Honor has just announced the Magic5 Lite, an Android phone with more than a touch of — you guessed it — magic to it.
You don’t have to pay a fortune for this phone, but you still get top-end billboard-ready features.
We’re going to list our top 5. The 64MP rear camera, 120Hz refresh rate and high-res selfie camera? Sure they’re neat. Great, even. However in this top five things you should know about the Honor Magic5 Lite we want to hone our selections down to elements we are a little surprised to see in a phone like this.
1. Premium design at a remarkable price
When did phones this affordable get this striking? The Honor Magic5 Lite has a gorgeous curved glass screen, the kind you only used to see in the world’s most expensive phones. That history makes sense when you remember both the screen and the glass covering it have to be perfectly, smoothly, curved.
There’s plenty of visual interest around the back too. The Magic5 Lite’s three rear cameras and LED flash are arranged in a symmetrical ring. Honor calls it the Matrix Star Ring Design, and we’d take it over a plain line of camera lenses any day of the week.
It doesn’t end there either. The Honor Magic5 Lite is significantly slimmer than most of its rivals at 7.9mm thick. And despite the huge screen the Honor Magic5 Lite weighs a pocket-pleasing 175g. You also have three colours to choose between. There’s the light shimmer of Emerald Green, the subtle shifting rainbow of Titanium Silver and trusty old Midnight Black.
We’re picking Emerald Green for our Honor Magic5 Lite.
2. Two-day long battery life
Honor promises us two-day battery life in the Honor Magic5 Lite. You know what? We believe them.
This phone’s battery is a chunk larger than the norm at 5100mAh. And it uses Qualcomm’s super-efficient Snapdragon 695 processor — the brains behind some of the longest-lasting phones we’ve ever used.
Even if you plan on charging your phone overnight each day anyway, battery life like the Honor Magic5 Lite’s lets you do what you want, when you want, without worrying about your phone running out of juice earlier than you’d hope.
3. Cinema-grade display
Phone screens don’t commonly get much larger than the Honor Magic5 Lite’s. It’s a 6.67-inch whopper, the ideal size for folks who want to do more on their phone than just browse Instagram.
This sort of size is ideal for movie and TV streaming, and watching games.
The 2400 x 1080 pixel resolution makes sure images and text look super-sharp, and the OLED panel ensures fantastic image quality in every possible respect. Emissive pixels guarantee near limitless contrast, and this screen can render 100% of the colours in the DCI P3 standard.
That means it is able to recreate ultra-rich reds, greens and blues — and every shade in-between — to make content really pop. The Honor Magic5 Lite screen also has a top refresh rate of 120Hz, which makes everything appear to move with silky smoothness. Once you go 120Hz, you won’t want to go back.
4. Eye comfort, day and night
Making movies and games look great is just one aim of the Honor Magic5 Lite screen. It is also made to keep your eyes comfortable in the brightest and darkest places, at early morning and just before you go to bed.
The Honor Magic5 Lite screen can reach 800 nits of brightness, enough to make content appear clear even in direct sunlight. It’s ready for late-night bedtime browsing too, with an eye comfort mode designed to avoid straining your eyes or unbalancing your circadian rhythm if you doom scroll late at night. We know we shouldn’t, and yet we so often do.
It reduces the blue light output of the screen, which is the major catalyst for eye strain. This mode has even been tested in TÜV Rheinland labs.
5. Invisible security
Almost all phones we get to test for review at Shortlist have some form of fingerprint scanner for easy pin-free security. However, it’s not often a phone this affordable uses what we still think of as the most futuristic and advanced style — the in-screen fingerprint scanner.
You may have encountered one of these before. You put your thumb on a lit-up virtual pad in the screen. The display itself lights up your finger and a camera-like sensor behind the screen itself sees through the pixels to check if those fingerprint-y grooves are really your own. Even after describing how it works, the Honor Magic5 Lite’s in-screen fingerprint scanner still sounds like the stuff of a 2000s sci-fi film to us.
The Honor Magic5 Lite is available to buy from today for £329.99 direct from Honor’s website, Hihonor.
