Honor made a convincing pitch to join big players of the smartphone world last year, with the launch of the Magic 4 Pro - its first flagship smartphone to launch outside of China.

It was a strong step in the right direction, and Honor now wants to build on that momentum with the new Magic 5 Pro. It's a flagship phone with flagship specs that look plenty impressive on paper - but how do they play out in use? Here's our full review.

Design and build

• Dimensions: 162.9mm x 76.7 x 8.77mm (HWD)
• Colours: Meadow Green and Black
• Weight: 219g

The Honor Magic 5 Pro takes a few design notes from with the Magic 4 Pro, while also learns some lessons, too. It's still a dual-glass design, with glass panels on the front and back, but this time round, it's offering a matte finish to reduce the fingerprints we found the mirrored Magic 4 Pro to pick up.

This finish is only available in the new colour way though – a rather fetching Meadow Green – so the ever-popular black retains its glossy credentials for those who love that look (and don't mind keeping it polished). The matte design feels more like plastic than it does glass, which we don't mind, but the added texture doesn't actually add much more by way of grip. This is quite a slippery phone, so you're probably going to want to add a case for peace of mind.

Like the 4 Pro, the edge of the display has a slight curve to it on all sides, and this is matched on both front and back – something Honor calls its Symmetrical Design. While curved displays might divide opinion, there's no doubt this does help it to sit nicely in your hand, and it looks lovely too.

The silver aluminium frame that runs around the edge of the phone is flat though, and thicker on the top and bottom than it is on the sides. There are just two physical controls housed here – a volume rocker and a power button on the right hand side - with stereo speakers to the top and bottom, joined by the SIM tray and USB-C charging port along the bottom edge too.

There's no denying the main focal point in the Magic 5 Pro's overall look and feel is the bold camera design on its back panel, and how you feel about how that looks could be a big deciding factor in whether this is the phone for you. It's a centrepiece of the design and one we had a lot of comments on from friends and family during testing.

While some manufacturers may be trying to make the camera bump smaller, the bump on the Magic 5 Pro sits even more prominently than it did on the 4 Pro, so much so that it lifts the phone up to an angle when resting on a table. We don't mind it though, and considering the emphasis on the cameras in this phone, having them be such a prominent part of the design is no real surprise.

It also gives you somewhere to tuck your index finger up against when holding the phone, which helps to counteract the slightly top-heavy balance the chunky camera creates.

Display

• 6.81-inch LTPO OLED display
• 1312 x 2848 pixels, 461ppi
• 1-120Hz smart refresh rate
• Up to 1800 peak brightness

Like the Magic 4 Pro, the Magic 5 Pro offers a large 6.81-inch LTPO display with a smart refresh rate up to 120Hz, so it can scale up and down to suit what you're doing, while also preserving battery. There are - as you'd expect - some differences and improvements here though, which we'll get to shortly.

As we mentioned above, it has the quad curve display, which looks lovely and feels great to hold, and we had no issues with the edges lacking in responsiveness - a common complaint from this type of screen design. It's probably as much about personal taste as it is about performance now, though gamers may still prefer a flat design to ensure all content is where they can most easily see it.

The pill-shape cutout for the front-facing camera, also brought over from the Magic 4 Pro, will continue to divide opinion as well. It can be hidden in some apps by placing a large black bar towards the top, but that depends on if that is supported in the app you're using, and loses you a decent slither of screen real estate.

Once again, you get biometric face unlocking from this camera, which works quickly and reliably, though there is also a fingerprint scanner under the screen as back up. We had a few incidents where it failed to recognise our fingerprint on first scan but most of the time, the face unlock got to the job quick enough so it wasn't needed anyway.

At 461ppi, the screen on the Magic 5 Pro is crisp and detailed in use, but above all - it's really bright. While the Magic 4 Pro could achieve 1000 nits of brightness, the Magic 5 Pro can go to 1300 nits, and packs Novel Display Luminance Enhancement technology to push that up to a peak HDR brightness of 1800 nits.

Colour accuracy in particular has been a big focus for the Magic 5 Pro, and the result is that it has the lowest Delta E score – which measures colour difference between the native colour and how it appears – of any smartphone.

This is backed up by dual-luminance calibration, set at a typical 120 nits for indoor brightness and 800 nits for outdoors brightness, to ensure the colours you see are automatically adjusted accordingly depending on where you are looking at them.

