Honor Magic 5 Lite Review: Good Looking & Long Lasting

Worth When Reviewed

Not out there within the US

By no means let it’s mentioned that former Huawei sub-brand Honor doesn’t be taught its classes. Final 12 months’s Honor Magic 4 Lite supplied a reliable if deeply unremarkable mid-range smartphone bundle with excellent battery life, nevertheless it was considerably unwieldy, its show lacked pop, and its cameras weren’t a lot cop.

The Honor Magic 5 Lite returns with a thoughtfully refined providing much more spectacular stamina in a smaller kind issue, and with the advantages of an AMOLED show. Its digicam syste,, too, has obtained a refined overhaul.

Not every thing speaks to progress, nevertheless, with an an identical Snapdragon 695 chip to its predecessor guaranteeing related efficiency to the Magic 4 Lite. The dearth of a bundled-in charger and help for a slower charging customary is one other notable backwards step. 

In the meantime, Honor has been unable to flee the price of residing squeeze, with a £30 bump to the Magic 5 Lite’s asking value within the UK. The query is, does the Honor Magic 5 Lite really feel like good worth in a market filled with mid-range marvels?

Design & construct

• Appears to be like and feels much more costly than it’s
• Twin-curved show and glass again
• No IP certification

Whereas it might need branched out into extra premium telephones of late, Honor constructed its model on cheaper telephones that punched above their weight. That experience is on show right here, as you wouldn’t know the Magic 5 Lite was a sub-£350 telephone just by dealing with it.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The telephone appears decidedly premium, with a slim 7.9mm physique, a dual-curved show, and a sensible glass rear. My mannequin comes with a frosted, rainbow-shimmering white again, generally known as Titanium Silver, however you may also get the telephone within the much less glitzy Emerald Inexperienced or Midnight Black.

This can be a smaller telephone than the surfboard-proportioned Magic 4 Lite, due to a decreased 6.67-inch show. It’s additionally considerably lighter at 175g, regardless of packing in a bigger battery.

The rear of the telephone sees the return of the Magic 4 Lite’s ring-shaped digicam motif. Certainly, Honor has actually leaned into this so-called ‘Matrix Star Ring’ design right here, producing an much more pronounced photographic donut with a bigger ‘gap’ that now matches the color – if not the premium materials – of the remainder of the rear panel.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Whereas the facet body is as skinny as you want, with skinny and clicky quantity and energy keys on the correct edge, Honor has flattened out the highest and backside edges. 

One other signal that that is certainly a less expensive telephone comes from the whole lack of IP certification. Greatest maintain this one away from our bodies of water.

Display screen & audio system

• 6.67in OLED
• Full HD+
• 120Hz refresh fee
• Mono speaker

One of many greatest drags with the Magic 4 Lite was its use of an LCD fairly than an OLED show. Honor hasn’t made the identical mistake with the Magic 5 Lite, supplying a 6.67in FHD+ (2,400 x 1,080) OLED with a 120Hz refresh fee. It’s smaller than its predecessor, however that simply makes it simpler to wield.

In addition to, the advantages are value it. Colors pop, blacks are actually black, and all is true with the world – particularly in terms of color accuracy. I recorded a gamut protection of 96.5% sRGB and a gamut quantity of 98.3% sRGB within the better-balanced Regular color profile, and a mean Delta E of 0.93. These are glorious outcomes.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Relating to brightness, the Magic 5 Lite will get to a respectably vibrant 510 nits with auto-brightness turned off within the aforementioned Regular show mode. You’ll get barely brighter with the default Vivid mode, however the colors can be extra garish.

Audio output is much less spectacular. The underside fringe of the telephone homes its sole speaker, and the dearth of true stereo sound is a little bit of a disgrace. As it’s, this solo speaker yields a transparent if inherently restricted sound profile.

Specs & efficiency

• Ageing Snapdragon 695 5G chip
• 6GB RAM
• 128GB storage

Honor has outfitted the Magic 5 Lite with the very same Snapdragon 695 5G chip because the Magic 4 Lite, which is a little bit of a disappointment. True, we mentioned that final 12 months’s mannequin “punches above its weight” in efficiency phrases, however a 12 months is a very long time in smartphones. 

We lately noticed the equally priced Poco X5 Professional swap as much as the Snapdragon 778G, leading to a major bump in efficiency from the Poco X4 Professional and its Snapdragon 695. It’s a disgrace Honor didn’t comply with go well with.

Positive sufficient, our regular suite of benchmark exams reveals that the Magic 5 Lite performs very equally to its predecessor in CPU and GPU phrases, and a good bit worse than some equally priced rivals.

Away from such synthetic exams the Honor Magic 5 Lite performs moderately properly on the whole, although the telephone’s premium construct performs a humorous trick together with your expectations. It’s like your mind expects flagship-level efficiency to go together with that elegant design and slick show, which makes each time an app takes an additional beat to load up or a scrolling animation hitches barely stick out like a sore thumb.

It’s not that the Magic 5 Lite’s efficiency is dangerous, although, and it’s definitely aggressive with different equally priced rivals just like the Moto Edge 30 Neo, which options the very same chipset.

Elsewhere you get a fairly 6GB of RAM and 128GB of inner storage. We’ve seen cheaper telephones doubling that storage allowance, so it’s not fairly as beneficiant as it’d as soon as have appeared.

Digicam

• 64Mp important sensor
• 5Mp ultrawide
• 2Mp macro
• 16Mp selfie digicam

Honor has gone with a extra pixel-packed 64Mp important digicam sensor for the Magic 5 Lite, and it’s additionally added a 5Mp ultrawide this time round. There’s nonetheless a pointless 2Mp macro sensor, although.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

That important sensor produces first rate, sharp, moderately well-exposed photographs in good lighting. I significantly appreciated how pure colors look right here, with little of the oversaturation that many low-cost telephones fall again on. It does fairly properly in HDR situations too, balancing out mild and shade properly.

