Honor Magic 7 Lite Review: More of what you want and less of what you don’t

We’re just two weeks into 2025 and Honor is already launching a series of new phones, including the entry level Honor Magic 7 Lite that promises to take the rough with the smooth. Is it any good?

Promising a high level of ruggedness, exceptional battery life, quality audio and visuals, plus a top-quality all round camera, the Magic 7 Lite looks a tough one to beat.

• The Magic 7 Lite goes on sale in the UK from January 15th.

The Honor Magic 7 Lite is built to endure the sort of abuse that every smartphone has to suffer at some point in its life, as well as more. Drops from two meters are one thing, but this phone can be placed in a freezer and dropped to -30 degrees celsius, or heated to 55 degrees. It’s water resistant and scratch resistant too.

There’s also a huge battery, a mid-to-high chipset, and a very high-resolution display that is also rather unbecoming of a phone that could be considered the budget entry in the Honor Magic smartphone family – but perhaps that’s the point; all Magic phones are of a higher standard with higher expectations from customers.

Despite the large display, the phone is still just 7.98mm thick and weighs only 189g.

Design & Build

The SGS Certified 5-Star Drop Resistance rating is a great selling point, and it’s just as well because there’s no case included in the box. There’s no power adapter either, although you may well have one already if you’ve owned a Honor or Huawei phone before – or you might get one bundled in depending on when you buy.

When I received the review device, Honor shipped it with tongue-in-cheek ‘Not Fragile’ packaging and inviting me to perform a series of tests from trying to scratch the display with a bottle opener, to dropping the phone from two meters.

I was even invited to leave the phone in a freezer to demonstrate that this phone can operate from -30 degrees celsius to as high as 55 degrees. If you want to avoid thermal throttling when playing games, you can now visit your local ice bar or restaurant cold room to get that extra edge!

An IP64 rating isn’t the highest for water submersion, but it’s perfectly fine for use in heavy rain showers and you can even operate the touch screen in wet conditions.

The large 6.78-inch display has a tiny bezel, but a pretty large curve that seems to be in and out of fashion on premium looking devices, and there’s powerful stereo sound included too – with the ability to boost the volume by 300%.

An in-glass fingerprint sensor, two volume keys and a power button complete things, as well as a base mounted USB-C 2.0 port. There’s no headphone socket or infrared to control other devices on the Magic 7 Lite.

The phone is particularly slim, and the camera doesn’t protrude far, and it is also lightweight, but as the chassis can feel a little slippery you’ll be glad there is that camera hump, as it will allow you to slot the camera just above your index finger and keep it steady.

This is a recurring theme on recent Honor phones and I hope they continue to keep the camera design and resist reverting to the top left again.

Camera

As the ‘entry level’ Magic 7 series phone, you may be thinking the camera will be heavily compromised – but in reality, Honor has included a very good quality camera complete with optical image stabilisation and, for video, electronic image stabilisation.

With its 108-megapixel resolution and 9-in-1 pixel binning, there’s enough data captured to allow for a 3x lossless zoom – maxing out at 10x zoom digitally and using AI to enhance the detail – sometimes with good results and sometimes less so. I’ve always remained consistent in recommending against using digital zoom, and if you do need to get that extra close-up it’s far better to use some imaging software afterwards to enhance.

There’s also a 5-metapixel ultra-wide camera included, and the resolution is a major drop on higher-end models so you will find a lot of detail is lost. There’s no telephoto camera either, but if you’re happy with 3x zoom (a pretty decent range) from the primary sensor, this is no great loss.

It would be silly to pay for more cameras than you need and a lot of people aren’t using their phone for outdoor scenic shots, so won’t even care.

There are many AI features like motion sensing capture that can take photos automatically when the phone deems it to be the right moment, and there’s also AI features for post image processing – including AI Erase that does a fantastic job of removing objects and people from photos.

In my testing it did a better job filling in the background than the similar tools in Google Photos.

Honor intends to push a lot more AI functionality in 2025, and much of this will come when the Magic 7 Lite gets the push of Magic OS 9 (based on Android 15) later in the year.

Photo Gallery

Battery & Performance

While other companies gradually increase battery capacities at what seems to be like a glacial pace each year, Honor is now on the third generation of its Silicon carbon batteries – with a higher energy density that enables a lot more battery capacity in ever thinner and lighter shells.

It was particularly stunning to see how tiny the two batteries were in the Honor Magic V3 and now Honor has done something remarkable again with a huge 6,600mAh battery fitted inside, along with 66W fast-charging.

