Last year Chinese smartphone brand Honor revealed its first flagships since breaking away from a troubled Huawei in 2020. Now the company has flown into Barcelona to impress global consumers with the latest generation of its flagship smartphone.
The Magic4 Pro handset features a 6.81-inch OLED display at 1,312 x 2,848 resolution and 19.54:9 aspect, and boasts a screen-to-body ratio of 93.5 percent, support for 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and HDR10+, and a dynamic refresh rate that runs from 1 Hz to 120 Hz as needed.
Inside is Qualcomm's mobile platform of choice for this year's flagship Android smartphones, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset with octa-core processing and Adreno 730 GPU.
The latter is given some optimization help from rendering technology dubbed Turbo X – "delivering an exceptionally high frame rate and network connectivity while generating less heat and lowering latency, adequately satisfying player's demand for high gaming quality and buttery smooth graphics." System support shapes up with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage.
The sizable disc around back is home to three camera modules – a 50-megapixel wide with F1.8 aperture and feeding light to a 1/1.56-in sensor, a 50-MP ultra-wide with F2.2 aperture for a broad field of view that spans 122 degrees, and a 64-MP periscope telephoto with F3.5 aperture, 3.5x optical zoom and optical image stabilization. There's also a single LED flash module in the array.
All cameras are powered by computational photography, with Honor promising a "65 percent increase in image sharpness and clarity" by combining the two 50-MP cameras, and up to 160 percent sharpness and clarity boost when the telephoto and wide cameras join forces. And on the mobile movie-making front, the Pro is reported capable of delivering the industry's first 10-bit Log 4K video at 60 frames per second.
The little oblong to the top left of the display is home to a 12-MP selfiecam – which also supports 4K UHD video recording – and a 3D depth camera.
Interestingly, the Pro not only comes with 100-W wired fast charging for a full charge of the handset's 4,500-mAh Li-Po battery in 30 minutes, but perhaps more impressively, Honor has included 100-W wireless charging chops as well for a cable-free top up to 50 percent in just 15 minutes.
The flagship runs Honor's Magic UI 6.0 operating system, which is based on Android 12 and therefore enjoys full access to the Play Store and Google services, and includes a new feature called Privacy Calling that's said to tap into AI and directional sound technologies to help prevent sound leakage during calls.
Elsewhere, the phone features Bluetooth 5.2 (with support for high-res streaming thanks to the LDAC and aptX HD codecs), 802.11ax Wi-Fi and 5G mobile internet. And an IP68 rating means that users can dunk the phone in the drink for up to 30 minutes at depths of 1.5 m (5 ft).
The Honor Magic4 Pro smartphone is due for release from the second quarter of this year, starting at €1,099 (~US$1,230). A lower-spec Magic4 model will go on sale at the same time for €899. You can see the launch highlights in the video below.
Product page: Magic4 Pro
