Review: Honor Magic7 Pro

Honor’s newest flagship device has landed in South Africa, the AI-powered Magic7 Pro. It is the successor to last year’s Magic6 Pro, which falls under its premium Magic Series.

The Magic7 Pro is the first Honor device to benefit from its new 7 year Android upgrade cycle, announced at MWC Barcelona earlier this year, which we attended as a guest of Honor. However, this rollout starts with Europe first, so South Africa may be included in future.

Honor Magic7 Pro Quick Look

• 6.8-inch OLED display (2800×1280)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite; Adreno 830
• 12GB RAM; 512GB storage
• 200MP+50MP+50MP rear cam; 50MP selfie-cam
• 5850mAh battery
• R29 999

What’s new on the Magic7 Pro

The Magic7 Pro has a new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and a more flat 6.8-inch display than last year’s Magic6 Pro, which is much preferred. While it is 0.2mm higher and 1.3mm wider, it is slighter lighter at 223g.

The back is still characterised by its huge round camera, which means the device does not sit flush. There’s a slight improvement of a 200MP shooter with 3x optical zoom, which also has additional AI features that we will get to later.

The battery size has also improved and there’s a bump in charging speed; it supports 100W wired charging with a plug in the box and 80W wireless charging.

The addition of the IP69 rating means it not just water and dust resistant, but it can handle high temperature and high pressure water jets and can be submerged up to 1.5m for 30 minutes.

For a premium smartphone in this category, there are notable improvements on this device, which does not look identical to its predecessor. However, it is on the large side.

Updates to Honor AI

I did not get to review the Magic6 Pro last year, but the Magic7 Pro also has the same AI features available from Honor, like Magic Portal.

There’s also something called Knuckle Circle where you can knock on the screen with your knuckle to activate Magic Portal but this comes down to personal preference. It is handy if you’re eating (cough) and want to perform this action.

This allows you to share an image to another app easily by sliding it to the side of the screen to share to email, messages, WhatsApp, social media, etc. This is one of those AI features that are handy because it’s easy to use and feels natural.

There’s also Magic Text that lets you can extract text from images. Professionally, this is useful if I am taking a pic of info shared at a launch from a brochure etc or up on the screen. The drag and drop on the Magic7 Pro is much quicker than selecting, copying and pasting, which is what I do on my iPhone 16 Pro and sometimes selecting text can be finicky.

There’s also Honor Translate for your chats and Interpreter for real-time translation in meetings or lectures in foreign languages, that works with its supported earphones. I couldn’t really test this but I can see how this is handy professionally if you travel, are a traveller, or if you’re a student abroad.

Interesting to note, all of these AI features need to be activated or turned on manually, so it’s not on by default. You can find it under Settings > Honor AI.

As always with AI, it tends to learn from your habits, however, if like me, and you don’t the suggestions or don’t like your phone thinking and offering you certain things, you can turn this setting off. It works for each app that can be toggled off.

Similarly, there’s also something called Smart Interaction. You can choose to let the phone track your eyes for example, and keep the screen on while you’re looking at it and glance to reduce the ringer volume, (though I didn’t know how this works), and then air gestures.

Air gestures lets you scroll with your hand in front of the screen without touching it, or “grabshot” to take a screenshot and “airback” to go back, with a specific way to activate, i.e. hold your palm facing the screen 20-40cm away.

I honestly didn’t have the patience for this on the chance it won’t work the first time. There’s a clever setting here that says turn off air gestures automatically if you don’t use it for 7 days.

You can also turn on the eye tracking feature by calibrating it to your eyes. I tested this last year and controlled a car with my eyes (you can read it on Forbes Africa) or watch my TikTok). While I did activate it on the Magic7 Pro, I couldn’t test it in real life because my app notifications did not show on the Magic Capsule.

Honor Magic7 Pro camera

The camera on the Magic7 Pro has a 200MP telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom, which you can use Honor’s AI Super Zoom with, when it’s on 30x. Then there’s two 50MP lenses, one wide with optical image stabilisation (OIS), and one ultra wide.

For typical shots you will use it the most, during the day or for landscape shots while traveling or outdoors, the phone takes excellent shots. Even when it’s sunset. I took it on a few events and loved the results. Please note all the images I’m sharing from the Honor Magic7 Pro is not edited in any way, not even to brighten.

Here are other shots during the day (click to view):

Here’s a lion but he was moving and it was difficult to get a shot when he was still:

However, I did find it struggled with certain low-light shots. These results are not as crisp:

Then there was AI Super Zoom. It’s a feature Honor was leaning on heavily prior to launch, and you may have even read about it on a sponsored article on Recharged but now that I’ve tested out in the wild in South Africa, I don’t think this feature was meant to photograph animals. It just does not look realistic.

And important to note, AI Super Zoom only works with an internet connection because it is cloud based. I did have a SIM card in the phone, so I could use it then, however, if you are on a plane and lets say approaching London, which has great views of the city, you can’t exactly use the feature then.

If you’ve been reading my articles and reviews for years, you know I am not big on any digital zoom, and thus, I would use this camera as normal (without worrying about an internet connection) and the optical zoom instead. The rule for me is you shoot on full resolution and crop after if you need to.

This is the 50MP selfie-cam, which takes great pics (click to view):

AI once again is available for editing your pictures and videos. I tired the AI movie maker before, and it’s a decent option if you have no idea how to make a video or want to turn pictures from a holiday into something cool for social media.

We’ve seen object removal for more than a year now on smartphones, as they can be hit or miss. Here are two example of that:

Overall performance 

The Honor Magic7 Pro is on par with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, both have the same Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and 12GB of RAM, however the Magic7 Pro has 512GB of storage. That’s really the cream of the crop.

I did not experience over heating while using the cameras, like I did on the S25 Ultra and when you consider the gestures for AI, I did not experience lag or apps freezing where I had to kill them to restart.

Most of you know I consume a lot of multimedia content and I’m always switching between these resource intensive apps to watch videos. I have a YouTube Premium subs, which makes it worthwhile watching on a smartphone because of the pic-in-pic view. I really do “second screen” on a smartphone and it was smooth.

I don’t really play games on a mobile, but apart from videos, I browse, use social media, Google Maps etc and the battery life on the phone was excellent, much like the S25 Ultra. The camera itself uses a lot of power, but you don’t need to worry about a power bank here.

The phone supports physical and eSIM slots, plus you can use two eSIMs at the same time, but country dependent. WiFi bands supported includes 6GHz, Bluetooth 5.4; InfraRed controls, and WiFi 7.

Other features include NFC, fingerprint sensor, facial unlock, USB-C charging and audio, stereo sound with DTS:X Ultra sound.

Final thoughts

The Honor Magic7 Pro is a direct competitor to the S25 Ultra, both have the same chip, but Honor gives you double the storage  at 512GB, a 100W SuperCharge plug in the box, and a phone cover. Its recommended retail price is R29 999 but I’ve seen Vodacom offer it for R26 999 at the time of publication.

Now, this may not matter to some people, but as South Africans, we always question “what am I getting for my money?” and when it comes down to what’s included, these small things add up. However, I did not use the cover and the phone has a small ding on it, not as durable as the X9c, then.

Honor is going after Samsung S25 Ultra customers with the Magic7 Pro and are making a very compelling offer. Its AI is executed differently while still sharing core similarities of Android and Google’s Gemini but it has features that are not difficult to learn.

If you’re a power user who wants the best Android device, do not pass up on the Honor Magic7 Pro.

8 April 2025 EDIT: This review has been edited to reflect the correct Android 7 year cycle info for the SA market.