This is all supported by a new discrete display chipset, which promises to improve the quality of video and gaming across the board, thanks to delivering a higher frame rate and improved video enhancement for smoother, more detailed images.

The result of all of this is that it is currently sitting at the top of the DXOMARK ranking for smartphone display, with a score of 151. By comparison, the Samsung S23 Ultra scored 148.

This all comes good in practice too and watching videos on the Magic 5 Pro is a genuine delight, with a superb colour balance, deep blacks and incredible brightness through HDR highlights that really pack a punch. It's backed up by decent stereo speakers too, meaning this is a fantastic screen for watching movies on the go, and up there as the best we've tested.

There has also been a pretty heavy focus on eye comfort in the Magic 5 Pro, which isn't a bad thing considering how long we spend in front of our phones. But Honor has implemented several technologies to try to ensure our eye health - and sleep health - is a priority.

Firstly, it has the industry's first LTPO display with 2160Hz PWM dimming technology, to minimise the unnoticeable screen flickering that causes eye fatigue. It's something the company started with the Magic 4 Pro, but it's pushed further still this year. It'll be one of those things you might not notice the benefits of until you've been using the phone for a while, but it'll be there doing its bit for you anyway.

The display also includes dynamic dimming that simulates the natural light and adjusts its brightness to ease unnecessary eye strain, plus there's an option to reduce blue light output (and a certification from TÜV Rheinland for being Circadian friendly to boot) for better sleep health. This can be scheduled to come on at a certain time or enabled all day - as well as adjusted to decide how much of the screen's blue light is filtered out.

As you'd expect, activating this creates a much warmer display, which of course impacts colour accuracy. Anyone who is worried about this would probably do best to swerve this option when watching video on the go, for the very best performance.

Cameras

Triple main camera system

• 50MP Wide Camera (f/1.6, customised 1/1.12 inch sensor, AF, OIS)
• 50MP Ultra-wide Camera (f/2.0, 122-degree FOV)
• 50MP Periscope Telephoto Camera (f/3.0, 3.5x optical zoom, 100x digital zoom, OIS)

Front-facing camera:

• 12MP(f/2.4 aperture)
• 3D Depth Camera

As we've come to expect from flagship phones, there's a wide selection of cameras on the rear of the Honor Magic 5 Pro, packing in three big lenses on the back.

It's 50MP all round - for the main, ultra-wide and zoom cameras - with a return to the periscope-style telephoto lens that we saw on the Magic 4 Pro. That promises the same 3.5x optical zoom and an impressive-sounding up to 100x digital zoom - 10x is the quick option presented on screen but you can pinch to zoom further if you wish.

Just manage your expectations sizeably for the performance at these greater zoom lengths. They can become very noisy and soft indeed, and not really usable in any real sense than to go "can you believe I can zoom as far as that building all the way over there!".

There are bigger, better sensors for the cameras this year, and on the main one, Honor says it can take in 24 per cent more light than the iPhone 14 Pro Max, and 13 per cent more than S23 Ultra, for improved low light performance. It might not be as big as the sensor in the Xiaomi 13 Pro or the Vivo X90 but it still packs a punch.

That's easily noticeable by the improved f-stop figures compared with the Magic 4 Pro, going from f/1.8 to f/1.6 on the main camera, f/2.5 to f/2.0 on the wide and f/3.5 to f/3.0 on the zoom.

As usual, the three cameras will all work together, as well as on their own to get you the best photo possible in the conditions, and the Magic 5 Pro will switch up the lens automatically to ensure you get the best results. The all-new Millisecond Falcon Capture algorithm promises to ensure that happens quickly and accurately too, with speedy autofocus, even at night.

In use, this is a hugely capable trio of cameras, and your pictures are in good hands across pretty much all lenses, and in most conditions - and that's saying something. There's usually a weak link somewhere in these triple camera setups, but these are all largely great cameras that take pretty impressive pictures indeed.

The main camera is the star of the show here, and produces clear sharp images with a fantastic colour balance. It can sometimes veers towards hyper-realistic, but it creates attractive, bright and well-balanced photos nonetheless - even in tricky lighting conditions.

At night, the Magic 5 Pro does just as it says it should, and pulls in a whole lot of light to lift even near pitch black shots to something that looks attractive, sharp and low in noise. It does so very quickly too, only in the darkest of conditions did it pause for a moment with an on-screen notification to remain still before capture.

