HONOR Magic5 Pro Review – An interesting looking flagship

Well, its again the season of unveiling and most brands has stepped up in launching all the flagship for 2023, and HONOR again is no surprise there bringing in their latest flagship, not one but two, which HONOR dubbed it as the dual flagship.

But lets just take a look at the HONOR Magic5 Pro, one of another strong contender in the premium flagship segment with pretty respectable specifications and features inside and out

Who is this for ?

This phone is for those who appreciate quality of the design in a smartphone with a combination of top notch performance you can find as a flagship phone, with a screen that gets you from day and night which you can work and play with style on it. It is also intended for those who looks for a flagship that provides years of software updates and a set of camera that rivals also any flagship phone camera setup you can get with added software and AI features in to it.

Unboxing Content

The HONOR Magic5 Pro came with the following

• The HONOR Magic5 Pro Phone
• SIM Ejector
• User Manual
• USB A to C cable
• Translucent case
• 120w Fast Charge Power Adaptor

Design : Nice to hold and to show also

At the front, it looks all normal, in fact quite resemblance towards the last year’s HONOR Magic4 Pro, with all the curved display but one slight improvement that they have done its the ergonomics, holding it seems very comfortable, even without installing the included case, it is still very comfortable to hold and grippy. Over to the back of the phone you will spot the triangular camera setup which looks interesting and color finishing does shows that HONOR did all the refinement as good as it gets. The frame sides of the phone is a good one, trying to light bending did not budge any of the parts, which the quality overall is there.

Two color choices are available, Meadow Green and Black, whichever color you choose, you still have the starry subtle glitter at the back of the phone.

Display & Audio : Sizable, comfortable and loud too

The HONOR Magic5 Pro features a 6.81 inch curved OLED floating screen that is able to run at a high 120Hz dynamic refresh rates, under display fingerprint reader for unlocking the phone and Rheinland TÜV Low Blue Light Certification. One should not be worried whether it is at any moment with such a nice large display for a slate form factor which one will enjoy whether its just viewing movies or just over on your emails, or even gaming. The boost up to 1800nits also makes it suitable to be used under bright environment, making it day and night a pleasant to you, whether I am viewing the screen outside sipping a coffee or reading novels before bedtime, the light sensor works quite well for it. In other words, I am quite satisfied with the color vibrance as well.

Audio wise, It can crank up pretty loud over small to medium size room when testing, one speaker located at the speakerphone while another one located beside the USB C port, I am pleased that it still can deliver clarity with a slight bass. Other than that the downside is there is no further equalizer settings or sound enhancement in the menu, apart from settings via headphones when attached/connected to it, where DTS:X is activated, and this can be done with some compatible wireless Earbuds.

The Camera Combo : Falcon Capture is here

Rear : 50MP Wide Camera (f/1.6, OIS)
50MP Ultra Wide Camera (f/2.0)
50MP Periscope Telephoto Camera (f/3.0, 3.5x Optical Zoom, 100x Digital Zoom, OIS)

Front : 12MP Front Camera + 3D Depth Camera

Now to the camera, the HONOR Magic5 Pro rear camera setup may look odd, but there is a reason for it. In fact that is HONOR’s huge selling dubbed as the Eye Of Muse which has been introduced since the launch of the Magic4 series last year and looking at the rear camera alone does interest anyone that passes by.

Day time Shots – Mixed

Indoor Shots – Mixed

Moonshot

Selfies

Here’s the thing, your day shots or bright area captures are no problem at all, in fact it has some interesting features such as the Falcon Capture which allows the phone to capture fast objects. Oh yeah, you can zoom up to 100x, this lets you capture moon shots, and it came out pretty nice although more optimisation may be required from a software updates and that could better improve the image quality. The rest such as Portrait, wide angle, Super macro are there as well for your different modes of capturing photos. Over night shots, you will get an adequate quality from its combined tri camera which came out with quality that is able to identify light and shadows, albeit you might need to focus is properly especially if you wanna shoot an object in particular. No complains on selfie shots as its able to identify subject and backgrounds pretty easily.

We will also attached a rear video camera sample here, which the HONOR Magic5 Pro is able to capture up to 4K and 60FPS, and nope, no 8K video capture there but for the majority of users, 4K seems to be the best and common if you still wanted to capture high framerate video while retain details and quality there.

Performance, Software, Benchmarks

The HONOR Magic5 Pro packed some serious internals also. For a start, it came with the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Octa-Core SOC with 8GB of RAM and up to 512GB of internal storage. If you wish to add more storage there is no options for it, leaving certain alternative such as cloud backup such as Google Drive will be a good choice if you ever out of storage internally, but I find it ok so far since most Android users uses cloud drives to save and backup. Since we touch on the RAM also, you have HONOR RAM Turbo too, which is a dynamic virtual memory taken from internal storage up to 7GB, that will make your application switches faster over 20 applications/games at the same time with close to no lag times to it. All your usual internals such as 5G, AX wifi, Bluetooth 5.x, NFC. The HONOR C1 RF chip is also a new inclusion to make signal smarter, stronger with smart redirection and sensing of signal, ensuring quality of calls and data transfers optimal while keeping your battery usage optimal with other hardware.

Operating System and UI wise, it does came with Android 13 with MagicOS 7.1, the latest inclusion with both Magic5 Pro and Magic Vs that carries all of the fixes and performance updates from the previous version. From the usability perspective, it is still feels similar and most stock Android UI features retained with essential needs tools and apps added with MagicOS stuffs embedded to it such as the RAM Turbo, Game mode, YoYo assistant (which you can extract text from image), themes, storage management, AI Privacy call (which minimize sound leakage), Smart sensing (for fast face recognition) and many more with lesser bloatware apps from third parties.

With the 5100MaH battery capacity, usage will last about 11.5 hours of usage that translate to a whole day of use, maybe another charge in the late evening will get you going again. Charging from empty to 100% with the included HONOR 66W Supercharge takes about an hour, which is good enough over my daily usage and it is within expectation.

As usual, we will also include the benchmark and comparison to it, and no surprises so far from the outcome there.

Technical Specifications

Overall Rating, Conclusion and Verdict

I find the HONOR Magic5 Pro is a phone that slowly shows HONOR does pick up some tremendous improvement from the last year’s flagship not just by focusing the camera enhancements in general, but shows care towards other parts such as general usage and adding on custom chips to keep things going better over battery consumption and quality improvement towards calls and network, which by the end of the day communications and data is still one important factor, and HONOR keeps this one in check.

HONOR Magic5 Pro will launch soon to the Malaysian markets coming April 2023, where full details and pricing will be unveiled via HONOR Malaysia official website and HONOR Malaysia Facebook Page