The Honor Magic 5 Ultimate, the best Honor flagship by far, is only officially available in China now. So the phone in my hand is a China variant, which means the software is slightly different from the other Honor phones you can buy outside China. There’s no Google service by far on the Honor Magic 5 Ultimate. On the other hand, it’s a device coming from an ex-Huawei brand. So apart from the Honor account, you can also log in to your Huawei ID on the phone to access Cloud features.
Except for the brand-new luxury design, the Ultimate model has nothing else different from the Magic 5 Pro (China variant). So if you are attracted by Ultimate’s premium hardware suite and impressive camera kit, the global version of Magic 5 Pro with full Google service ready is a great alternative.
Design
But if you are running to its unique design, then unfortunately you will only take the fact that it doesn’t work with Google. The Magic 5 Ultimate is the most stylish premium phone that I’ve ever seen this year. I quite appreciate the design details it retains on the back cover, which not just offers a stylish and recognizable design but also greatly boosts the grip.
The leather-like pattern looks impressive, retaining elegant lines and dimensionality below the camera module.
Starting with the Magic 4 Ultimate, the series’ camera module is no longer the same round design, but an octagonal curved glass design with a triple-lens structure.
And it’s worth noting that, compared to the Magic 4 Ultimate’s weight of 242g, the 5 cut the weight down to 217g, while the body thickness also got reduced from 9mm to 8.7mm. So it’s pretty obvious that the magic 5 Ultimate is not that bulky and it feels much better than its predecessor. More surprisingly, the battery is instead not reduced by the smaller size but got enlarged to a capacity of 5450mAh.
Display
Turn it over and we can see the front face is quite stunning: A 6.81-inch LTPO OLED curved screen with super narrow bezels. The pill-shaped cutout at the top-left corner is the 12MP selfie camera and ToF 3D system for face scanning.
The edges of the display for the Magic 5 Ultimate are not that curved, so visually it’s great. No edge is too distorted and the grip is fine, but it’s not so satisfying if you add a case.
The display has a high resolution of 460ppi density, 120Hz dynamic refresh rate, a 10-bit color depth with HDR10+ support. So it looks no less than other premium phones.
Almost all the 2023 flagship phones improved their high-frequency PWM dimming to 1920Hz or above. The Magic 5 Ultimate is no exception. And honor even boosts it up to 2160Hz. My eyes are actually sensitive to the flicker issue, so I couldn’t really stare for long at a display that didn’t fix the flicker issue. But fortunately, I didn’t suffer that under low lighting on the Magic 5 Ultimate. It seems that the PWM dimming works.
Honor has excellent HDR content management that is similar to Huawei. Even when you play the HDR content in a window mode, the phone can correctly display the high brightness and vibrant colors required for HDR separately from the rest of the display.
The manual brightness of the display is good, reaching about 750nit. The full-screen adaptive maximum brightness in strong light and for HDR both reach over 1200nits, while the figure will rise up to 1600nits with a 10% HDR window. That’s almost the best level for android.
The phone is equipped with stereo speakers. You can check out how it sounds in our review video.
Camera setups & samples
Main Cam
The Magic 5 Ultimate comes with a triple-lens setup. Let’s first focus on the main camera, which features a nearly 1-inch sensor. Although it’s not the largest sensor size yet, I’m quite satisfied with the photos it took from the main camera. The colors are rich, the bokeh effect is great, and there’s good detail across the brightness and shadow. The experience is so good that as long as you open the camera and press the shutter, it feels like it would definitely give you a great photo no matter when or where you are. Even in a very dark situation, it can control the dynamic range and exposure just right, and won’t feel like the night photo was taken in the daytime.
When you zoom in with the main camera, Magic 5 Ultimate also automatically switches to high-resolution mode to do the cropping. The benefit is that the sharpness will be improved to some extent. This feature will automatically activate when you zoom in to 2x, and you can clearly see the difference between the two photos. Since pixel binning is not available in high pixel mode, its exposure and dynamic range are always significantly improved in low light conditions.
Ultra-wide lens
The physical focal length of the ultra-wide-angle camera reaches 13mm, and the field of view will be a bit wider than the wide-angle lenses of other phones. So the image-quality degradation of the corners is also a problem that needs to be solved by HONOR.
Not only is there the problem of reduced sharpness, but obviously it comes with fringing issues. And here the red flowers also show an oversaturated problem. On the other hand, the wide-angle lens has many of the same advantages as the main camera, such as excellent dynamic range and exposure control. But the poor image quality at the corners and the difficulty in framing with too wide a field of view make me rarely use it in my daily shooting.
The wide-angle camera supports autofocus, so you can also use it as a macro lens. The image quality will be much better than those 2MP macro cameras.
3.5X Telephoto lens
This 3.5x telephoto lens inherits the excellent algorithm from previous HONOR phones, and the AI to increase the image detail allows the Magic 5 Ultimate to take great-looking photos up to 10x. It far exceeds our imagination that a 3.5x optical telephoto can produce such sharp 10x photos. It’s really great, but sometimes this telephoto lens lost its temper. The picture might get exposed too much and the image could look a bit under-contrasted. When I manually lower the exposure, the AI feature for increasing sharpness disappears and the photo becomes blurry. The colors are also not as vibrant as the primary camera.
In night mode, the 3.5X shooting is easier to have stable handheld capture.
And the night mode is also available for the 10x shooting and sometimes it worked, while sometimes it didn’t. The normal mode could even shoot better images with less noise.
Anyway, this telephoto camera is good all around, but not very stable. You need to put up with it when it misbehaves, and hope Honor can fix it well with the software update in the near future.
Video shooting
In terms of video, the good news is that all three lenses support 4k 30fps shooting and support switching lenses in the recording. The main camera and telephoto are even better, with the ability to switch lenses freely in 4k 60fps shooting. The bad news is that there is no 8k recording. And the 4k clips shot on the wide-angle camera are not as sharp as what we shot on the main camera.
Performance & Gaming
As for performance, I’m not gonna talk much about it since we’ve covered a lot about the Snapdragon 8 Gen2 chipset, which is Qualcomm’s most powerful mobile chipset launched in the past few years. Everything looks great on those phones powered by the 8Gen2. No exception for the Magic 5 Pro. And the Magic OS based on Android 13 is surprisingly smooth and responsive. So you don’t need to worry about the phone’s performance at all. For smooth gaming, the new Magic Ultimate has a unique graphics chip to enhance the framerate in games like Genshin Impact. So on the Magic 5 Pro, you could smoothly play Genshin Impact at a boosted framerate of 90fps.
Software
So one of the biggest problems of the China variant is the inability to use Google services. For app searching and installation, in addition to the Honor app store, you can still have third-party options like ApkPure and ApkMirror. But if you rely too much on Google services and cannot take it, just think carefully before buying the Magic 5 Ultimate’s China version.
Battery & Charge
Its battery life is another surprise. It’s one of the premium phones with the longest battery life we have ever reviewed. More importantly, it doesn’t get too bulky as a smartphone. It’s almost at the same level as the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. The charging is not as impressive as the battery life, but it still supports 66W wired and 50W wireless charging. A full charge with the included charger took about 53 mins.
Verdict
So that’s all about the Magic 5 Ultimate. As a premium phone, its battery and display are definitely at the top of all models in the market. And the camera experience it prides itself on is still a satisfying additional value. And what we didn’t mention is that all the features are wrapped into the stylish body with IP68-rated water and dust resistance.
So that’s it. Hope you enjoy the review and the video, if you like that video, please kindly hit the ring and like buttons on YouTube, which means a lot to Gizmochina.
