My long-haul travel plans might have changed forever thanks to this five-star tablet (with one small flaw)
Built-in infotainment is over for me
It might not always look like it, but being a tech journalist involves much more long-haul travel than you might think. I can't necessarily always explain why conferences like CES have been in Las Vegas for decades, although others, like Computex being in Taipei, are a little easier to trace.
Either way, it means that I've spent a lot of time on the road and in the air over the last few years, and that's made me intimately familiar with in-flight entertainment. It's always fun to sink into a movie that only just left cinemas while at 30,000 feet, but the sad fact is that you'll generally be doing it on a downright terrible screen.
When I flew to Taipei a couple of weeks ago, it marked the first time I took a really long flight since I got my hands on a loaner unit of the Honor MagicPad 4, which had been impressing me a lot in regular household use. So, to see whether it could upgrade my experience actually watching movies on some very long flights to and from Asia, I downloaded some movies on Now (where I have a Sky Cinema subscription) to put it through its paces.
While I fly a lot, those flights are almost never in business class, so the comparison I'm making here is very much against the standard economy and premium economy screens that most of us are familiar with, and it won't surprise you to learn that the MagicPad 4 completely destroys these from a quality point of view.
Its display is a bright and vivid OLED, and that means that when I glanced to my left to check out my neighbour's in-flight screen comparatively, the difference was almost embarrassing. This does mean that some brightness tweaking was needed when the cabin lights went down to let people sleep, but that's a small price to pay.
While I do have an AirFly Pro 2 from Twelve South to make Bluetooth connections a doddle with in-flight systems, it's also even easier to just use the tablet's built-in functionality without needing an extra accessory. That said, one tiny foible is that the MagicPad 4 doesn't have a 3.5mm audio jack, which is a slight shame as it makes audio setups a little more restricted.
That wasn't a factor on my flights, but when I'm travelling with my girlfriend, it means I can't use the AirFly Pro 2 to set up a dual-audio system where we can both connect our headphones to the tablet for a shared viewing session.
Still, that one quibble aside (and it's one that won't apply to most solo travellers), the MagicPad 4 was such a big upgrade in terms of viewing quality that I'm likely to now pack it on every long-haul trip while I still have access to it. The only downside is the loss of some more space in my backpack, even if the tablet's absurd slimness means it's really not much of a burden.
I'm not going to pretend to be surprised that a £600 tablet outperforms in-flight systems that have, in some cases, been around for a decade or more, of course. Anyone with a recent iPad is probably thinking that the benefits are obvious – but this was my first time verifying that for myself, and it was still a fun change to make. If you're staring down a long flight soon and have access to a tablet alternative of your own, consider this your warning to follow suit.
