First Impressions: Honor Magic 5 Lite Review

The Honor Magic 5 Lite isn’t just a good-looking mid-range smartphone, as it’s also sporting key specs including a 6.67-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, a 64MP main snapper and a 5,100mAh battery that’s larger than most flagships. It could be a tempting option for those on a budget, and I look forward to delving in deeper for my full review. 

Introduction

The Honor Magic 5 Pro might be stealing all the headlines with its curvy design and impressive camera performance, but the mid-range focused Magic 5 Lite is just as impressive. 

Boasting a premium design and impressive specs including a 6.67-inch AMOLED display, a 64MP camera and a huge 5,100mAh battery, and costing just £329, Honor could have a winner on its hands. 

While I’m yet to get my hands on a review sample for in-depth testing, I spent about half an hour playing with the mid-ranger at MWC 2023, and here’s what I think about it so far.

Design and screen

• Lightweight design
• Dazzling rear design
• 6.67-inch AMOLED panel is a nice touch

If there’s one thing I like about the Honor Magic 5 Lite, it’s the overall look. Considering it costs just £329, it doesn’t look or feel like a mid-range phone. In fact, with a width of just 7.9mm and a weight of 175g, it feels pretty superb in the hand compared to most other mid-rangers around right now. 

It’s mainly made from plastic, which isn’t really much of a surprise at this price point, but it doesn’t feel like a cheap plastic phone when you hold it. It feels solid, and the slight curvature to the rear panel not only adds to the premium look but makes it more comfortable to use one-handed. 

Flip the phone over and you’ll be greeted by a dazzling glittery finish embedded within the plastic rear case. I’m a huge fan of the Titanium Silver, which I saw during my hands-on, but there are also Emerald Green and Midnight Black options available if you want something a little more subtle. 

The 6.67-inch AMOLED panel isn’t to be sniffed at either, sporting key specs including a 120Hz refresh rate, though don’t expect dynamic performance like its more expensive sibling. As you’d expect from an FHD+ AMOLED panel, things look fairly detailed and vibrant, though it lacks support for HDR. 

It also caps out at 800 nits, which should be more than enough to use the phone in bright daylight without issue, but it’s not the 1800 nits of the Pro model. 

Cameras

• 64MP main snapper has promise
• 5MP ultra-wide looks comparably washed out

With the more expensive Honor Magic 5 Pro going all-in on camera performance, it should come as no surprise that the Magic 5 Lite also boasts a fairly decent camera setup – as far as mid-range phones go, anyway. 

The Magic 5 Lite comes equipped with a 64MP main snapper with an f/1.8 aperture, along with a 5MP ultra-wide camera and a 2MP macro camera. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of snaps from the main lens during my hands-on time with the phone, with plenty of detail and a fairly true-to-life look – though it can look a little too vibrant at times.

I don’t currently have the same feelings about the ultra-wide, however. The 5MP snapper can’t compete with the main lens in terms of detail, quality or colour, with images looking notably more washed out than those captured with the main lens.

Of course, this is only based on very limited testing and I’ll put it to the test for the full review, but first impressions are a little underwhelming.

It caps out at 1080p video recording, which is fine for the majority of people, but if you’re a creator looking to upload videos to YouTube and TikTok you may be left wanting more. 

Performance

• Mid-range performance from the Snapdragon 695
• 5,100mAh battery is one of the largest around
• Runs Android 12

At the heart of the Honor Magic 5 Lite you’ll find the ever-popular Snapdragon 695 found in other similarly priced mid-range smartphones including the Poco X5 Pro. 

It’s certainly not powerful enough to compete with flagships, but the phone did feel responsive in general use during my hands-on experience. It’s just probably not going to be the best phone when it comes to mobile gaming, especially with more power-hungry titles like Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact. 

That’s backed up with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of non-expandable storage, which again, isn’t bad for the price. 

Battery life is an area where the Magic 5 Lite should excel, sporting a whopping 5,100mAh battery that beats the capacity of top-end flagships including the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. With a lower resolution display than Samsung’s top-end smartphone and less power draw from the processor, that should result in impressive multi-day battery life.

40W charging isn’t that fast when you’ve got such a large battery on board, so I’d expect a full charge in around 90 minutes or so, but I’ll have to put that to the test for the full review. 

When it comes to software, don’t expect the latest and greatest Android 13-based MagicOS 7.1 that ships with the top-end Magic 5 Pro. Instead, the phone runs MagicOS 6.1 based on Android 12 out of the box, which is a bit of an oddity considering we’ve had Android 13 for quite some time now. 

That said, Honor’s approach to software is generally a fairly polished one, though I did spot a few pre-installed Honor apps that you can’t uninstall. If you want to pre-load some apps, fine, but at least allow users to delete them if they don’t find them useful. 

The good news is that Honor has confirmed that the Magic 5 Lite will get the update to Android 13 sometime in 2023, likely around July, as well as three years of OS upgrades and security updates. Considering the mid-range nature of the phone, that’s not a bad OS promise.