Honor Magic 8 Lite Review: Budget battery beast

Design

• Plastic sidewalls and back panel
• Super-slim screen borders
• IP68/IP69K water and dust resistance

The Honor Magic 8 Lite is a prime example of a “fake it ’til you make it” design. Honor has tried its best to make the phone look expensive, without using much of the stuff that actually makes a phone expensive to produce. 

Its flat back looks like fetching etched glass, but it’s plastic. The Honor Magic 8 Lite’s sides could easily be mistaken for metal. They’re plastic too. 

That cog-like piece of silver surrounding the massive camera housing that looks exactly like aluminium? Plastic. The Honor Magic 8 Lite’s side buttons are metal, but that’s about it. 

The phone also uses an unspecified tempered glass screen protector rather than one of Corning’s more desirable toughened glass formulations. It comes across as a budget take on the Huawei Mate 80’s style — although not many in the West are likely to bump into that phone in person these days. 

Lack of expensive materials aside, there is plenty of subcutaneous substance to the Honor Magic 8 Lite’s build. It has terrific water resistance, specced to the IP68 and IP69K standards. This means it can handle full submersion in fairly deep (1.5m) water and fairly high-pressure water jets. 

Similarly, the Honor Magic 8 Lite is admirably thin at 7.85mm thick and has very slim screen borders for a phone of this class. It also has a factory-applied screen protector, which is reassuring. 

The phone does not include a case or a power adapter, though, and I’d recommend picking up the former. This phone’s fake glass rear is easy to scuff, creating shiny parts within days, like a cheap suit, and the plastic sides aren’t going to be very scratch-resistant either. After around six weeks’ use, the bodywork is beginning to look a little tatty.

Honor says the Magic 8 Lite can take 2.5m drops, but its relatively soft materials require a little care to stay looking good. Fresh out of the box, the Honor Magic 8 Lite does look good too. The green I have is a charming shade, and it comes in black and “reddish brown” too. 

Screen

• 1720 nits tested peak brightness (6000 nits claimed)
• 2640 x 1200 pixel resolution
• OLED panel

The Honor Magic 8 Lite is proof of how boring phone screens are these days. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a new phone that doesn’t have a good screen. And to find one this good at this price? It means there’s really not much to analysing display quality for the average buyer anymore. 

This is an excellent 6.79-inch 120Hz OLED with excellent colour depth, fab perceived sharpness despite the fairly ordinary 2640 x 1200 resolution and — the norm for an OLED — unassailable contrast. 

Honor’s big claim is that the Honor Magic 8 Lite screen can reach 6000 nits, which is kinda ridiculous. That’s roughly double the peak brightness of an iPhone 17. 

And, of course, it’s brightness you’ll never really see in typical usage. But this is absolutely a super-bright phone. 

In normal conditions, it will reach around 733 nits. This increases to 1530 nits when the Honor Magic 8 Lite is in a super-bright environment, and it hits 1720 nits with HDR content. For a mid-tier phone, these are very good results.

The phone also gives off a pleasant impression of being more-or-less all-screen, thanks to its slim screen borders.  

Camera

• Weak 5MP ultra-wide camera
• Solid 108MP primary camera
• OIS and punchy low-light image processing

Design flamboyance butts heads with the realities of a budget phone big time in the Honor Magic 8 Lite camera. The phone has a massive camera circular housing, like Honor’s most expensive phones. But there are only two cameras here. 

The main camera has a 108MP sensor of 1/1.67-inch size, and an f/1.75 lens aperture. This sounds impressive, but it’s only a small upgrade to the Honor Magic 7 Lite’s.

That phone, and reportedly several other Honor models, use the Samsung HM6 sensor. And I think that’s a good bet for the Honor Magic 8 Lite too. Honor has not confirmed the exact hardware specs. Both generations have OIS, optical image stabilisation. 

Camera two is a basic 5MP ultrawide, just like that used in the Honor Magic 7 Lite. Rule number one of the Honor Magic 8 Lite camera: don’t expect much from the ultra-wide.

At that sensor resolution, detail does not hold up beyond a cursory look, and at times, the images appear crude compared to those of the main camera. In some scenes, the HDR engine also has to go into overdrive to compensate for the limited native dynamic range of the sensor. And you can tell. 

After doing the due diligence of testing the ultrawide I’ve come to mostly ignore it as the results just aren’t that great.

The Honor Magic 8 Lite’s main camera fares better but is not without problems. At first glance, pretty much all the phone’s shots look decent. We get effective HDR, avoiding overexposure in bright clouds and super-dark looking foregrounds. Images appear detailed, and colour is close enough to reality not to appear obviously oversaturated in most scenes. 

Like a lot of lower-cost implementations of high-resolution pixel-binning sensors, though, the Honor Magic 8 Lite’s images do not have a particularly natural look up close. Natural textures have a painted look that the best phone cameras managed to eliminate a while back. 

Zoomed images, using the phone’s 3x preset, are worthwhile. They don’t always have appreciably more detail than a basic crop of the main view, but the two views use a completely different processing profile — digital zoomed images have greater tolerance in the signal-versus-noise stakes.

