42 days now with the honor magic 5 Pro yes I got hold of this in Barcelona at mwc 23. it's a review
unit from honor of course and in those 42 days is it a phone that I can recommend well I'm going to
go over all the Good the Bad and the Ugly with this model here so you get a a good overall idea
of exactly what to expect with honors new 2023 flagship phone so included with your nice new
shiny honor magic 5 Pro you'll find a clear TPU case fits the phone perfectly type A to type c USB
cable our honor supercharger that is 66 watts and then a SIM tray tool now I've covered most of this
with my Hardware preview so just run over it very quickly we have a glass back glass on the front
that has a slight curvature to it middle frame the phones build quality feels excellent it is very
good and I like this curvature to where we have our three cameras on the rear so all three of them
are 50 megapixels but the main sensor does have a very fast and bright F 1.6 aperture which is great
to see housed within this we have a large battery so it's 5100 milliamp hours with this model we've
got 50 watt wireless charging and of course a 65 sorry 66 watt charging there too with it
so the phone does have this pill cut out in the upper left hand corner we've got a 12 megapixel
front-facing camera and then it does have time of flight camera there's for that 3D face mapping
so super secure now when I unlock the phone and then look at it it unlocks and it is very quick
super accurate really do like it the fingerprint reader this is a ultrasonic one and it does work
really well no problems with it so we have an ltpo OLED screen here 120 hertz HDR 10 plus
picks at 1800 nits 6.81 inches and the bezels aren't too bad curvature here to the screen I do
wish it was flat but the bezels on the side are not bad at all and we have reasonably small top
and bottom bezels it weighs 219 grams and is 8.8 millimeters thick and we do have an ip68 dust and
water resistance too with the phone so you can see on the right hand side we have metal volume
up and down and power buttons and the location of them is very very good so I can easily get
to that power button there to unlock it now there are three microphones in total with this phone so
there's one where the camera module is the one at the top and one down below so antenna lines right
here IR transmitter and here we do have part of the loudspeaker which is within the earpiece down
the bottom you'll see well SIM tray here so it takes two Nano Sims type c Port that is USB 3.1
with video out it just does clone display there is a desktop mode with it and our loudspeaker
so it runs Android 13 and we do have their magic OS 7.1 I am on the latest patch here with this
version that they did send out for me this review unit does have eight gigabytes of RAM you can see
with an extra five which is basically caching page file system but they call it on a ram
turbo now the screen resolution it's 1312 so it's not quite 1440p but you don't really notice much
of a difference there and we do have a security patch level of February the 1st which is not bad
at all Snapdragon 8gn2 so everything is very fast touch response great the haptics not a bad little
buzz that we do get from this particular phone it's very good and the UI magic UI magic OS 7.1
here is great the performance very fast smooth gestures here and just doing some multitasking
is great the performance of it it does have a lot of extra features however I really wish it had an
apps draw with it it doesn't have that option when you go in into their home screen settings
feels a little dated now the UI I just wish they would add this and maybe modernize it a little bit
it's starting to show its age a bit but of course it's all very smooth and fluid and which is what
I love about this is how fast everything really is even when you go into all your photos and
everything you really do not see any casing any loading slow down or any problems thanks to the
ufs 4.0 storage it does have which is very quick now under the display settings you'll see here we
do have a lot of different options so you can of course go through the scaling color temperature
you can adjust that if you want I've kept it on the default which is vivid for this OLED panel
120 hertz but you can do this you can put it onto 90 Hertz and that is that sweet spot for battery
saving but still remaining fluid and it doesn't feel choppy and laggy that 60 hertz nowadays does
if you're so used to 120 that is when you lower it down to save on that battery life you don't
really have to do that because you can just use 90 which is great now which more manufacturers would
do this because most just give us 60 or 120 that is it so in here there is no option for DC dimming
but because it's got such a high pulse width modulation we don't need it because I don't see
any banding any flickering any issues whatsoever and the 1800 Nets holds up really well in direct
sunlight and being an OLED screen you can make out everything and send your text messages WhatsApp
and use your phone just fine even in direct sunlight so there's a couple of things to
point out with the camera system here now one of them is this that's their motion sensing capture
