Thin and light phones are a remarkable feat of engineering, but they often come at the expense of cameras or battery capacity. However, Honor is entering this race strongly with the Magic8 Pro Air, which it presented as a direct answer to the iPhone Air and other thin devices that have appeared recently.
Honor adopted a different approach this time, as it presented a thin phone with Pro category specifications, starting with a triple camera system that includes a dedicated periscope lens, passing through a large battery with a capacity of 5500 mAh, all the way to a screen of a size suitable for use with one hand.
In terms of design, the company succeeded in making the phone remarkably thin thanks to re-engineering the device’s structure, as it is only 6.1 mm thick and weighs 155 grams. It also used an aluminum frame with a glass back, and added stereo speakers, along with a physical port for two Nano SIM cards with eSIM support, as well as water and dust resistance with IP68 and IP69 standards.
At the screen level, Honor provided the phone with a 6.31-inch LTPO AMOLED panel with a resolution of 2640 x 1216 pixels and a refresh rate of 120 Hz, with a maximum local brightness of up to 6000 lumens. It also included a 50-megapixel front camera, along with an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor under the screen.
As for the back, the company placed a triple camera unit with a strip design, which includes a 50-megapixel main camera with a 23 mm equivalent focal length, a large 1/1.3-inch sensor, and an f/1.6 lens aperture with support for optical stabilization.
Alongside it, it added a 64-megapixel periscope camera with a 74 mm equivalent focal length, a 1/1.2-inch sensor, and an f/2.6 lens aperture with 3.2x optical zoom and optical stabilization. The system is also completed with a 50-megapixel wide lens with a 16 mm equivalent focal length, which also supports macro photography.
Despite the slim design, Honor provided the phone with a 5500 mAh battery based on silicon and carbon anode technology, with support for fast charging of 80 watts wired and 50 watts wirelessly.
In performance, the company relied on the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 processor, with options of up to 16 GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 1 TB of UFS 4.1 storage space. The phone runs on the MagicOS 10 interface based on Android 16.
The Magic8 Pro Air is available in black, purple, white and orange. The price of the 12 GB RAM version with 256 GB storage starts at 4,999 Chinese yuan (about $717), while the price of the higher version with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage reaches 5,999 Chinese yuan (about $860).
Sales are scheduled to begin in China on January 23, with no global launch plans yet revealed.
