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What I like most about the Honor Magic 7 Pro is not the AI features. It’s not its fantastic build quality that feels substantial. It’s not the super-bright screen that’s perfect under the sun. It’s not the silicon-carbide battery that contains more mAH of juice than others without increasing the physical size of the battery. All these things are awesome, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s actually the sound of its speakers that sets it apart.

Sound Quality

The Magic 7 Pro is the best sounding phone I have ever tested. It has speakers on the bottom and the top as usual, but what’s different from most phones is that it’s designed to mirror the output of the bottom speaker, which makes it much easier to create Spatial Audio, making the phone sound a lot bigger than it looks. It’s got several sound settings, but on its default setting it’s loud, it’s tuned very well, clean mids without any of that typical harshness, and vocals are separated from the bass.

Yes, there is bass here. There’s a large vapor chamber at the back, it doubles up as a waveguide amplifying the bass frequencies. So unlike most phones, these actually do have a decent level of upper bass, to the extent that when you play music, you can actually feel the bass pulsing at the back of the phone. It feels like a fresh experience for me watching videos, playing music, and gaming on this device.

👉 Have a listen to the sound samples

Customization

Even with headphones and earbuds, there are lots of settings you can play with to enhance and customize the sound. So maybe the settings from the earbud’s manufacturer aren’t sufficient, no worries, you can just adjust the global EQ settings from within the Magic 7 Pro.

There’s a DTS:X option which adds a surround sound factor for videos and games, a more spacious Honor Sound Spatial mode, and you can also pick from a list of custom settings for headphones from a long list of brands. (Although it seems like they stopped updating the list from 2019, so you only get presets for older models). But that is not an issue for me, since I prefer to craft my own settings.

Issue

The only sound-related issue that I have with the Magic 7 Pro is a small one to many people, but it’s something that audiophiles really care about, codecs! There’s simply a lack of Audio Codecs. Kind of like Samsung phones but in this case Samsung also has their own codec SSC which works with the Galaxy Buds series, but this one only supports SBC AAC and LDAC. Even though this runs on Snapdragon 8 Elite, it doesn’t seem to support any version of aptX. Furthermore, I would have thought that since it’s a Chinese device it would also have LHDC. Like I said, not a big issue with many people, just some people who may prefer to reduce the compromise that going wireless does to audio.

(A viewer highlighted that in the UK and EU, the Magic 7 Pro supports aptX and aptX HD.)

Camera (Photos)

As for the Magic 7 Pro’s camera, in a nutshell, it’s awesome in certain ways. We’re talking pretty accurate colors, even in low light, most phones tend to lean a little too blue, others a little too red, this one’s somewhere in the middle on all 3 lenses, which means one less thing to tweak in post if all you want is a neutral look.

And it’s also got deep blacks which adds more contrast, giving the pictures a sort of pop. At the standard focal lengths it also has this sharpness, yet smoothness to the picture so it looks very natural. Anything beyond the standard focal lengths relies on AI to patch and smooth the picture so understandably, it could look a little over processed, but acceptable in a pinch. But what I like is the stabilization. The framing is so sticky even when you’re zoomed in 100x, it’s so easy to stay focused on one point.

However, interestingly, it’s not possible to shoot in 50MP using the standard Photo mode. You have to go into Pro mode, only then can you opt to shoot in 50MP, JPEG or RAW. Pro mode obviously does give you more granular control over your shots.

👉 Have a look at the photo samples

Camera (Video)

For videos, its stabilization is good. It does look a little oversharpened, but picture quality is overall quite acceptable. My only gripe with it is it’s very limited in terms of focal lengths, You only have 3 fixed focal lengths, 0.5x, 1x and 2.6x, and digital crop zoom of up to 10x. It sounds weird that it’s got 2.6x zoom, when it’s actually got 3x Telephoto. But it’s probably to accommodate for stabilization crop, and they’re trying to be more transparent about the numbers.

I was shooting under the sun which was a great chance to see if it gets hot, because this phone is using the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor which runs a little hotter than average. Well, it did get warm, but while most phones have much of the heat concentrated in one spot around the camera area, the Magic 7 Pro could dissipate the heat very well around the back and further away from the camera elements. Overall good thermals.

👉 Have a look at the video samples

Artificial Intelligence

As for its AI features, in the short time I’ve spent with the phone, most of the features I’ve been using aren’t so different from other phones because it runs on Google Gemini. Even the available AI camera features are more or less similar to that of Samsung or OPPO devices, with varying efficacy.

What was pretty unique is Magic Portal. You use your knuckle to draw a circle on the screen to highlight stuff that you want to send or search by dragging it into certain apps instead of taking screenshots, or copy and pasting. I find this one useful because it saves me a few steps. Otherwise there’s Magic Text, AI Translate, things which any device with Google Gemini can do.

So I don’t really think it’s game changing in the AI space, but there’s lots about it that’s cutting edge. In some areas, not so, but like I said, the sound quality from the speakers is simply incredible. Definitely get this for watching videos and gaming.

Check Honor Magic7 Pro latest price:

Lazada (Singapore) - https://s.lazada.sg/s.chWR3?cc
Amazon - TBA

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