Honor Magic4 Pro review: hardware highs, software stumbles

Since being spun out in late 2020 Honor has been its own brand. Since becoming an independent company, the company has not been able to release a true flagship phone in the west due to various difficulties. The Magic3 phone was only available in China, even though it was supposed to be available around the world.

The Magic4 Pro will be available to pre-order in the UK from May 13th and will ship on May 27th. Honor has no plans to release the phone in the US. It's a price point that Honor's phone can compete with, and it's also a price point that Apple can compete with. Those are three excellent choices for prospective phone buyers.

The Magic4 Pro is competitive. It has a trio of high-resolution rear cameras, 100W wired charging, and support for 100W wireless charging, as well as a big bright, colorful screen with a fast refresh rate. Honor's software struggles to hold up its end of the bargain, despite the fact that I liked a lot of these features individually.

The Honor Magic4 Pro is similar to most other flagships in 2022. The display has a resolution of 1312 x 2848, a peak brightness of 1000 nits, and a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. It gets lots of bright and colorful. There is a pill-shaped hole-punch cutout on the top left for a 12-megapixel selfie camera and 3D face unlock hardware.

Honer is calling the screen a quad-curved screen, but it only curves around the left and right sides of the phone, and I wish it wasn't curved at all. The curves give the phone a more premium feel, and I didn't have any issues with accidentally touching its sides like with some curved screen phones. I lost the sides of apps and the top and bottom of videos around the curved edges, with very little benefit. The phone is dust and water resistant, so you shouldn't have any issues using it in the rain.

Honor is only committing to two years of security updates and two years of Android updates for the Magic4 Pro, which is out of the box. In contrast, Apple is still releasing new updates for the iPhone 6S even though it has been a year since it was released, while other companies such as Google offer three or five security updates.

I don't normally talk about the security features built into phones, but the time I had to set up fingerprints on the Magic4 Pro is worth mentioning. I encountered a software bug that led to my attempts to register my thumbprint failing over a dozen times. When I manually added three more fingerprints after initial setup, I didn't encounter any issues, so I think the problem is software-based rather than with the 3D Sonic Sensor Gen 2 that Honor is using in this phone.

In a side-by-side test with an Apple device, the Magic4 Pro's 3D face unlock feature was only a fraction of a second slower. When it was more challenging, such as when looking from an angle or in a dark room, Honor's face unlock would sometimes fail, and its implementation didn't feel as reliable as Apple's.

The phone's 100W fast charging is even more reliable than the 4,600mAh cell's battery life. I averaged over five hours of screen on time out of the Honor Magic4 Pro and would end the day with over 40 percent of charge left. It took a day of heavy usage, including a half-hour video call and an hour and a half of using the phone for cycling directions, for the phone to reach zero at around 11PM. The Honor box has a 100W charge that did a great job when I did a charging test. It hit the 46 percent mark just 15 minutes after I put it on charge, and reached 100 percent just after the half-hour mark.

In my test, the Honor Magic4 Pro charged the phone to 100 percent in 31 minutes, and 54 percent in 15 minutes. I don't think many people will use this feature because it takes two things to get these speeds: the Honor 100W wireless charging stand and the power brick that comes in the box for the wireless charging. I think they're unlikely to come cheap, even though Honor didn't respond to questions about the pricing.

Honor's MagicUI 6 software adds a couple of interesting features, but for the most part, I got frustrated with the bloat. Booking.com, TrainPal, Trip.com, and WPS Office are just a few of the questionable apps that the phone comes pre-installed with. When I wasn't looking for them, I stumbled into supposedly helpful shortcuts. The phone will ask you to slide your finger up on the display to access the home screen once it's unlocked. If you start too far down, you'll open a shortcut menu with links to a voice recorder app and calculator, and I accidentally activated it.