AI capture and it's super quick now that's an amazing fast shutter rate like this this is how
I managed to get this shot right now of me jumping mid ear is because it detects this takes the photo
before you can even do it yourself so it's pretty handy and the focus is so fast and that shadow
rate amazing blazing quick however I did run into a few problems with sometimes with animals
getting a focus lock and I had to disable this the smart Focus which is like basically tracking
automatically turning that off I could get a bit of focus then sometimes it would actually be off
that lock now firmware updates will hopefully be able to improve that and the front-facing camera
good news with that one is it does support 4K video but we don't get 8K with the magic 5 Pro
when you get the phone you will find a few bloatware applications tiktokbooking.com
but it's quite minimal compared to other brands that can put 10 15 or so apps on there that you
probably have to go through and remove so my unit here has 256 gigabytes of storage it is of course
ufs 4.0 the fastest that we now get with phones and you'll see that those speeds they are as good
as some people's pcie 3.0 ssds and their laptops so that is quite impressive and just like this
now I did put it into the high performance mode for this the and 22 score so you can see we are
getting well over a million points now Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for these short bursts like this Benchmark
very good that is impressive performance it went up eight degrees the temperature and I lost four
percent uh battery life there pretty standard now there is a wide Vine level one cert so Netflix is
already pre-installed and yes it is in full HD Amazon Prime video also full HD a camera 2 API
support with all of the cameras that is great if you want to use open camera or for example gcam
it does pass the safety net check right here so for banking applications we do have NFC on board
and battery run time so this is running at the highest resolution highest refresh rate and like
all other phones I review you can check out those reviews of fixed battery benchmark test here went
for 9 hours and seven minutes that's the result realistically with that resolution that high
brightness screen and 120 hertz you're looking about seven and a half hours of screen on on time
which is standard it's nothing amazing even though it does have a large capacity battery I expected
a little more out of this it is that resolution and refresh rate taking its toll there a bit so
to charge from four percent to 100 with the 66 watt charger took one hour exactly 60 minutes
so that's not exactly blazing fast compared to some other phones out there that can fully charge
and only 15 or 10 minutes or so we've now got 120 watt charging 240 watt charging but still around
about an hour or just under an hour is okay in my books it's not too bad then the stress test
that I ran here is a 20 minute Loop of a very demanding gaming Benchmark and what I saw was it
did Throttle Down just over 30 percent now that is similar to the also powered Snapdragon 8 gen
two powered Galaxy s23 Ultra will throttle down to about this level and you can see at the six minute
Mark is where the scores there take a bit of a dive that is when it triggered the throttling and
then it just maintained that constant performance the lowest Loop score isn't too bad I have seen
worse but I do wish it didn't throttle as bad as it does right now you can see the frame rate there
went from 11 frames per second to 27. maximum temperature was 43 degrees Celsius that's the
chipset but I have the felt the phone itself get up to 48 degrees after gaming for long periods
so of course there is no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack it's 2023 if we went back quite a few years
then we would have that but hey it's gone now loud's bigger down the bottom loudspeaker at
the top I'm going to play a track now at 100 volume these loudspeakers they're good they
got decent amount of volume to them some mids in there overall I don't really think anyone's
going to be complaining about them so here's that track at 100 volume [Music] thank you
[Music] over to the cameras now with the magic 5 Pro so this is our front facing camera we can
shoot in this Ultra wide which is 0.7 times and you fit quite a bit more in the shot now because
of the electronic image stabilization the crop is a little closer but I've got the option to go
to 0.8 which is this is what it is right now and then one times that's even closer cropped in right
up close to me so 4K 34k 60 with a front-facing camera really good to see this option because so
many other brands especially brands from China are dropping and don't even use 4K with their
front-facing cameras only 1080p now you can see it might be overexposing a little bit the Sun so
it's early morning here around about 9 30 in the morning and it's difficult conditions with all
that light behind me so tough for a front-facing camera sensor main video now so 4K 30 4K 60 very
there's no 8K option like we do get with other Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagships unfortunately now
we've got Optical image stabilization with the main camera here just gonna jog ahead
