Australia hasn’t seen new phones in quite some time, ever since major players Sony and LG departed, the former simply disappearing from our shores and the latter moving out of phones altogether. The majors are the ones you know — Apple, Samsung, Google, Oppo, and Motorola — but there are others popping up in the list as well.
Recently there were new phones from Nothing, and also Xiaomi with its Leica phone and less-branded 17 Ultra iteration. Last year, there was also a foldable from another recent brand, Honor, offering a handset designed to challenge the handful of foldables from Google, Samsung, and Oppo, the only players doing foldable tablet phones in Australia.
We didn’t get to play with Honor’s flagship foldable, but at $2599, it was already in the high-end part of the market.
If you didn’t need the foldable and wanted to save a bit, Honor’s latest might be for you, especially if the high-end options from other players aren’t your cup of tea.
The latest is the Honor Magic 8 Pro, a handset that’ll bring a fair amount of technology to a sizeable 6.7 inch OLED screen, offering the high-end Snapdragon 8 Elite chip found on other flagships this year, and arming it with a minimum of 12GB RAM and either 512GB or 1TB of storage.
Of particular note is the camera system, which is distinct to the robot camera the company showed at Mobile World Congress this year, but is still something, as well.
The Magic 8 Pro camera system uses a 50 megapixel F1.6 wide camera and a 50 megapixel F2.0 ultra-wide alongside a 200 megapixel F2.6 telephoto camera covering 3.7X. That’s a little unusual, and suggests you’ll be able to get a little closer by downsampling the image, covering a little more zoom. Alternatively at night, the telephoto is built for low light with a large sensor and optical image stabilisation for capturing long distances when the sun goes down.
There’s also a 50 megapixel camera on the front for selfies, and like most phones today, there’s a good dose of AI for a bunch of things. You can find AI for stabilisation, AI for erasing things from images, AI for colour, and even a button specifically for AI, though it’s mostly going to be used for opening the camera when the phone is locked.
Like most mobiles not made by Apple, Honor’s Magic 8 Pro runs on Android, albeit with a version of the operating system tweaked by Honor.
Officially called Magic OS 10 (and based on Android 16), it also has a bunch of AI, with that AI button providing access to suggestions that the phone can do using artificial intelligence. That includes summaries and apparently both voice cloning detection and deep fake detection, the latter of which can be used during calls to work out whether something is a scam.
While big cameras and everything AI are pretty much the norm for phones these days, the other major factor is the battery, with a big silicon-carbon battery under the hood. That’s the tech that helped the Oppo Find X9 Pro secure the nod for Best Battery in Pickr’s Best Picks last year, and provides 7100 mAh in the space made for a smaller lithium-ion.
Most of this tech is high-end, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Honor Magic 8 Pro will come with a similarly high-end price. Australians can expect to find it shortly in stores, priced from $1999.
