Honor Magic 8 Pro Air: thin smartphone with telephoto camera and large battery
A large battery and a telephoto camera: The Honor Magic 8 Pro Air offers two things that other particularly thin smartphones have so far lacked.
The Honor Magic 8 Pro Air is not the thinnest smartphone. Instead, it has space for a 5500 mAh battery and instead of an ultra-wide-angle camera, the manufacturer has installed a telephoto camera with 3.2x the focal length of the main camera.
Extremely light, large battery and telephoto camera
At 6.1 millimetres, the Honor Magic 8 Pro Air is a very thin smartphone, but thicker than the competition in this segment. The iPhone Air, the Galaxy S25 Edge and the Motorola Edge 70 range between 5.6 and 6 millimetres - in each case excluding the camera hump. However, with a weight of 155 grammes, the magical Air is lighter than the competition, which weighs between 159 and 165 grammes.
Source: Honor
One reason for this is probably the smaller AMOLED display. It measures 6.31 inches diagonally on the Magic 8 Pro Air and offers a resolution of 2640 × 1216 pixels and a refresh rate of 120 hertz. The other thin smartphones mentioned come in at 6.5 or 6.7 inches.
Honour relies on a silicon-carbon model for the battery. Batteries of this type can store more energy with the same volume than the lithium-ion models used to date. Accordingly, the Magic 8 Pro has by far the largest battery capacity among the thin smartphones with 5500 mAh. The smartphone accepts up to 80 watts when charging via USB-C. Wireless charging is up to 50 watts.
Source: Honor
While the iPhone Air only has one camera, Samsung and Motorola have opted for an ultra-wide-angle lens for the second camera. Honor provides a little more space for a 64-megapixel periscope telephoto camera. At 74 millimetres (35 mm equivalent), it offers 3.2 times the focal length of the 50-megapixel main camera, which has a focal length of 23 millimetres. The 50-megapixel front camera rounds off the camera setup.
In terms of performance, the Honor Magic 8 Pro Air is well equipped with the Mediatek Dimensity 9500 chipset. It is supported by 12 or 16 gigabytes of RAM. The internal memory is between 256 gigabytes and one terabyte in size.
Price and availability
Honour has only presented the Magic 8 Pro Air for China. There, the smallest storage variant - 12 and 256 gigabytes - costs 4999 yuan. That is the equivalent - excluding import costs - of around 568 francs or 613 euros. There is no word yet on availability here. However, the MWC at the beginning of March could be a good opportunity for the manufacturer to present the smartphone globally.
Source: Honor
As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus.
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