testing out that stability now note that with 4K we do have a recording limit of 15 minutes
so I'm going to just zoom into this is the iron Tower top coastal defense has actually
built so they can warn the town against pirates that would come in raid here that's four times
two I'll just bring it back now to our main camera and we can shift over to the ultra wide with its
electronic image stabilization now I don't typically see panning jutter with this button
which is good it seems to be slightly improved almost non-existent with the Snapdragon 8gn2 in my
experience with also other Snapdragon 182 powered phones now audio bitrate is 256 kilobits per
second you should be able to hear a lot of noise for those waves crashing against the coast here
overall not bad at all video quality for 4K so you're probably asking can it take a good photo it
can this is a macro shot looks really great this other shot here of a flower does show that the F
1.6 offers great background blur and more shots that I've been taking over the last 42 days of
using this phone here and this one here too of my breakfast one day that I went out I think it came
out really well the colors the blur this is the front facing portrait mode selfie lots of detail
there turned off all the beautifying so this is the main camera here so they're 50 megapixel main
camera and now 3.5 times zoom and then over to the 10 times so it starts to lose a little bit
of detail but still not bad for 10 times zoom and this shot I took in Barcelona while I was
there the ultra wide so if you want to see more photo samples including low light please check
out my camera comparison that I have a dedicated video with the magic 5 Pro versus the Galaxy s23
Ultra and the iPhone 14 pro gaming performance this is pretty obvious this one that yes with
the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 8 gigabytes of RAM it does perform well again share and impact with the top
settings 60 frames per second it occasionally has a few frame dips now after around about the
eight minute Mark you notice the performance does drop down a tiny little bit it goes from around 60
frames per second to then 50 51 about there and it's not bad at all so good gaming performance
is it the absolute best no but it's still one of the better ones and really good for gaming
for all those titles that are in the Play Store they're going to run just fine on the magic 5 Pro
I rule this is a great all-rounded phone and a lot of people will focus most of their attention
on the cameras the camera performance right well check out that camera comparison because
it really does go head to head with the iPhone 14 pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra and
it really offers a lot that bright screen the 120 hertz refresh rate the 3D face unlocking so much
better it's fast and it's safe and super accurate compared to 2D face unlocking which you can easily
fool with just photos of people well not the case here with this one of course and then those three
cameras I love the main camera the fact that it's got a super quick shutter rate it can get
that Focus spot on using that motion sensing capturing there so you can get those images
of people jumping animals moving really fast things like that that I don't think any other
phone currently can match the kind of Photography and that sort of style there of your fast paced
like sports and things or jumping it is really good now I did experience that tiny little bit
of a problem with trying to get a focus on my cat I had to disable that smart Focus feature just
turn that off and then it was all right without the tracking of the focus so hopefully firmware
update will be able to address that the UI has been very fast fluid no complaints from me apart
from the fact that it feels a bit dated with an without an app store I would really like to see
an app store on this because I'm so used to that now having an app store and I think a lot of other
people too would personally like that say hope with a magic OS 7.5 or 8 whenever they bring out
the update for it that they do add an apps your option would be really good to see battery life
pretty standard it's not bad at all for 5 100 milliamp hours that we get around about seven
and a half hours that is by the way with the smart resolution feature off forcing the top
resolution and forcing 120 hertz it's a super bright screen as well 1800 nits so you can see
this OLED screen and direct sunlight as I showed you before without any problems really good it's a
phone that is is very well rounded now the pricing of it I don't know exactly I'm just kind of going
to guess here really well I think it's about 1100 to 1200 or so Euros as they announced it
mwc but that could have changed by now if I've got an update to that I'll let you know in the
comments of this video there's a pin the comment there in the description too of course and the
release date again I don't know the exact release date for Europe so if I have that information from
honor I will most certainly put that down in the description pin a comment to as well so there we
go that's the full story this is a solid very well-rounded phone from honor their magic 5 Pro