Night owl

Review: Honor Magic 8 Pro - Sharp top model changes the game

A clear flagship phone that also stands out with innovation on several levels.

Published 2 April 2026 - 10:38

It's not enough just to have the latest components for the best performance, which the Honor Magic 8 Pro has. They also need to be used for something that actually adds value. With this phone, Honor, which is a returning player in the Swedish market, shows that they are moving forward.

Honor Magic 8 Pro impresses especially when it comes to the screen and cameras. Night photography is something of a specialty, and both zoom and sharpness are in a class of their own. Furthermore, the screen is at least as sharp and also has a wide range of functions to enhance the impression. In addition to what we expect today, such as fast updates and generous brightness so that it is easily readable even in strong sunlight, we get a wide range of options for customization. I can do several tests so the phone appreciates my colour vision and how I see contrasts, which means that the screen's reproduction is then adapted to that. I can also activate myopia adaptation to make it easier to focus, but I find it difficult to notice any clear effect from the latter. Honor gathers all these and more functions under the menu option Eye-friendly screen, and it is something they have clearly invested in.

Great screen with possibilities

The screen itself is 6.71 inches and has subtly rounded edges on all four sides. I have the option to activate an active lock screen, but it is not always active anyway, because a power-saving mode kicks in and turns off the screen completely without me being able to completely opt out of it. I am informed that the power mode activates at night, but sometimes I wake up at 4 am and the screen is still on, other times it is off, and a third time it is off even though it is 8 in the morning. A bit temperamental, then.

Honor, of course, has Android at its core and Google's apps and services, and they promise a full 7 years of updates, more than you can ask for. Google and Samsung promise the same in their flagships. The reason for updates is mainly to ensure that apps like BankID will work in the long run and thus promise a long lifespan for the phone. The new features you get with each new Android version do not add much. Nowadays, it is instead the manufacturers themselves who release new features, and Honor adds a lot of things in its Magic OS that you do not already have in regular Android.

Honor has in its new Magic OS 10 taken quite a bit of inspiration from Apple. Like several other mobile manufacturers, they have copied Apple's dynamic island, so we get a pill-shaped black panel around the selfie camera that is supposed to display information. However, it does so quite sparingly, as only a few apps support it. I mostly notice it when some music is playing in the background, and it adds little utility. Furthermore, I have some problems with facial recognition to unlock the phone. Despite re-entering my face several times, the phone often has trouble recognising me, and I have to enter the PIN code.

More Apple-inspired

In addition to the notch around the selfie camera, the interface itself is also a bit of a copy of Apple's glassy latest IOS. But Honor Magic OS contributes a lot more.

Some of the basics are familiar from Huawei's phones because the relationship is clear, even though Honor has completely different owners now. We therefore have our own email client, the Honor Health app, notes, our own music player, video player, and photo gallery, to name a few. Of course, a lot of AI has also been added recently. At its core, Honor, like all other Android manufacturers, relies heavily on Google's Gemini, but there are also a lot of unique, own features. Many of these can be accessed via the physical button on the side. I happen to press it many times and thus save a lot of screenshots by mistake, but you can get used to it. Additionally, you can of course customise how the button reacts and turn it off completely if you want.

AI with varying usefulness

One of the AI features, the one that saves screenshots, is AI memories. It is supposed to let you save important things that are then interpreted and become searchable. In the collection, I can search for interpreted text in the images, which app they come from, date, and so on. I find very limited use for it, and it never becomes much more than a digital photo album, all over the place. For example, when I find myself in a situation where I need to use an app that only exists in Japanese, it is Google Circle to Search that helps me understand, not Honor's own features. Anyway, the help is there.

Just as I often press the AI button by mistake, another AI function appears when I hold my finger on the screen to pause an Instagram story. Then I am instead thrown into what Honor calls the magic portal. It is a way to save or share content and by holding down on certain images, texts or other content, easily get shortcuts to it.

The most useful AI functions are probably those for translating both text and speech, including Swedish, and making adjustments with AI in image editing. AI is also active in the camera app if you want it and can enhance the zoom. It does this in extreme zoom modes to increase detail, but when I test it, AI just adds completely wrong details and ruins it. And since the zoom is extremely good photographically without AI, I turn off the AI 'support' there.

By extremely good zoom, I mean that I can get usable images almost all the way up to 100 times magnification. This is achieved by Honor Magic 8 Pro basically with camera sensors and optics, a 200 megapixel sensor with 3.7 times optical zoom in the telephoto camera. Together with the wide-angle and main camera, Honor Magic 8 Pro gives you very great possibilities when it comes to zoom and also night photography. It handles a lot when the light is low and above all, it is better than other cameras when I combine zoom and night image in one. Like a zoomed-in image of a skyline with glowing windows. Here, good shake reduction also does its part. However, that is a very specific subject, perhaps not what fills the majority of either your or my photo album. When I take regular pictures in an urban environment at night, Honor is still among the best but not necessarily better. Often it feels like the phone overexposes and in post-processing increases the contrast for drama and then I often have to lower the exposure at the time of the photo for the images to be more true to life. Otherwise, I can get images that look almost like the night sky has a bright summer day sky. It also happens at some point that the HDR function gets it wrong and makes the sky bright blue when it is actually December grey.

For more general photos, the phone provides good sharpness, colour reproduction, and light sensitivity. However, I miss the depth in the images that phones with larger one-inch sensors provide. The images from Honor can feel a bit flat if you don't use the zoom, take a few steps back, and in that way get more depth. I sense more of an engineer behind it than the person with a passion for photography as documentation and art form that you can sense with Sony and Xiaomi and their collaboration with Leica.

Most of the features I've mentioned so far are made possible by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 system chip that we find in the phone, which also makes it one of the fastest ever. So, there's power to spare, and the screen, as I've mentioned, is really good, especially with sharpness and brightness for sunny days when they come. This is supported by a powerful battery, including fast charging, so there's no doubt that this is a flagship with a future ahead of it.

Questions and answers

Does it work extra well with Mac and iPhone?

Yes, Honor has features for both Mac computers and iPhone so you can easily share files, sync notifications, and so on. Xiaomi and Oneplus/Oppo also have their versions of iPhone and Mac approaches.

What if you use multiple Honor devices?

Yes, then you have more possibilities for them to collaborate when all are logged into the same Honor account.

Any tendencies to overheating?

The fastest system chips can cause the device to become warm under load and also fast charging, but this has not happened with the Honor Magic 8 Pro.

An alternative

Poco F8 Ultra and Oneplus 15 are alternatives that both have the same system chip and similar characteristics.

Camera example

Nattbild av upplyst storstadsskyline med höga hus och svag skymningshimmel. — HONOR MAGIC 8 PRO: Night-time city skyline shows the phone's sharp zoom and strong low-light performance in practice.

Primarily in extreme zoom and darkness, Honor shows that they have the resources to make a difference. Some images may require manual adjustments to be as realistic as possible and not overly dramatic.