The Honor Magic 4 Pro has Android flagships in its sights

Honor was once Huawei’s youth brand, and a pretty good one at that. Its phones were typically inexpensive, but decent, and we’ve published plenty of high scoring reviews attesting to that. 
 
But Huawei’s ongoing problems with the United States meant that Honor had to forge its own path. 2021 was its first full year as an independent company, and free of Huawei, its latest flagship handset — the Honor Magic 4 Pro — has the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and iPhone 13 Pro in its sights.
 
Let’s get the internals out of the way first. As you’d expect, it uses Qualcomm’s latest and greatest flagship SoC: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. On top of that, to boost its gaming credentials it features an AI gaming engine called GPU Turbo X which, Honor claims, will reduce power and increase frame rate without impacting performance or display quality.

 
Speaking of display quality, it certainly looks like a good one on paper. The 6.81in quad curved OLED display features LTPO technology allowing it to dynamically shift between 1Hz and 120Hz to allow smooth performance without impacting the battery life too much. It packs a resolution of 2,848 x 1,312 (around 460 pixels per inch) and reaches a maximum brightness of 1,000 nits. Eye-searingly bright, in other words.
 
Honor is clearly very proud of its display tech and, if all the metrics are accurate, rightly so. It apparently covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut, has a 360Hz touch sampling rate and includes 1,920Hz PWM dimming to make it easier on the eyes. For reference, the iPhone 13 Pro is 480Hz. 
 
It also has a few tricks up its sleeves to make non-optimised content look better, including always-on HDR upscaling and something called Dual MotionEngine, which will artificially increase the framerate to 120Hz. How well that works in practice remains to be seen, but it certainly sounds impressive.

 
Then there’s the triple-camera array which seems equally impressive, if less trailblazing. You get a 50MP (f/1.8) main camera, a 50MP ultrawide sensor and a 64MP periscope telephoto lens with a 3.5x optical zoom. There’s also a Galaxy S22 Ultra-matching 100x digital zoom in the mix, but we imagine that’ll be just as gimmicky here as it is there.
 
Finally, there’s the battery. While Honor hasn’t yet confirmed the size, we imagine it’ll be suitably chunky for a 6.8in handset (the Honor Magic 3 Pro’s was 4,600mAh for reference) and crucially it features 100W charging both wired and wireless. This is dubbed SuperCharge by Honor, and the long and short of it is that you can expect 90% battery from flat in just half an hour, or a full battery in 35 minutes.
 
Finally, as you can probably see from the pictures, it’s something of a looker with a design that’s “inspired by the aesthetics of symmetry,” meaning that there’s very little it does wrong on paper. The big question mark is on the price, and that’s still TBC at the time of writing. It certainly won’t be cheap, but hopefully Honor picks a price point that’s competitive enough to give Apple and Samsung a run for their money.