Honor Magic 5: Everything about release, equipment, design, price

Smartphone manufacturer Honor has new devices in its luggage at the MWC in Barcelona. With the Honor Magic 5 Pro and Lite, the Chinese company is putting a high-end and a mid-range smartphone into the race. TECHBOOK was there and was able to take a look at the devices.

Two years after the separation from the parent company Huawei, Honor is consolidating its reputation in the smartphone world and is also increasingly gaining a foothold in the high-end sector. The manufacturer presented its new flagship at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona: the Honor Magic 5 Pro. The company relies on a powerful camera and an eye-friendly display. The Honor Magic 5 Lite, which belongs to the same series, scores particularly well with a huge battery. The sale of the Magic Vs folding smartphone also starts in Germany.

The Honor Magic 5 Pro is supposed to be easy on the eyes

The Honor Magic 5 Pro has a 6.81-inch, energy-efficient LTPO display (low-temperature polycrystalline oxide) with the rather unusual resolution of 2848 x 1312 pixels and a frame rate of 120 Hz. The maximum brightness is 1300 cd/m², or even 1800 cd/m² in HDR mode. A new technology should also improve the display on the screen and be easier on the eyes.

For this, Honor relies on PWM dimming (pulse width modulation) with a high frequency of 2160 Hz. This should further minimize the barely perceptible flickering of a dimmed display and thus put less strain on the eyes. The Honor Magic 5 Pro comes with three 50 MP cameras and Qualcomm’s high-end chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. There are also 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of internal storage. Android 13 is factory installed with MagicOS 7.1. The device is also one of the first to receive the new Wifi 7 standard and is IP68 certified.

Magic 5 Pro with 50MP triple camera

The still existing visual similarity to the Huawei smartphones can also be found functionally in parts of the camera. As already mentioned, the Honor Magic 5 Pro has a triple camera on the back, with each sensor offering 50 megapixels. In addition to the wide and ultra wide-angle camera (f/1.6 and f/2.0 respectively), the device also has a so-called periscope telephoto camera. This has a 3.5x optical zoom and a 100x digital zoom.

On the front sits a 12 MP front camera and a 3D depth camera. According to the independent benchmark site DxOMARK the camera (and also the display) of the new Honor smartphone delivered the best test results and left competitors like Samsung behind. That also seems to have been the goal of the Chinese manufacturer.

Also read: Huawei is selling its budget brand Honor to survive!

New mid-range model Honor Magic 5 Lite

In contrast to its big brother, the Honor Magic 5 Lite clearly has a different target group. As with the competition, the more colorful and fresher design is aimed at younger users. A clear focus was placed on the battery. According to their own statements, the 5100 mAh battery even lasts more than two full days of use. Otherwise, the Lite has an AMOLED display with a diagonal of 6.67 inches and a resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels and also 120 Hz.

The Lite version “only” uses the Snapdragon 695 and Android 12 for this. Above all, the outdated Android version is annoying, since Android 13 has been around since autumn 2022. However, Honor has placed three lenses on the back: a 64 MP main camera (f/1.8), a 5 MP ultra wide-angle camera and a 2 MP macro camera.

Also read: Samsung Galaxy S23, S23+ and Ultra – who is which model suitable for?

Prices and Availability

The Magic 5 Pro will come to Germany in mid-April 2023 in the colors green and black and only in the memory configuration with 12 GB RAM and 512 GB internal memory and costs 1200 euros. The Magic 5 Lite should be available from March 1, 2023 in the colors Emerald Green, Silver and Midnight Black and only costs 370 euros. The launch of the foldable Magic Vs, on the other hand, is planned for early summer 2023; the price is fixed at 1600 euros.

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