Honor Magic 7 Lite review: Reach exceeding its grasp

The Honor Magic 7 Lite is one of the first phone launches of 2025 and sets the stage for the flagship Pro variant later this month. This mid-range smartphone focuses on stamina and durability, with a laundry list of resilience credentials and one of the largest batteries used in any phone to date.

On these two fronts, the Honor Magic 7 Lite achieves what it sets out to do, with brilliant battery life and a build that feels both sturdy and comfortable to use. Unfortunately, these upgrades are paired with a £50 price increase, which puts the Magic 7 Lite directly in the path of several fierce competitors. And while it excels in some areas, the Honor Magic 7 Lite isn’t a strong enough all-rounder to take on the best in this price range.

Honor Magic 7 Lite review: What you need to know

At first glance, there’s not that much to separate the Magic 7 Lite from its predecessor, the Honor Magic 6 Lite. We’ve again got a 6.78in curved AMOLED display, a large, circular camera module on the rear and a Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 processor keeping the lights on. The latter is again paired with 8GB of RAM but the internal storage has been doubled to 512GB.

Things have got bigger elsewhere, too, with a ridiculously large 6,600mAh battery replacing last year’s 5,300mAh number. Charging has also increased from 35W to 66W, though you still don’t get a charger bundled in the box.

The cameras are similar, with a 108-megapixel main unit joined by the same 5-megapixel ultrawide shooter as last year. The 2-megapixel macro camera has been dropped for this generation but that’s no great loss.

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Honor Magic 7 Lite review: Price and competition

At £400, the Honor Magic 7 Lite is £50 more than the 6 Lite was at launch. This puts it up against some of the best mid-range phones around, the most impressive of which is the Google Pixel 8a. The 128GB variant is £499 at the time of writing and the 256GB model is £559. For the money, you’re getting far better performance, fantastic cameras and seven years of software support.

Elsewhere, the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion offers similar performance and stamina for just £271, the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G is a stronger performer and comes with four years of software support for £339, while the Nothing Phone (2a) has a similar battery life and a unique aesthetic for just £289. The only caveat is that all of these are either 128GB or 256GB models – only the Magic 7 Lite offers a massive 512GB of storage.

Honor Magic 7 Lite review: Design and key features

Despite the switch-up in some of the hardware, the Magic 7 Lite is essentially the same size as its predecessor, measuring 76 x 8 x 163mm (WDH), and weighing only a couple of grams more, at 189g.

The IP64 dust and water resistance rating is a little better than last year (IP53) and above average for a phone in this price range. Sturdiness in general is a strong theme this year; Honor claims that the Magic 7 Lite can withstand extreme temperatures (-30°C to 50°C) and survive a fall from 2 meters onto a hard surface without so much as a nick. After chucking it in the freezer for half an hour and dropping it onto my driveway, it is impressively intact – but I wouldn’t make a habit of pushing those limits.

The Titanium Purple and Titanium Black colour options are a little misleading as they imply that you’re getting the same premium materials as the similarly named styles for flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro Max. In reality, the build is mostly plastic, though this is still an attractive phone. The satin finish and circular camera module give the rear an instantly identifiable profile and, even though curves aren’t in vogue, the rounded edges make the phone feel comfortably slim in the hand.

The pill-shaped selfie camera cut-out is another design misdirection, looking like it houses a 3D TOF sensor like the Pro variant, where in reality there’s only the single 16-megapixel camera handling face unlocking. There’s also an optical fingerprint sensor nestled beneath the display and the screen supports dynamic PWM dimming up to 3,840Hz, which should help to reduce eye fatigue.

The Magic 7 Lite launches with Android 14, topped by Honor’s own MagicOS 8. This is a fairly transparent iOS imitation, not least due to the Magic Capsule feature, which debuts on the Lite series for the first time. This expands around the selfie camera notch to show things like alarms, timers and currently playing music, in a similar fashion to Apple’s Dynamic Island.

There are a fair few unwelcome apps preinstalled upon first boot – hardly uncommon in this price range but annoying nonetheless – however, otherwise, MagicOS is easy enough to use and generally not too gaudy. Honor has committed to three years of OS updates (one of which will presumably be the already-released Android 15) and four years of security patches. That’s fine enough under normal circumstances but the seven years of support offered to the Pixel 8a ups the ante here.

