 4 review: Verdict
The Honor MagicPad 4 is not a cheap tablet. It’s no impulse buy. But when you compare it directly to the competition from Apple and Samsung, it does start to seem a bit of a bargain.
It’s a very large tablet with an excellent screen and a wonderfully thin and light design that significantly boosts handling. And its list of abilities is similar to those of far more expensive rivals – including the option of a smart stylus and a case with a good-quality keyboard.
Sure, you can get more powerful tablets, but this one still runs Fortnite like a dream and feels responsive. So do you really need more? Most people don’t. The Honor MagicPad 4 really is magic for the money.
Also Consider
Two key alternatives are the OnePlus Pad 3 and Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro. Both have more gaming power than the Honor. But neither has the Honor’s three key highlights – the OLED screen, sub-5mm thickness and very low weight per screen inch.
If your budget can go way higher, consider the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11. It costs hundreds more and has a smaller screen, but some of its software feels like it has had more work pumped into it – most notably Samsung’s DeX, which emulates the feel of a desktop PC, especially when connected to an external display.
