Honor’s AI-packed Magic 7 Pro does enough to challenge the Galaxy S25 Ultra

We are buying phones less often these days, which is a good thing. There’s no longer a good reason to upgrade every two years because smartphones have improved so much that year over year improvements are relatively minimal. But this also means when it does come time to shop for a new one, you want to be sure you’re buying something you’ll be happy with for three or four years.

That’s partly why and have a grip on the smartphone market in the UK. If you’ve had an or Galaxy phone for a few years, it’s pretty safe to upgrade to the latest version and be done with it. But if you are after a new Android phone it’s well worth considering the alternatives as you’ll find a world of excellent high-end devices that offer different design, software and camera perks.

One such device is the Honor Magic 7 Pro, a very good premium phone with bold design, great cameras, long battery life and much-improved software compared to older Honor phones. In fact, there’s little to complain about here besides the decision to include some quite dodgy AI options in the camera app, but thankfully you can mostly ignore these optional tools, leaving you with the most complete and polished Honor phone yet that can easily go toe-to-toe with the while costing at least £200 less.

So, what do you get for the still-expensive £1,099 asking price?

The design is a refined take on last year’s . My review sample is an attractive Lunar Shadow Grey with a marble effect matt glass back (there’s black or blue for the less adventurous). Paired with the matt sides, this is a phone that completely hides fingerprints, though it is large and slippery. A shame, then, that there’s no case included in the box – nor a charger. The latter is par for the course for phones these days, but it’s galling here when Honor boasts the phone can charge at very fast 100W speeds. You’ll have to fork out £50 extra for . Ouch. Ditto if you want to take advantage of the 80W wireless charging, costs £85.

Whichever way you choose to charge (any USB-C charger will work, if slower) you’ll be rewarded with great battery life. I found it impossible to kill the phone in a single day, and the cell sometimes stretched to two, though this is actually a smaller battery than on the Magic 6 Pro, for some reason, and smaller than the , which has even better battery life.

The phone is very well designed but very large thanks to its 6.8-inch AMOLED screen, which is very slightly curved at the edges but is mostly flat, a departure for Honor. Most screens on phones this price are excellent and that applies here, with great resolution and sharpness. Honor includes loads of great display options that you don’t get on rival phones including automatic colour temperature adjustment, natural tone settings based on ambient light, a blue light filter and even an eBook mode for grayscaling the software to read comfortably.

There’s even a ‘defocus eyecare’ mode that is designed to reduce eye strain. We should all be staring at our phones less, but it’s good to see Honor include so many options to fine-tune the display to your liking,

At the top of the display is a camera cut-out that includes 3D face unlock, much like Apple’s Face ID. This allows for secure 3D biometrics, which is very rare to see on Android phones. It means you can unlock the phone with your face even in the dark and it’ll work to authenticate your identity for banking apps. Samsung, OnePlus and Xiaomi only offer 2D face unlocking that doesn’t work in low light and can be fooled by 2D images of your face. Honor’s way is much more secure.

That cut-out also copies Apple’s Dynamic Island, displaying information from audio apps and some others when in use. It’s a shameless copy, but I’m glad it’s there.

Though the large camera bump looks like it has four lenses it’s actually three plus a laser autofocus sensor. You get a 50MP main sensor with a two-stage variable aperture that can automatically flit between f/1.4 and f/2.0 depending on the scene. Theoretically this helps with natural background blur but in reality there’s not much difference between the two and you can just let it do its thing.

The sensor takes excellently sharp shots in most lighting conditions and I was pleased with a lot of the snaps I took. The images are often oversaturated though, boosting blues and greens beyond natural, though there are ‘natural’, ‘vibrant’ and ‘authentic’ filters so you can choose which sheen to put on your photos. Only the pickiest mobile photographers will take issue with the photo processing here but I prefer the ’s naturalistic look and the processing on the OnePlus 13.

Honor has put all its eggs in the zoom basket this year with a 200MP 3x optical telephoto lens, and the gamble pays off. This phone has one of the best zooms, with outstanding picture quality even up to 10x thanks to the high megapixel count.

Things get less sharp past that, and you can go up to 100x. The controversy is in the AI option Honor gives you. Punch in more than 30x and there’s an ‘AI’ toggle button that appears when you have a data connection. This will give you the normal version and an AI enhanced version of the scene.

The latter is simply make-believe, using AI to sharpen the image in some cases, or totally replace what was actually there with what the technology thinks was there. It’s designed to make shots usable but in many cases it simply lies and replaces details with fake ones.

The idea is a good one: to make blurry shots usable. But the reality is many of the photos look like paintings because they are manipulated, with details dramatically changed or added (see below comparison). It’s a weird feature and one I am not a fan of. Thankfully you can choose to totally ignore it.

Regular shots from the main lens fare far better most of the time:

A 50MP ultra-wide is solid here too, even though it’s the lens I use the least. Gen Z-ers who use this lens to take better selfies will be pleased with the quality though, and the 50MP selfie camera is good in most scenarios but suffers in low light and without auto-focus shots can sometimes be disappointingly blurry.

Elsewhere, Honor ships the phone with MagicOS 9 based on Android 15. Honor has been criticised in the past (including by me) for its unnecessary changes to the look and feel of Android but I have few complaints this year. It’s quick and highly customisable, from icon and layout changes to always-on display options and charging settings. You can really make this phone your own, which was the whole point of Android in the first place.

Honor still ships the phone with its own Gallery, Calendar, Clock, Notes and other apps rather than only using Google’s but it at least means you can choose which you prefer (i.e., Google’s).

A responsive and quick ultrasonic fingerprint sensor is well-placed under the display if you prefer it to face unlock, and while there’s no headphone jack, Bluetooth audio connections are stable. The dual stereo speakers are also top drawer, bassy, and some of the best I’ve used on any phone in recent years.

There’s a bunch of other AI tools including Magic Portal. This is one of the simplest but best uses of AI I’ve seen, far more useful to me than writing and summarising tools or erasing people from images that this phone can also do. The Portal lets you select and drag photos or text from any app you’re in and slide to the left or right to reveal a list of apps to send it to. You can then drop the selection into an app such as , Messenger, or search to send or query. It’s intuitive and useful.

With 12GB RAM and the chipset, the Magic 7 Pro flies through this and all tasks. Everything loads instantly and I never had any slowdown or app crashes. With five years of Android OS updates and six years of security updates, this is a phone that should stay fast and up to date till 2030 at the least. Better still, it comes with 512GB storage as standard, beating most rivals’ 256GB entry-level specs.

Add to that IP68 and IP69 water and dust resistance that means this device can survive a blast in the dishwasher – I’ve seen it – and you have as complete a modern Android phone as anything Samsung, OnePlus or Xiaomi is currently offering for an expensive but competitive price. The Magic 7 Pro is also available from , , or if you want to split the cost over a two or three year contract, and buying from Honor directly at the time of launch will get you money off and freebies such as the charger, a case and more.

No phone is perfect, and the Honor Magic 7 Pro’s dodgy AI zoom features somewhat sour an otherwise excellent device. Luckily you can ignore them. If you want an alternative Android flagship in 2025 to the Samsung Galaxy series, you can do far worse than go for this one.