Honor just released the Magic 8 series in China, with two phones and several new upgrades over the year-old Magic 7 line. These are the best and most bleeding-edge devices Honor has ever made, and they are also among the initial few handsets to have the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip onboard. Here’s everything you should know about Honor Magic 8 and Magic 8 Pro.
Honor Magic 8 Pro
The name tag makes it obvious that the Honor Magic 8 Pro leads the series, at least for now. There’s also an Ultra model coming soon, but let’s not get sidetracked by its position. This flagship newcomer has a 200MP telephoto lens on that circular camera plate.
There’s a 1/1.4-inch sensor here with an f/2.6 aperture lens, and it should zoom to about a 3.7X range with OIS keeping it stable. If these stats sound familiar to your ears, you should trust your gut, as these are the exact same numbers seen on the Vivo X300 Ultra’s 200MP telephoto.
Honor really copied the X300 Pro’s camera setup down to the wire with a 50MP Main and 50MP ultrawide camera. It even has the same 50MP selfie shooter. Sure, the Magic 8 Pro has minute differences in the lens construction, soft features, and maybe the sensor type, but it trades blows with the X300 Pro.
Where this Honor Magic 8 Pro really takes the edge is the performance. It’s the phone with Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 4.6GHz engine. Honor has absolutely pushed itself to a new height. They are promising up to 7 major Android upgrades, and it begins straight from Android 16 MagicOS 10.
The Magic 8 Pro scores up to 7200mAh cell capacity (Chinese version), which is a generous boost over last year’s 5850mAh battery. It can be charged with either an 80W wireless or a 120W wired input. This phone also has something called large amplitude stereo speakers, which is intriguing.
The screen on this handset is an LTPO 120Hz 6.71” OLED with small curves on all sides and 6000 nits of advertised brightness. It has an HDR Vivid support too. The resolution is 1.5K or 1200p, and a Giant Rhino Glass is on top to shield it from damage. Honor Magic 8 Pro’s base price comes down to CNY 5,699 (~PKR 224,000), and that’s for a 12/256GB storage format.
Honor Magic 8
The screen grows a bit smaller on the Magic 8, but the specs are similar. The non-pro’s OLED is 6.58” in size, slightly compact, with an LTPO 120Hz refresh rate and 1.5K resolution. There’s the same Rhino Glass at the top. You also get HDR Vivid and 6000 nits brightness to make the HDR content pop.
These two phones are IP69 rated, so they are pretty durable against water or dust ingress. The Magic 8 gets an identical Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 4.6GHz chip and 12GB base RAM with Adreno 840 pulling the GPU load. It boots straight to Android 16 OS, and 7 years of long software support is promised here.
Magic 8 does drop the telephoto resolution to 64MP and 3X Optical zoom. That seems to be the only major difference. At least these two phones share the same 50MP first camera, 50MP Ultrawide, and a 50MP selfie shooter. Both can do 4K 60 FPS videos.
The hardware level goes up to WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Honor also added Satellite SOS support here. Each model has the industry’s fastest Ultrasonic fingerprint ID. And yes, these two also have NFC and Infrared ports.
The battery size for the vanilla Magic 8 is 7000mAh with 80W wireless input and 90W wired. The Chinese base price for Magic 8 (12/256GB) is CNY 4,499, which is around PKR 177,000 when converted. These tags don’t reflect the prices in other markets. We assume the global costs will be much higher. You have to wait for a confirmation, though. Keep watching the news.