One of the features is a phone calling technology called "Just Say to Me", which adjusts the sound coming out of the phone's earpiece to make it inaudible to those around you. Honor says the feature works by using the screen itself to transmit low and medium-frequency sounds, leaving the earpiece to handle high frequencies. It sounds like it's adjusting the sound of the incoming voice to reduce the volume of lower frequencies that might carry further. It only works when the phone's call volume is set to 60 percent or less. It was harder to hear the person on the other end of the call if I had to turn the volume down, but it's not clear how much of that was due to the fact that I had to turn the volume down.

Some of my annoyances could be changed with Honor's software. SwiftKey is easy to replace with Gboard if you want to return to the standard app drawer. Honor's software shuts down apps in the background if it doesn't think you're using them, which tripped up a jogging app I was using to keep time.

Even when I adjusted Honor's software to my liking, it still didn't feel like I was using a phone with a flagship processor. When I flipped it open, the drawer stuttered slightly, and apps would sometimes get confused and have to reload their contents when I switched to them quickly. It's not great seeing these in a premium flagship, given how good the midrange phones have gotten. The Magic4 Pro has the same amount of storage as the Pixel 6 Pro.

The Honor Magic4 Pro's camera system is housed within a large circular camerabump on the rear of the phone. People who were shown the phone were split on the design, but I like the way it makes a statement out of its rear camera bump. There are three rear cameras on the Magic4 Pro, with a 50-megapixel main, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and a 64-megapixel telephoto. Honor bucked the trend of using a high-resolution main sensor with lower resolution secondary cameras.

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• Ultrawide lens.
• Telephoto lens, 3.5x zoom.
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• Telephoto lens, 3.5x zoom.
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• Telephoto lens, 3.5x zoom.
• Ultrawide lens.

Daylight photography is good in practice, which is where most manufacturers will be in 2022. Honor's tuning tends to prioritize bright colors and sharp edges, but with its well-specced sensor, it's got enough detail to work with that I think the effect works. It does a good job with my face, leaving my skin tone looking natural. The secondary cameras have hi-res sensors behind them. Honor's shots are the same quality as other phone cameras.

I was not impressed with the performance of the Honor Magic4 Pro in low light. I was impressed by the lack of noise, and it did a good job with color accuracy. It looks like Honor's software is trying to smooth out as much film grain as it can, and it can make images look like soft watercolors when you look closely. The performance of the main camera is roughly the same as the ultrawide or telephoto cameras, which is pretty good considering the degraded performance you often get from the secondary cameras in other phones.

Honor has done a good job with the hardware of the Magic4 Pro. The device's hardware succeeds at having that premium flagship feel, as it charges incredibly fast, has a beautiful screen, and has high resolution cameras. If you want a phone that can charge faster than other phones that use a wired connection, then the Honor Magic4 Pro is the phone for you.

I didn't like the experience of using the Honor Magic4 Pro. It felt like wearing a pair of shoes that were just half a size too big when it came to the occasional software hiccup, the aggressive background app management, or the lock screen shortcut that got in the way too often. You might find a better fit elsewhere if your phone costs as much as Apple's flagship.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it. It is impossible for us to read and analyze all of these agreements. We started counting how many times you have to agree to use devices when we review them.

You need to agree to use the Honor.

• Honor’s terms and conditions, its End User License Agreement, and Basic Service Statement
• Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
• Google Play Terms of Service
• Install updates and apps: “You agree this device may also automatically download and install updates and apps from Google, your carrier, and your device’s manufacturer, possibly using cellular data. Some of these apps may offer in-app purchases.”

You need to get past several optional agreements during setup.

• Participation in user experience improvement program
• Assistant Voice Match
• Back up to Google Drive: “Your backup includes apps, app data, call history, contacts, device settings (including Wi-Fi passwords and permissions), and SMS.”
• Use location: “Google may collect location data periodically and use this data in any anonymous way to improve location accuracy and location-based services.”
• Allow scanning: “Allow apps and services to scan for Wi-Fi networks and nearby devices at any time, even when Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is off.”
• Send usage and diagnostic data: “Help improve your Android device experience by automatically sending diagnostic, device and app usage data to Google.”

There are six mandatory agreements and six optional agreements.