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Review: Honor Magic 7 Pro - Worthy Return with Class in the Cameras

When I get to test an Honor phone for the first time in several years, I am reminded that Huawei left a gap behind. A gap that Honor might be able to fill.

Elias Nordling
Published Modified

When the USA in 2019 banned Huawei from using Google's services due to the company's connections to the Chinese state, they essentially had two choices. Either to place mobile manufacturing in a separate company without ambiguities regarding its relationship with the Chinese military, or to proceed without Google's services and try to build their own platform. You could say they chose both. Huawei has survived and recovered in the Chinese market with technology that is increasingly their own, but the Honor brand, which represented a slightly more youthful style and cheaper phones, became a separate company no longer affected by US sanctions. Both disappeared as mobile manufacturers from Sweden, but now at least Honor is ready to tackle the Swedish mobile market again. Honor Magic 7 Pro is the company's latest top model, and I am reminded of Huawei in several areas, which is mostly a good thing.

Honor Magic 7 Pro feels luxurious on the outside. The back is in curved glass with a large protruding camera island. The screen on the front has thin black frames. It is not curved, but the edges are rounded on all four sides. A clear detail reminiscent of the Huawei era is that the camera hole in the screen is elongated. Like on the iPhone but smaller. Here, in addition to the selfie camera, there is a 3D sensor that allows the selfie camera to be used for more secure facial unlocking approved by Google. It is noticeable in the system that functions normally protected with fingerprints can also be unlocked with the face. A fingerprint reader is of course also available. It is located in the screen and responds well to touch throughout the test period.

The screen itself is excellent, with a fast refresh rate, bright colours, and above all, a significantly high maximum brightness that allows me to use the phone outdoors in sunlight without any issues now in the summer. The phone has stereo speakers with high maximum volume and clear sound, but they are a bit weak on the lower frequencies compared to the best mobile speakers.

A bit bulky

It should be noted that it is an unusually thick and heavy phone. This is partly used for an extra-large battery, but not here. That is, the European version has a slightly smaller battery at 5270 mAh compared to the international one. It should still be enough for above-average battery life, but in our screen test, we actually get slightly worse battery life than we are used to. Standby time is good, but when I run demanding apps, the charge disappears quickly. The phone can be charged with up to 100 watts via cable or 80 watts wirelessly, but a charger is not included.

The system in the phone also makes me think of Huawei, and it's not surprising since the Magic OS user interface running on Android 15 has its roots in Huawei's user interface. This means, among other things, that all apps are on the home screen, but if you prefer to have an app drawer, you can enable it. Like more and more mobile manufacturers, they have divided the quick shortcuts and notifications into swipes from the top of the screen from the left or right side of the cameras. Honor includes many apps, both third-party and their own, and some duplicate Google's apps, which are also included. Honor has its own calendar and email app, but also its own app store. Honor promises seven years of system and security updates for the phone, the same as the best Android manufacturers.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite in the phone is the fastest available for purchase, and the same as in the fastest top models from other Android manufacturers in 2025. The phone also has 12 gigabytes of RAM and 512 of storage, so in terms of performance, it is a top model throughout.

Excellent cameras

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It's when we get to the cameras that I once again get a whiff of Huawei, something I really feel I've missed. For Huawei was indeed the best at mobile cameras when they disappeared from the Swedish market, and after them, development has stalled. Perhaps it would have done so anyway, but that Honor is a child of Huawei is noticeable in any case in an ambitious camera setup. We have a main camera with a large 1/1.3-inch sensor, a telephoto camera with three times optical zoom and a very large sensor for telephoto cameras at 1/1.4 inches, and also 200 megapixels resolution which allows for further zooming with the high resolution. It's only the wide-angle camera, admittedly with autofocus but with a sensor at 1/2.88-inch resolution that doesn't stand out.

The large sensor in the main camera is noticeable in the image quality, the images have good sharpness when you zoom in on them, and the camera handles night photography excellently. The fact that the image processing also stands out is something I notice, among other things, when I take pictures with high contrast. The camera handles it excellently, the image becomes contrast-rich while maintaining details in the bright and dark parts. A button lets me choose between three different colour modes in the images: Natural, vivid, and authentic. The differences between natural and vivid are small, Honor hasn't turned up the colours very much, while authentic gets a strange colour tone, perhaps they've tried to mimic old photographs taken with a Polaroid camera?

I have high expectations for the telephoto camera, and they are partially met. In lower zoom levels, the camera does not particularly stand out. At two times zoom, the main camera's resolution is not utilised, and I get images that are only digitally enlarged. Three times zoom is sharper but not better than the telephotos from the Samsung Galaxy S25, which has a significantly smaller sensor in its telephoto camera. However, the images remain sharp at six times zoom and are still really good with ten times zoom. Then they lose quality when the camera relies on digital zoom.

For 15,000 kronor, the Honor Magic 7 Pro is an expensive phone, but it is a phone that can match or surpass Samsung's and Apple's phones for the same price tag in virtually all areas. It's exciting to have Honor back, and I look forward to seeing what they will achieve in the future.

Questions and Answers

Does the phone have an Always on-display? Yes, the feature is turned off initially, but you can turn on Always on Display, and then a dimmed version of the screen is shown when you are not using the phone.

Does the phone have a memory card slot? No, Honor has opted out of that.

Does Honor have any AI features? Of course. Partly those from Google, of course, but also their own with features you recognise from other manufacturers: Object removal in images, text processing, and live translation and transcription of voice to text. However, Swedish is not one of the languages supported at the moment.

An alternative

If you're looking for a top model with the best possible camera, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is slightly sharper, but also a couple of thousand kronor more expensive.

Camera example

I am particularly impressed by how well the Honor Magic 7 Pro handles backlit images and other images with high contrast.

phone product tests android product reviews other manufacturers honor magic 7 pro honor

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