Occasionally it will take any elements of light in the picture and creates a falsely bright picture that lacks some of the dark-and-light contrast that you'd hope for in a night shot. You can see this in the third shot below, which looks like it was taken at dusk, not at almost midnight.

This is a rare occurence though, and you can pretty much point and click and leave the Magic 5 Pro to do the heavy lifting, no matter the conditions. There is a specific night mode that you can choose but we found we didn't need to, and that the results from the main camera gave pretty much the same result as with night mode selected.

The selfie camera is fine for what you'll need from it and in good light takes bright, sharp selfies with the option to have beauty mode on or off. Once you select your preference the very first time, it remains this way until you make a change - you can always click the icon to add it in the future.

Portrait mode is enabled by default when you switch to the front-facing lens, and is available in 2x (the default) or 1x zoom - both of which serve up attractive pictures, with just slight softening and strong edge detection, plus adjustable bokeh.

AI Motion Sensing is on board to provide stable, clear pictures of moving images too, and we found this to work really well in testing. Even at 3.5x (optical) and 10x (digital) zoom, it captured racing horses in action with next-to-no blur - though images did lose some detail at the larger zoom lengths, and looked a bit like a watercolour on close inspection. Where possible, it's worth sticking to the 3.5x option for the best results.

From a video perspective, the Magic 5 Pro can capture sharp and stable footage up to 4K in 30fps or 60fps, but you will need to go into the settings to adjust that, as it defaults to 1080p.

Content creators may also want to look elsewhere if they were hoping to capture a lot of content on their phone, though, since you can only capture up to 15 minutes of 4K footage in any one go on the Magic 5 Pro. That's a bit of a shame but ultimately should suffice for the majority of video needs. Even at these maximum times, the phone runs cool so there's no concerns there.

The result of all of this good stuff is another DXOMARK stamp of approval. Currently, the Magic 5 Pro is sitting at the top of the global camera rankings with a score of 152, compared to the iPhone 14 Pro Max at 146 and the Google Pixel 7 Pro at 147.

Hardware specs

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 12GB RAM
• 512GB storage, 12 GB RAM
• Adreno 740 GPU
• 5100mAh battery, 66W wired charging/50W wireless

The Honor Magic 5 Pro is powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, with a boost of 12GB of RAM from 8GB in the Magic 4 Pro and double the storage too, now up to 512GB. It's nice and fast in use and we've had no issues at all with it from a performance perspective, getting only very slightly warm when gaming - but certainly nothing to be concerned about.

Sadly, the Magic 5 Pro doesn’t get the 100W charging of the 4 Pro, but it still offers a very respectable 50W wireless charging capability/66W via the in-box charger, and an improved battery capacity, up to 5100mAh from 4600mAh. We found it'll take around 45 minutes to charge from empty, but you'll get a good 15 per cent boost in around five minutes if you're in a pinch.

We had no problems getting through a full day of pretty moderate-to-heavy use with that, and we noticed around an 11 per cent drop in battery streaming a 90 minute movie on 50% brightness at 50% volume.

The Honor Magic 5 Pro will run the latest Magic OS 7.1, based on Android 13. It still has its quirks and comes with some pre-installed apps that add to some bloat - but it's far from the worst offender. You will still be left with some of Honor's apps duplicating Google's suite of apps that also comes installed, but a lot can be deleted. You'll need to tinker with it to get it working how you want it to, but there's largely not a lot to complain about her once you have.

The very best news? Honor is finally offering a decent level of update support for the phone, and one that matches Google's own Pixel series. That mean you'll get support for three years of Android updates and five years of security updates, seeing you through to 2028 on this phone should you wish.

Verdict

The Honor Magic 5 Pro shows Honor inching forward in its attempts towards really challenging the leading Android phones on the market right now. The Magic 5 Pro has a lot to love, and ultimately very little that lets it down.

It's hugely powerful, has a gorgeous display, three great cameras that perform well across the board and a solid design. The camera bump and design may divide opinion but we didn't mind it - it's a talking point at the very least.

The UI is still slightly heavy handed for our taste but it's pretty customisable and we think most people can find a happy medium here - particularly now decent Android and security updates are on board.

Even better is that at £949.99, it comes in considerably cheaper than some of its competitors, like the Xiaomi 13 Pro, making it an even more attractive for anyone looking for a photography-focused flagship Android smartphone.