Honor Magic4 Pro Review: Far Eastern Beauty
Things Are Much More Interesting at the Back, Where We Find the Huge Circular Camera Bump That Has Its Own Name. “Eye of Muse. ” I’m Not Really Sure What It...
Things are much more interesting at the back, where we find the huge circular camera bump that has its own name. “Eye of Muse.” I’m not really sure what it means, but it’s definitely a catchy name, and the bump itself is quite fascinating. The center-positioned telephoto lens gives the illusion of looking right inside the eye of a… muse, I guess?
All jokes aside, I find the design fresh, especially with the Cyan-painted glass back - it really gives the impression of an eye. The back is also curved, though - making the metal frame extremely thin on the sides. Consequently, the volume rocker and power buttons are also quite thin and a bit stiff. They’re quite clicky, though.
The frame flows into quite a flat surface at the top and bottom, housing a SIM tray, USB-C port, loudspeaker, and a mic (on the bottom), and strangely - a speaker grill, IR blaster, and another mic (on the top).
Display
One of the main features of the Honor Magic4 Pro is its 6.81-inch OLED screen with variable refresh rate. It’s capable of pinging the image all the way between 1 and 120 times per second, and that’s a fancy way of saying that it matches the LTPO tech used by other flagship phones.
Honor claims that this is the first phone to sport a 1920 Hz PWM (Pulse Wide Modulation), the highest in any LTPO screen on the market. Now, this calls for some explaining. There are two ways to make a smartphone display dimmer or less bright.
One is to make it flicker at a certain rate (Pulse Width Modulation) - the human eye then perceives the result as a less bright image overall, and the second one is called DC (Direct Current) dimming - basically giving less energy to the diodes makes them lose brightness (just like turning down the dial on your dimmer light in your bedroom).
Obviously, the DC dimming method is easier on the eyes, as no flickering is involved but it is also problematic with OLED screens - when organic diodes receive less current, they tend to shift colors, switch off outright, etc. There are however AMOLED phones with DC dimming - the OnePlus 7 Pro being one.So, the 1920 Hz PWM means that the screen of the Honor Magic4 Pro flicker at a higher rate (most manufacturers use 480 Hz or 960 Hz PWM) and should be easier on the eyes when not at full brightness.
The display is plenty bright at a glance, and it also looks crisp and really smooth. Honor also boasts that the display of the Magic4 Pro covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and is also HDR 10+ capable.
Display measurements and quality
The display benchmarks only confirmed what I already suspected. There's a high-quality OLED panel inside the Honor Magic4 Pro. Subjectively, it's one of the brightest phones under direct sunlight I've ever tested, and the measurements confirm that.
There are two color presets for the screen - Normal and Vivid. As you might've guessed, the Vivid one boosts the colors to be more pleasing to the eye, while the Normal sports the best color accuracy (quite good at deltaE 1.41). You can also set the color temperature either by manually dragging a point on a color disc, or choosing one of the three presets - Default, Warm, and Cool.
You can toggle the refresh rate between three manual settings - 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz respectively, and there's also a Dynamic mode, taking full advantage of the LTPO tech and exploiting all the range between 1 and 120Hz, depending on the scenario. There's also an Always-on mode that's highly customizable - you can choose when to display it (Tap to show, Scheduled, or All day).
Overall, the display of the Honor Magic4 Pro is impressive, and absolutely flagship-worthy. The curved sides might not be everyone's cup of tea but the quality is outstanding.
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Performance and Software
The Honor Magic4 Pro is unsurprisingly equipped with the latest Qualcomm silicon - the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 - coupled with 8GB of RAM. The built-in storage is 256GB with no trace of a microSD card slot (it’s a dual SIM phone, though).
The overall performance seems to be really smooth, with no hiccups whatsoever, which is to be expected from such a configuration. It’s worth noting that the under-display fingerprint scanner works really well, and fast. I’m normally not a fan of these (as some of you might already know) but the implementation here is actually quite good.
Synthetic benchmarks are running as I type but I have no doubt that the Magic4 Pro will be up there with the big boys when it comes to test scores.
This phone comes with Android 12 out of the box (Google Services included), and on top of that we have Honor’s proprietary interface - Magic UI. The 6.0 version looks clean and offers some neat customization features.
Widgets are called Cards here, and there are a couple of useful ones - such as the All Notes widget (needless to say, it offers notes at your home screen), the Conversation card, the Weather widget, quick dial (very useful), and more.
You can choose your home screen style to sport an app drawer, or to show everything right on the home screen, customize the notification shade, the usual stuff. All in all, Magic UI 6.0 looks pretty and works smoothly. Nothing to complain about here.
Chloe Bennett explores the intersection of pop culture, streaming entertainment, digital trends, and contemporary lifestyle. Her weekly commentary reaches thousands of culture enthusiasts.