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Honor Magic 7 Lite review: Display

The 6.78in AMOLED display once again refreshes up to 120Hz but the resolution is a little sharper than last year at 2,700 x 1,224. It gets brighter than its predecessor too, hitting a peak of 1,092cd/m² on auto-brightness with a torch shining on the light sensor. Manual brightness tops out at a lower 557cd/m² but that’s still great for such a cheap phone.

Less impressive is the colour accuracy. On the Normal colour profile, the sRGB gamut coverage of 96.4% and the volume of 98.6% are both decent. The average Delta E colour variance score, however, came back at 1.55, which is quite far from the target value of 1 or under and a fair bit worse than the Magic 6 Lite’s score of 1.06. Given the price increase, this is disappointing.

Honor Magic 7 Lite review: Performance and battery life

The Magic 7 Lite uses the same Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset as its predecessor, which isn’t the best look considering that the 6 Lite was a mediocre performer to begin with. The Magic 7 Lite does manage to squeeze some extra horsepower out of the chipset, however, beating the 6 Lite by 4% in the single-core Geekbench 6 benchmarks and 14% in the multi-core.

But you need only look at the Google Pixel 8a to see what kind of performance you can get for this money. With a lead over the Magic 7 Lite of 82% in the single-core results and 57% in the multi-core, the Pixel is leagues ahead of anything else in this price range.

On the GPU front, the Magic 7 Lite scored near enough identically to its predecessor, which means that the Google Pixel 8a is once again best in class by a long shot. I was able to play Genshin: Impact on medium graphic settings on the 7 Lite relatively smoothly but, if you play 3D games regularly, the Pixel is the way to go.

If the story so far has been one of few changes, things are about to take a drastic turn. The Honor Magic 7 Lite has a 6,600mAh silicon-carbon battery – the largest capacity in this price range and the largest of any phone I’ve reviewed.

That doesn’t directly translate to the longest battery life I’ve seen but 29hrs 6mins is certainly up there with the best. It’s a couple of hours better than the Magic 6 Lite and comfortably lands the Magic 7 Lite on our best phone battery life roundup.

The 66W charging is also a solid improvement from last year. In my testing, this brought the battery up to 50% from empty in around 25 minutes (you have to enable boosted charging manually to get this speed) and on to 100% in 56 minutes.

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Honor Magic 7 Lite review: Cameras

Aside from the wise decision to drop last year’s pointless macro lens, the cameras aren’t all that much different from the Magic 6 Lite’s setup. The main shooter is now supported by optical image stabilisation and there are a handful of AI tricks present too, including an object eraser, AI night photography enhancement and motion sensing designed to help you capture moving objects more crisply.

The 108-megapixel main camera was decent last year so I have no problem with it returning. The f/1.8 aperture once again captures plenty of light, producing detailed images that burst with colour in good lighting conditions, and the image processing notably improves the contrast.

Night photography is still reasonable but not class-leading. Despite the OIS, detail retention isn’t any better than last year, and there is still a fair amount of visual noise in the big blocks of darkness. Even still, for a mid-range phone, this is decent enough.

The 5-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide camera is still the weak link; the field of view is solid enough but detail capture leaves a lot to be desired, particularly around the corners.

Video is identical to the Magic 6 Lite, which means 1080p up to 60fps and 4K at 30fps. That’s about average for phones of this price but, once again, the Pixel 8a raises the bar by offering 4K at 60fps, as well as OIS support for video, which is lacking here.

Honor Magic 7 Lite review: Verdict

Despite being a generally competent mid-range phone, the Honor Magic 7 Lite is ultimately tricky to recommend. Battery life is excellent and improvements like OIS for the main camera, faster charging speed and upgraded device durability just about account for the extra £50 premium.

Even with these improvements, however, the Magic 7 Lite struggles to compete with the now-discounted Google Pixel 8a. It may not have as much storage or last as long, but the Pixel’s general performance, camera quality, display accuracy and software support are all far superior. The Magic 7 Lite puts up a valiant fight but it would have been better off avoiding the price hike and giving the Pixel a wider berth.