It means zoomed images often pick out more foliage detail, for example. A lot of my favourite Honor Magic 8 Lite pics are taken at a 3x crop, largely because of the kind of compositional avenues it opens up.

Considering the lack of finesse in some of the processing, the Honor Magic 8 Lite’s low-light results are surprisingly good. The phone makes super-effective use of computational photography to enhance very low-light scenes to appear much brighter and clearer than they are in person. 

Compared to the most expensive phones, this can take a little while, though. You’re shown an on-screen countdown as the Honor Magic 8 Lite captures the necessary image data, so a little patience is required. 

Much like the last-generation phone, the Honor Magic 8 Lite has a solid 16MP selfie camera. Impressions of its pics are similar to those of the main camera: decent impression of detail, good HDR processing, if a little slow to process. And up close, the fine facial detail doesn’t look super-natural some of the time.

Like a bunch of recent mid-range phones, video is disappointingly limited. There’s 4K capture, but in that mode you’re limited to 30fps, not 60fps. Video quality is good, but this feels like a low capture ceiling at £400 in 2026.

Performance

• Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 CPU
• 8GB RAM
• Up to 512GB storage

The Honor Magic 8 Lite has a fairly humble processor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 4. It’s roughly on par for raw performance with the MediaTek 7300 Pro, as used in the cheaper Nothing Phone 3a Lite. 

You can get significantly more powerful phones at this price, including the OnePlus Nord 5. It has a Snapdragon 8S Gen 3, which is massively more powerful on both the CPU and GPU sides. 

The power per pound isn’t brilliant here, but as we found with the Honor Magic 7 Lite, actual day-to-day performance is perfectly good. There’s no obvious, irritating lag and skipping between apps doesn’t feel slower than in a much more powerful Android phone. 

To go looking for the limits, I tried Fortnite. It defaults to a very low graphics setting. When you ramp things up to Epic and bump up the render resolution, it actually still remains playable, but the frame rate doesn’t get close to a locked 60fps. 

We’re looking at below 30fps lows as you fly into the stage at the start of a round, and anywhere from 30fps to 60fps the rest of the time. This is obviously not the best gaming phone around for the money, but that’s fairly obvious from a glance at the spec sheet. 

One benefit of having a lower-power processor is that the Honor Magic 8 Lite doesn’t suffer from any thermal throttling in normal conditions. And I haven’t felt the phone get clearly hot at all during testing. 

Software

• Android 15
• Handy AI photo editing tools
• Not too much bloatware

The Honor Magic 8 Lite has fairly clean and customisable software, with the same kind of quirks seen in Honor’s other phones. For example, the drop-down notifications and feature toggle gesture are split across each half of the screen. Flick down from the right side to open up feature toggles. Left-side swipes open up your notifications. 

This can’t be switched off, but a lot of the rest can. You choose whether to use soft keys or gesture navigation. You pick between having an app drawer or just home screens. 

Honor doesn’t load the Magic 8 Lite with too much junk either. Its main contributions are basic apps like a note-taker, document reader and the Honor Health tracker app. The two apps you might wish weren’t here are the App Market custom app store — it’s largely pointless when you have Google Play — and the My Honor app. But even this has some tools to help diagnose when something may be wrong with your Magic 8 Lite, which may come in handy. 

The phone runs Android 15 at the time of review. Just like the last-generation phone, we’re left with a last-generation version of the operating system.

On the brighter side, Honor has not gone overboard with AI, which can clog up phone interfaces. While Gemini comes preinstalled, Honor’s own AI stuff is mostly limited to photo editing. It will, for example, remove objects you highlight. Or it can automatically look for “passers by” and remove them — that’s anyone who doesn’t appear to be the subject of the photo. 

Battery Life

• Fantastic 2-3 day battery life
• Fast 66W charging 
• Power adapter not included

The battery is perhaps the best part of the Honor Magic 8 Lite. Honor has aggressively pushed silicon-carbon battery tech down the price scale with this phone. It allows for the kind of capacity that would simply not have been possible in a phone of this size just a couple of years ago. 

5000mAh was the traditional norm for budget phones at this level, and they’d usually be thicker than the Honor Magic 8 Lite too. This phone has a 7500mAh battery. It’s a monster. 

Even on full days, I’ve ended up with 50% or more charge left by the end of day one. This is a real two-day phone for most folks, and light users will be able to make it last even longer. I’m not sure many folks who read phone reviews — us nerds — will get the claimed three days out of it, but living with the phone is pretty much blissful in this respect.

The Honor Magic 7 Lite was already a battery life winner, and this generation gets a capacity boost from 6600mAh — a decent 13% bump up.

Fast charging is on board too, with support for Honor’s SuperCharge system at up to 66 watts. A charger is not included, but thankfully I had one to hand. 

It gets the phone to 54% in 30 minutes, while you’ll be at 100% within 68 minutes. Honor is fairly conservative about using maximum charging power, staying at 66W for just a few minutes, but you can also set the phone to override this profile to get slightly faster charging. I seemed to get similar charging speed result during testing in this mode, though. There’s no wireless charging here either.

Should you buy it?