Honor has not included wireless charging capability here, but you now have a phone that is advertised as offering three day battery life, and I can attest to it being able to do this easily with anything but heavy total-phone-addict usage.

With no need to compromise usage (so keep the screen bright, maintain the 120Hz refresh rate, and don’t be put off using the camera) you can just keep using the phone and ignore the battery meter, as you’ll likely charge it long before you have to through necessity.

There are a bunch of standard Honor power management tools (you can boost performance too if you so wish), and battery management tools to lengthen the lifespan of the battery – which is already rated such that it will last many years without significant degredation.

Performance wise, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset comes with an Adreno 710 GPU and isn’t going to win any awards if you’re into heavy 3D gaming or video rendering, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe you aren’t?

The AnTuTu Benchmark score of 571,551 may seem extremely low (but scores on v10 aren’t directly comparable to v8 or v9 versions of the benchmarking tool) but the phone is plenty smooth for day-to-day operation, with the screen refresh rate makes it feel like you’re using a phone with a far more powerful engine under the hood.

But, the GPU performance lets the phone down on heavy rendering, and for the benchmarking testing I was presented with a pretty stuttery sequence that, although exceptionally hard on all chipsets, demonstrated the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 SoC as not being quite good enough for intensive operations.

But, again, if you aren’t someone with those needs, why pay more?

The phone comes with 8GB of RAM with 512GB of storage, which is ample and also helps keep the normal day-to-day usage buttery smooth, as it can easily handle multiple applications being jumped to back and forth.

I was quite surprised to see so much storage on a ‘budget’ smartphone, considering Apple will still happily sell you an iPhone 16 Pro Max costing well over £1,000 with just 256GB.

Final Thoughts

The Magic 7 Lite has some compromises that are likely acceptable, as the phone is being targeted at a different audience to the Magic 7 Pro or Magic 7 RSR models.

It takes good photos, subject to the limitations of having a weaker ultra-wide camera and no telephoto lens. It can play normal games just fine, and will also cope with more processor intensive apps too – just not with the level of performance as a device costing two or three times as much.

It’s an ideal smartphone for media consumption and social networking, which is what most people will want – and it is all backed up by an incredible battery that could seal the deal. It’s also built to cope with bumps and scrapes, with Honor even including screen protection on some online offers (check at the time of placing your order, as offers will change depending on when you’re reading this review).

For a lot of people, this is the ideal configuration. Not needing to pay for things you don’t want or need, but what the phone does have that you want is of a sufficiently high specification to ensure there won’t be any disappointment.

Of course, if the Magic 7 Lite doesn’t quite meet your needs, you have the option of moving up the Magic 7 series range, but after my time with the phone I could definitely see how this phone will appeal to a wide audience who no longer have to feel compelled to spend more than necessary to get a solid all-round offering.

Key Specifications

	Honor Magic 7 Lite
Size/Weight	162.8 x 75.5 x 7.98mm 189g
Screen	6.78-inch AMOLED (1-120Hz) 10-Bit colour (1.07bn colours) with 4000 nits peak brightness 1224 x 2700 pixels Circadian Night Display Technology with 3840Hz PWM Dimming
Audio	Stereo Sound
Chipset	Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 gen 1 Octa-core, Max freq 2.2GHz Adreno 710 GPU
RAM	16GB (+ Honor RAM Turbo)
Storage	512GB
Camera (selfie)	16MP (1080p, 30fps)
Camera (rear)	Primary: 108MP (f/1.75) OIS 3x Lossless Zoom, 10x Digital Ultra-wide & Macro: 5MP (f/2.2) 4K Video recording Max 60fps
Connectivity	Dual band Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) Bluetooth 5.1 5G NR (SA & NSA) Sub 6 4G+ with VoLTE, ViLTE and VoWiFi NFC USB-C 2.0
Battery	6,600mAh 66W fast-charging (SuperCharge protocol) wired [Not included with the device as standard, but may be included as part of a bundle offer]
Other	MagicOS 8.x (Android 14) In-screen fingerprint sensor + face unlock Factory fitted screen protector Dual SIM (Dual Standby) Discrete Security Chip S1 + RF Enhanced Chip Honor C1
Price	£399.99 (with offers)

Pricing & Availability

Two colours are available at launch: Titanium Purple and Titanium Black, with sales starting from January 15th. You can purchase the phone from Honor’s own site, as well as EE, Virgin Media O2, Three, Vodafone, Argos, Very and Currys – at £399.99.

Early adopters can benefit from different promotions from the above retailers and networks, such as a pair of Honor Earbuds Open and/or a 66W SuperCharger fast charger.

More information

• Honor