Honor Magic8 Pro review - "A phone for pictures"

• Tons of useful Ai-related features
• Amazing camera, with built-in editing
• Great battery life and fast charging

The Honor Magic8 Pro is the newest, most powerful phone they've released. It's got a lot of AI integration, providing a much deeper ability to assist in everyday actions, and more importantly to me, take a lot of truly stunning photos.

Let's take a step back to how the Honor Magic8 Pro feels. The phone itself is roughly as big as the iPhone that I have been previously using, though it's both thinner and thicker. The camera on the front of it sticks out quite a bit, in a massive circle; it's really, really quite big! This is due to a lot of the different features and lenses that are within this camera system, which I very much like. I do feel this phone is slightly top-heavy, due to the camera on it. The screen is crisp, the colours clear, and everything just feels good.

The battery life on the Honor Magic8 Pro feels good too, with the battery lasting all day, despite me playing games and taking pictures of everything. If you are into technical things, this phone has a 6270mAh Honor Silicon-carbon battery, which allows for both wired and wireless charging. 

The AI Assistance

This phone highlights its own use of AI quite a bit. As Honor is Android, it comes pre-installed with Google Gemini, which allows people to interact with it using text, voice or image, for assistance on the go. I am not a huge AI assistant user, but I can see the perks in wanting a phone that can so easily react to you this way. There is also the option of Gemini Live, which has real-time visual understanding, can read signs and translate menus, and can even understand where you are based on landmarks. It's great for those who love to travel and explore the world. 

Honor has its own Honor AI, which can be accessed using a quick tap AI button and a Magic Sidebar. This allows your phone to understand what it's looking at, detect deepfakes, protect against face-swaps and voice cloning, and let you know if there is some sort of AI trying to deceive you. Having these sorts of protective features is really important in this day and age, especially with so many scams using AI to generate voice and video. 

All about images

Now, with a massive camera, it's very clear that the Honor Magic8 Pro has a handful of extra features. On the camera itself, there are a bunch of different options. Lots of normal things like Portrait mode can be found, but there is also a dedicated night mode, which features a 200MP Ultra Night Telephoto. It really captures the finer details in low-light instead of making up the picture. There is a Pro mode, which allows you to basically tinker with your phone as if it were a physical camera - very neat for those who love photography. This phone has a good level of stabilisation as a default as well! 

Several of the modes have an option, Ai enchancement mode, which can help with it. There are a few different filters that can be put in when it comes to taking pictures, including uploading your own watermark, which will appear on your images. The editing after you take a picture with the Honor Magic8 Pro is also quite detailed and fantastic, with plenty of presets. You can take your pictures and us Ai to change them too, to make a photo into a drawing, for example, which is fun to play around with. 

Verdict

I found the Honor Magic8 Pro to be a fantastic phone to tinker around with. The amount of control on changing and taking photographs is fantastic, though the phone did at first lighten my cat to be more orange than he is in real life, it's great to tinker and make those settings your own. Setting up the phone and transferring data, even from an iPhone, was easier than expected. Everything came through quickly and fully. I do find the shape of the phone to be a bit odd, but to accommodate such a big camera, it makes a lot of sense.