Since its return after separation from Huawei, Honor has been busy. So busy, in fact, that it’s launched two flagship devices in the space of six months: the Honor Magic 3 and Magic 4 series.
With such little time between their respective launches, however, can you expect much of a difference between these handsets? There are some, but it’s not a major overhaul. Here we’ll detail the key spec differences between the Magic 3 and Magic 4 series.
While the Magic 3 came in three flavours - standard, Pro and Pro+ - the Magic 4 keeps things simpler, arriving as a duo in standard and Pro forms only. We’ll be excluding the Pro+ model from here on out, to keep things simpler.
Visually the Magic 3 and 4 series are otherwise much the same. It’s the finishes where there are some differences, however, with the 4 Pro offering a glass shield in black and an orange PU option.
There’s no difference between the standard and Pro models in terms of front-on scale, respective to each series.
The Magic 3 series is a slightly different size to the Magic 4 series on account of its differing screen size, though, but again it’s only marginal.
All devices across the generations feature a curved-edge screen, it’s just ever so slightly less in the more recent Magic 4 series.
With a new generation comes new hardware, the Magic 4 series squeezing in Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 compared to the outgoing Snapdragon 888 series of the Magic 3. It’s a fairly marginal difference, though.
Neither Magic 3 or Magic 4 offer wireless charging. The 3 Pro does, at 66W, which is very quick for wireless. However, the 4 Pro trumps that with super-fast 100W wireless charging - the fastest non-wired charging we’ve seen to date.
The Magic 3 is a triple camera setup, lacking any kind of zoom lens. It actually features a monochrome camera instead, which we suspect is more-or-less useless.
It’s a goob job, then, that the Magic 4 series ditches that monochrome camera and brings in zoom: the standard model offers an 8MP sensor with 5x optical, while the 4 Pro upgrades that the a 64MP sensor with 3.5x zoom (yes, oddly it’s less - but similar to the 3 Pro’s 4x optical zoom).
The Pro models in both series offer dual front-facing cameras, whereas the standard models both stick with a single punch-hole instead. We would prefer all to go simpler with the single, really, as the pill-shaped cutout for a dual camera is too distracting in our view.
Conclusion
Despite it being months since the Magic 3’s announcement it’s still not available to international markets. Honor says it is still coming, but as it’s on last-gen hardware now, unless the price is spectacularly different, the Magic 4 series is the more obvious option to buy. When that will arrive, however, is still to be confirmed, as is pricing.
