HONOR Magic8 Pro - Shaking Up the New Zealand Market

For a very long time, Kiwis looking for a flagship handset really only had a choice of two brands - unless you were prepared to import something else directly from overseas, which your telco may or may not have supported once you got it up and running.

Then, slowly but surely, more and more Android devices from different brands started appearing on New Zealand shelves, giving us access to different cameras, faster charging times and various other features we'd been missing out on while the rest of the smartphone world moved forward.

More recently, you even got a choice with foldable phones and late last year, HONOR finally found its way to our shores with the Magic V5, impressing me with one of the most polished foldable flagships I'd come across to date.

Now HONOR keeps the momentum going with a more conventional flagship form-factor.

The HONOR Magic8 Pro is a very solid piece of kit, straight out of the box. Quite literally. My first impression was one of serious heft - it's quite heavy and the circular rear camera module positively dominates the back of the phone.

But that doesn't worry me because the reason this phone feels heavier than it looks is HONOR has packed so much into it. I'm not exaggerating.

There's a big battery for starters - 7,100mAh - which puts the 4,500-5,000mAh cells more commonly found in other flagship phones to shame. Not only will it absolutely cruise through two full days on a single charge, it's lithium polymer - so it won't heat up when charging. Which is good, because you can charge it at a whopping 100W. Even more amazing, with the right charger, you can juice up wirelessly at 80W! That's significantly faster than most other handsets charge using a cable.

All the controls are on the right-hand side, which means you can keep a decent grip on this thing without accidentally putting yourself on mute. That includes a dedicated AI button, towards the bottom, which doubles as a customisable shortcut button if you double-tap. I've got it set to quick-launch the camera, for example. Meanwhile a single long press brings AI Screen Suggestions to the fore - making it easy to circle-to-search or bookmark an "AI Memory" - kind of a snapshot of whatever you're doing so you can come back to it later.

Between the brute-force of the latest generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform chip, the 12GB of RAM and that beast of a battery, you can imagine how this handset scythes through even the most demanding tasks and 3D graphics manipulation like a hot knife through butter - except, without getting hot.

But it's the camera setup that probably deserves the most attention. Again, here, HONOR has held nothing back. The primary, rear-facing array consists of a 50MP Ultra Night main sensor, a 50MP Ultra Wide and an impressive 200MP Ultra Night Telephoto lens. It's this last component that really sets the Magic8 Pro apart from the rest; night-time and low-light shooting has come a long way on smartphones recently, but it's rare for that to be just as true for more specialised zoom lenses.

HONOR has achieved a massive jump in long-distance night shooting, thanks in no small part to something called CIPA 6.5-stop image stabilisation. Essentially, what this means is each shot is kept stable - even for the longer exposure pics after dark - so you still let the extra light in without any of the blur.

As you'll see me demonstrate in the video below, that also results in some crazy-stable action shots too.

Colour reproduction is also next level, and you even have the option to tweak things further, post shooting. Although, as you can see from my açaí bowl in the sunshine the other morning, no post-production fiddling was required. The Magic8 Pro's AI recognised I was taking a food shot and automatically created a masterpiece; I just had to point and click.

Similarly, the portrait options are also outstanding. I'll let doggo here speak for himself...

Continuing the theme of "all that, and a cherry on top" - HONOR hasn't pulled any punches with the forward-facing selfie-cam either. The 50MP high-res sensor is teamed with a 3D depth-sensing camera which means you can professionally fix focus on your selfie videos and shoot them in 4K at 60fps.

It also means the Magic8 Pro performs perhaps the fastest face-unlock of any phone I've used to date.

Alternatively (or as well as) you can rely on the 3D ultrasonic fingerprint sensor built into the screen - and I do mean "rely on" - it's been nothing but speedy and consistent every time.

The screen - as you would expect after everything else - is nothing short of sublime. 6.71-inches with a 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate and capable of dazzling HDR brightness; up to 6,000nits.

Yet here HONOR shows masterful restraint, with a host of AI controlled screen adjustments to ensure less exposure to blue light, taking the temperature down in dim conditions, reducing eye fatigue and even relieving motion sickness and preventing screen-induced myopia.

Oh, you get great speakers on this phone too. I mean, who even cares about phone speakers these days? Well, Honor does, apparently. Genuine spatial sound reproduction for a more immersive gaming or streaming experience and the bass response actually isn't terrible - and for a phone, that's saying something.

Seriously, HONOR has poured about every high-end ingredient they can into the Magic8 - even the water and dust-proofing is like nothing I've seen before - not just IP68 and IP69 but now there's something called IP69K, which as far as I can make out, means you can spray it with hot lava out of a fire hose and it'll just shrug it off.

Which is why I'm mystified they still ship the handsets with a factory-fitted screen protector. I scratched the screen protector on the first day I used it. Useless. Meanwhile, the actual screen beneath is protected by HONOR NanoCrystal Shield and has a five-star SGS drop resistance certification. Needless to say, I've now peeled off the so-called protector and the phone has been blemish-free ever since.

People complain about paying more than $2,000 for a flagship phone, but when it's as feature-packed as the Magic8 Pro, I reckon this one's a bargain.

Click here for more information and pricing on the HONOR Magic8 Pro.