The 5Mp ultrawide isn’t anyplace close to as completed as that important sensor, producing an enormous drop off intimately and a way more muted palette. You count on that kind of factor in a less expensive telephone, although.

So-called Tremendous Macro photographs utilizing the 2Mp macro digicam are just about a waste of time. It’s very exhausting to get a correctly targeted shot, and even once you do the photographs are typically extraordinarily fuzzy and washed out. I received a lot better outcomes capturing close-up photographs utilizing the primary digicam.

Capturing in low mild utilizing that important sensor is a considerably hit or miss affair. Hit the Night time mode button and take the time to line up your shot, maintaining a gradual hand, and you’ll seize some spectacular crisp photographs. Nevertheless, it’s simple to lose definition in case you don’t body correctly. The dearth of OIS might need one thing to do with that.

The 16Mp entrance digicam is able to taking first rate selfies, although the selfie portrait mode smudges edges and pores and skin tones alike.

Battery life & charging

• 5100mAh battery
• 40W charging help
• No adapter included

The standout spec with the Honor Magic 5 Lite is its 5100mAh battery. That represents a uncommon bump over the typical, and a decent improve over the Magic 4 Lite’s 4800mAh cell.

In sensible phrases, I discovered that this resulted in real two-day battery life for the Magic 5 Lite. You’ll be able to count on to get by means of a full day of moderate-to-intensive utilization, with round 4 hours of screen-on time, and nonetheless have greater than half a tank left.

It’s not all excellent news, nevertheless. Curiously, the Honor Magic 5 Lite scored worse than the Magic 4 Lite in our PCMark Battery Work 3.0 take a look at, which fashions fixed on a regular basis utilization. At 12 hours and 58 minutes, it fell a very good two hours brief.

That is regardless of operating on the very same chip and having a bigger battery. I can solely assume that the Magic 5 Lite’s superior OLED show is behind this drop in stamina. 

Jon Mundy / Foundry

One other destructive is the charging provision, and it’s a little bit of a double whammy. Not solely does the Magic 5 Lite solely help 40W charging (down from the Magic 4 Lite’s 66W), nevertheless it doesn’t embody a charger within the field both.

Of all of the chargers I’ve in my possession (and that’s rather a lot), I didn’t have a 40W unit handy. Utilizing each a 60W and a 67W charger, nevertheless, the telephone constantly hit round 13% in quarter-hour from empty, and 25% after half-hour. That’s not too speedy.

Software program

As with final 12 months’s mannequin, the Honor Magic 5 Lite runs on a technically outdated model of Android. On this case it’s Android 12, whereas plenty of first rate telephones have upgraded to Android 13.

That’s not all that consequential, nevertheless, as a result of your important level of interplay comes by means of the customized Magic UI, which is on model 6.1 right here. It’s one other stable, if considerably busy interface.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

As soon as once more, there are just a few too many customized apps clogging up the house display screen, together with Honor’s personal app retailer, App Market, its personal Themes retailer, and the My Honor system manager-meets-user handbook app. For those who’re something like me, your first intuition is to clear all such apps right into a folder, and there’s rather a lot to clear away.

As well as, you’ll be given a bunch of third social gathering pre-installations, together with Fb, Netflix, TikTok, and Reserving.com.

Worth & availability

UK pre-orders for the Honor Magic 5 Lite are stay now over on the official Honor web site, earlier than it formally goes on sale on 28 February – by which era the remainder of the Magic 5 telephones can have been revealed. It’s priced at £329/€369 for the only mannequin, which provides you 6GB of RAM and 128GB of inner storage.

This value positions the Honor Magic 5 Lite up in opposition to the Poco X5 Professional, which prices a little bit extra at £369 and doesn’t look or really feel half nearly as good. Nevertheless, it does provide you with double the storage (256GB) and a superior processor.

The Motorola Edge 30 Neo, in the meantime, prices £350, which will get you a similar processor because the Magic 5 Lite and sooner charging.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Take a look at our full rating of the most effective mid-range telephones for different choices, or the most effective finances telephones for one thing a little bit cheaper.

Verdict 

The Honor Magic 5 Lite is one other stable lower-mid-range providing from the model, supplying an uncommon stage of match and end for the cash. It’s an altogether extra aesthetically pleasing telephone than the Magic 4 Lite, with a a lot better OLED show.

Simply as spectacular is the Magic 5 Lite’s bigger battery, which produces a stage of stamina that may simply stretch throughout two days of normal utilization. It’s only a disgrace that Honor has cheaped out with slower charging and no bundled brick.

It’s additionally a little bit of a disgrace that there’s been completely no advance on the efficiency of the Magic 5 Lite. It runs simply positive, however now you can get sooner for related cash.

Specs

• Android 12
• 6.67in, FHD+, OLED, 120Hz, curved show
• In-display fingerprint sensor
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 695
• 6GB RAM
• 128GB storage
• Digicam:
  • 64Mp, f/1.8 important digicam
  • 5Mp ultra-wide digicam
  • 2Mp macro digicam
  • As much as 1080p @ 30fps rear video
  • 16Mp front-facing digicam
• Mono speaker
• Twin-SIM
• Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
• Bluetooth 5.1
• 5100mAh battery
• 40W charging (no charger in field)
• 161.6 x 73.9 x 7.9 mm
• 175g 
• Launch colors: Midnight Black, Emerald Inexperienced, Titanium Silver