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Thin but tough

Review: Honor Magic 7 Lite - Luxurious mid-range phone that can take a beating

Honor Magic 7 Lite has a luxurious design that conceals its surprising durability.

Elias Nordling
Published

In the review guide I received for the Honor Magic 7 Lite, Honor suggests that as one of the test elements of the phone, I try dropping it from a height of two metres onto a cobblestone street to see what effect it has. No chance, I think as I look at the phone. It is thin and has a screen and back (material unspecified but probably glass) with rounded edges made to scratch and crack upon contact with gravel and stone. As far as you can get from a durable mobile phone of the type, for example, Ulefone makes.

Honor used to be Huawei's youthful brand, but when the USA imposed restrictions on Huawei, Honor became its own company, thus avoiding American sanctions. The legacy from Huawei is evident in both the user interface and camera technology, and for those who miss their Huawei, it is therefore an interesting brand.

The Honor Magic 7 Lite, in turn, is a mid-range mobile for 5000 kronor, with Samsung's Galaxy A56 as an intended competitor. Design and durability are clear focus areas, let's see if we can find any weaknesses as well.

Honor also recommends that we try submerging the Honor Magic 7 Lite in water and leave it for a minute, but the phone is actually not certified to handle that. The IP rating is 64, which means it is dustproof, but only made to withstand splashing water from all directions. That is, rain, not bathing.

Bright and Fast Screen

The screen, as mentioned, has curved edges, is of OLED type with a 120 Hz refresh rate, and has a maximum brightness of 4000 nits. It is an excellent screen. The size is 6.78 inches in a 20:9 format, which, combined with the thin bezels, results in a phone that is narrow but quite tall. It thus feels light in the hand for its size.

The phone lacks a memory card, but is sold in Sweden with a generous 512 GB of storage space. However, a weakness is the performance. The chipset in the phone is Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, a mid-range chipset that is two generations older than the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 found in the Samsung Galaxy A36. The performance improvement over these two generations is not dramatic, but the phone is slower than Samsung's mid-range models, and this is noticeable at least sometimes when using the phone.

On the other hand, the battery is unusually generous. It takes advantage of the new materials that are starting to emerge and improve lithium-ion technology, which means that despite its compact format, the phone has a battery capacity of 6600 mAh. This gives us over 14 hours of screen time at maximum screen brightness, a brightness that is also ample and thus power-demanding.

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Mixed Camera Quality

The cameras are both good and bad. Huawei was a leader in mobile cameras when they disappeared from the Swedish market, and one could hope that at least some of that expertise has spilled over to Honor.

And sure, the main camera is quite good. It has 108 megapixels which are combined into a 12-megapixel image that is sharp and rich in detail. In most conditions, the image results are good, but the colour reproduction is sometimes a bit too exaggerated, and when taking pictures in the dark, it becomes apparent that you are not dealing with a top model.

There is no telephoto camera at all. This is partly compensated by the high resolution of the main sensor which can be used for zooming. Images taken with three times magnification are sharper than if you enlarge an image afterwards, even though they are not quite as sharp as from a telephoto camera with three times optical zoom. The wide-angle camera at five megapixels is a noticeable step down in quality compared to the main camera.

The system in the phone is updated to Android 15 from Android 14 when I start the phone. The phone is promised 2 years of system and security updates. Here, Honor is clearly behind compared to Samsung's Galaxy A phones which receive six years of system updates. Honor's user interface Magic OS contains a number of changes and features compared to standard Android which can take time to explore. If your last phone was a Huawei, it will probably feel familiar.

When I have finished testing the phone and photographing it, I gather the courage to drop it onto the stone floor in the stairwell from eye level a couple of times and at different angles. It hurts to see the phone bounce against the hard floor, but when I examine it afterwards, there isn't a scratch on either the screen or the back. The only thing I can see are a few barely noticeable marks on the plastic frame between the screen and the back.

Questions and Answers

Does the phone charge quickly? Yes, but only if you have a charger from Honor, which is not included. Then you can enable ultra-fast charging. With a standard charger, it is not nearly as fast.

How is the speaker sound? The stereo speakers have a high maximum volume, good for phone calls but a bit too sharp and treble for watching movies.

Do the curved sides cause accidental touches on the screen? No, it's not something I experience during the test period.

An Alternative

Samsung Galaxy A56 costs about the same. It is faster and has promised updates for six years, but feels a bit bulkier.

Camera Example

The colours sometimes become a bit too intense in the pictures I take with the Honor Magic 7 Lite.

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