Review of the Honor Magic5 Lite: Flagship features make for an impressive foray into the midrange market.

 HONOR was created in 2013 as a Huawei subsidiary brand, but in 2020 it emerged from its shadow to stand on its own. Their newest series of cellphones, the Magic 5 range, is a serious lunge at independence. They also produce computers, accessories, and smartphones.

The Magic5 Lite, one of three devices, is at the bottom of the ladder and offers flagship features while cutting costs to keep the retail price at just £329.99.

Three colors—Titanium Silver, Emerald Green, and Midnight Black—are available for the HONOR Magic5 Lite. It weighs only 175g, making it lightweight. Its dimensions are 161.6mm x 73.9mm x 7.9mm, and its 6.67-inch OLED curved display occupies 93% of its whole surface area.

The HONOR Magic5 Lite is striking in its design while being lightweight and thin. ( 

Image: 

HONOR)

A massive ring for the camera system, resembling the Eye of Muse on the Honor Magic4 Pro in appearance but perhaps not to everyone's taste, is located on the back of the phone.

The Honor Magic5 Lite's screen is excellent; it measures 6.67 inches from corner to corner and has a 45-degree curve. With a staggering 120 Hz refresh rate, it features a resolution of 2400 x 1080 and displays 1.07 billion colours. The phone has one speaker built into the base, but it's not very impressive; the sound is loud but quite thin.

Its maximum brightness is 800 nits, and Honor is particularly proud of its TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light Certified. The HONOR Magic5 Lite is as gentle to your eyes as a screen can be, showing how important eye care has been to their design processes in the past several iterations.

The screen is excellent overall; it functions well in all lighting situations, is bright, clear, and crisp, and effectively depicts colour and contrast. HONOR themselves told me they've run it over with a car in-house and offered to let me do the same. It also incorporates a fingerprint lock and is fashioned from reinforced glass for increased grip and durability.

The HONOR Magic5 Lite comes in three colours, each of which great ( 

Image: 

HONOR)

Its maximum brightness is 800 nits, and Honor is particularly proud of its TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light Certified. The HONOR Magic5 Lite is as gentle to your eyes as a screen can be, showing how important eye care has been to their design processes in the past several iterations.

The screen is excellent overall; it functions well in all lighting situations, is bright, clear, and crisp, and effectively depicts colour and contrast. HONOR themselves told me they've run it over with a car in-house and offered to let me do the same. It also incorporates a fingerprint lock and is fashioned from reinforced glass for increased grip and durability.

The device's main flaw is its processor; Honor chose the Snapdragon 695, which feels like a budget option when compared to processors with a similar power demand like the 778G, which delivers much more power.

We repeated each benchmark several times and averaged the results. It's important to note that none of the benchmarks showed any variation, with the device consistently achieving extremely comparable results across all tests.

Basemark Web 3.0, which evaluates a device's capacity to use web-based applications, appeared first. Throughout three tests, it received a 350.86 average score. Although this is a disappointing outcome, it is important to note that the device only performed poorly on the trickier activities, including the WebGL 2.0 tests.

This isn't a test of the device's performance for ordinary web browsing, but rather for tasks like shader renders and draw calls carried out in a browser. The phone performed especially well when resizing and loading pages, with 93.7% efficiency in both cases. It's important to note that for this test, we used the Google Chrome that came pre-installed; performance in other browsers may differ.

The benchmarking software Geekbench 5, designed exclusively to test the CPU, was our next test. The computer received 666 single-core and 1928 multi-core scores. This places it only behind phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9 and slightly ahead of devices like the OnePlus Nord CE 2 Lite and the LG G7.

We used 3DMark to test the GPU, and the average result was 1208 points. The Moto G100 and the Asus ROG Phone 3 had comparable scores for devices.

The HONOR Magic5 Lite features a three-camera setup at the rear, and a single camera at the front ( 

Image: 

HONOR)

It performs poorly in benchmark tests because it is surrounded by smartphones that cost about £100 less than it does. Having said that, the Snapdragon 695 will work just fine for a lot of individuals because the processor isn't everything. To keep the pricing where it is, HONOR had to make some compromises, but other features on the product may more than make up for it.

The phone has 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM. Moreover, there is HONOR ram turbo, which can add up to 5GB more RAM to the device as needed. This is an outstanding quantity of Memory that, in some cases, will compensate for the processor, especially whenever it comes to marketing

Three back cameras, a 64MP Ultra-clear Camera (f/1.8 aperture), a 5MP Wide Angle Camera (f/2.2 aperture), and a 2MP Macro Camera (f/2.4 aperture), make up the outstanding camera. There is only one 16MP (f/2.45 aperture) front camera.

We are well aware that megapixels are no longer important, but the HONOR Magic5 Lite really impresses in both the software and megapixel departments. Together with the hardware, you also get all the extra features you'd anticipate from an Android-powered camera, such as portrait mode, aperture mode, and pro mode, which enable you adjust particular aspects of your image.

The 5100 mAh battery inside the Magic5 Lite, which HONOR boasts can last two days, is another reason for their pride. One benefit of the CPU choice is that it doesn't have a massive monster that will use all the power in a short period of time.

Although it lacks a socket, it does have a USB-A to USB-C cable that can SuperCharge a device at up to 40W of power. The battery appears to be fairly durable as well; after 1000 charging cycles, it still had 80% of its original capacity.

There is only a USB-C port, which can be used for charging, headsets, or data transfer; there is no headphone jack. AAC, BLE, SBC, and even Bluetooth 5.1, which is included, are all supported.

HONOR Magic5 Lite verdict - 4/5

Due to the two sides of the Honor Magic5 Lite's coin being so dissimilar from one another, it is pleasantly weird and very challenging to compare to anything else.

The screen is incredible, the battery life is excellent, and the camera is terrific on the plus side. On the other hand, the CPU is drab and the design is missing in some areas, most notably the speaker.

The gadget has 6GB of RAM, which is respectable yet odd when paired with the Snapdragon 695. Nonetheless, it is packed with features, from the Blue-Light specification to the obscene video capabilities.

Even while it might be at the expense of features some customers might want, HONOR has chosen what is important to them, and they have done it well.

Many individuals will find this device appealing, especially those who don't want to stress their phones with heavy gaming or complicated computing.

The HONOR Magic5 Lite will meet all of your needs if you only need a phone for the bare essentials but value a superb screen and battery with SuperCharge.