The Honor Magic 8 Lite has the best battery life of any phone I've ever tested – but it's not a total home run

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Two-minute review

With the Honor Magic 8 Lite, the battery is undoubtedly the star of the show. It has the same massive 7,500 mAh capacity as the Oppo Find X9 Pro, but when combined with its lower-end energy-efficient chip, it lasts even longer. I'm not exaggerating when I say that four days on a single charge is quite easy to achieve with this phone.

The Magic 8 Lite's construction has been significantly upgraded this year, too. It now carries the highest possible IP rating, so dust and water will pose no threat, while a shock-resistant frame and reinforced tempered glass should keep it fairly safe from drops.

The phone's display is another highlight, and it ticks all the most important boxes. It's bright, has a speedy 120Hz refresh rate, supports PWM dimming, and has slim symmetrical bezels all the way around.

Unfortunately, the Magic 8 Lite's performance isn't quite so impressive. You'll see the occasional stutter when you're going about your daily business, and you'll need to use very low graphics settings to get a playable experience in modern games.

The cameras, too, left me wanting more. Honor hasn't upgraded the camera hardware on its Magic Lite series for the last few generations, and while the main sensor on this latest model is quite good, the ultra-wide is pretty terrible.

The software won't be to everyone's taste (and it's not fully up to date), but it has some genuinely useful features, as well as some neat AI tricks that are often reserved for pricier flagship phones. I found it very easy to live with.

So, whether the Magic 8 Lite is right for you will all depend on your priorities. As a photographer and a gamer, I didn't have the greatest time with Magic 8 Lite, but not everyone is like me. Battery life is the number one concern for many users, and that's one area where the Magic 8 Lite will definitely not disappoint.

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Price and availability

• £399 for the 512GB model
• Launched in Europe on December 8, 2025
• Not available in the US

The Honor Magic 8 Lite launched internationally on December 8, 2025. It's now available to order in most regions across Europe, including the UK, but as usual for Honor products, it's not launching in the US.

At the time of writing, I only have pricing for the 8GB/512GB model, which costs £399 in the UK. The previous model, the Magic 7 Lite, started with an MSRP of £399 for the 256GB model, so this is a welcome price drop.

Of course, there are plenty of other great phones around this price (the Samsung Galaxy A56 and Google Pixel 9a, for instance). However, the Magic 8 Lite manages to stand out by offering the biggest battery of the bunch, as well as capacious storage and an IP69K rating.

• Value score: 4 / 5

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Specs

Here's a look at the Honor Magic 8 Lite's key specs:

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Design

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• Plastic frame with 6-layer drop-resistant structure
• Forest Green, Midnight Black, and Reddish Brown options
• IP68/IP69K dust and water-resistant

With the Magic 8 Lite, Honor has done away with the curved edges we saw on the last few generations, instead opting for a boxy design with flat siderails, which is bang on trend. While I appreciated how slim the curved edges made the Magic 7 Lite feel, the newer model feels more premium and modern.

The phone is available in three different colors: Midnight Black, Reddish Brown, and Forest Green. I have the latter in for review, and it looks lovely. The rear panel has a velvety matte feel, and the color shifts slightly when the light hits it. It's not a fingerprint magnet, either, which is often a problem with matte-finish phones.

The cameras are arranged in a centrally placed halo, just like on the previous generation, and the design reminds me of the Huawei Mate-series flagships. Love it or hate it, there's no denying it stands out from the crowd.

One of the big upgrades this year is the new IP68/69K rating for dust and water resistance. This means the phone is effectively immune to dust ingress and can withstand dunks in fresh water, as well as blasts from jets of hot water. So, if you can't resist scrolling while you take a shower, this is one of the few phones that will survive the ordeal.

The drop resistance has also been cranked up a notch. Honor reckons it'll survive drops from up to 2.5m heights, thanks to a new 6-layer drop-resistant structure that incorporates non-Newtonian fluid.

The phone still has a plastic frame, but it doesn't seem to be holding it back in terms of durability. The tempered glass coating on the screen has also been toughened; it now has a 31% deeper tempering depth to help with scratch and crack resistance.

• Design score: 4 / 5

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Display

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• 6.79-inch 120Hz OLED display
• 3840Hz PWM dimming
• 6,000-nit peak brightness

The Honor Magic 8 Lite now has a fully flat screen, rather than curved edges, and I much prefer it. Not only does this mean you avoid unwanted reflections and accidental edge touches, but it's also easier to find a quality screen protector.

The bezels are slimmer, too, and they're symmetrical on all sides, which gives the phone a more premium look. The pill-shaped selfie cutout is also gone, and you now get a more typical circular punch hole.

The screen is also brighter than before, able to reach a whopping 6,000 nits at peak brightness. I certainly never had any trouble seeing the display out in the sunlight.

It's an OLED panel, and as you might expect, it delivers the deep, inky blacks and vibrant colors that the technology is known for. A 120Hz refresh rate keeps things looking smooth as you swipe around, too.

If you're concerned about eye strain, you'll be pleased to learn that the Honor Magic 8 Lite supports 3,840Hz high-frequency PWM dimming. This will help your eyes feel fresher when using the phone at low brightness levels.

Another neat feature is Honor's AI Heavy Rain Touch/Glove Touch tech. This ensures that the touchscreen continues working when others might fail, for example, when there's water on the screen. It's very useful in the British wintertime.

• Display score: 4 / 5

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Cameras

• 108MP main (f/1.75)
• 5MP ultra-wide (f/2.2)
• 16MP selfie camera (f/2.45)

The Honor Magic 8 Lite has two rear cameras: a 108MP main and a 5MP ultra-wide. Around the front, there's a 16MP punch hole selfie camera.

This is the exact same hardware that we saw on the Magic 7 Lite and Magic 6 Lite before that. Neither of those phones impressed me with their photographic abilities, so my expectations were on the ground when coming to test the Magic 8 Lite.

Indeed, the ultra-wide is as bad as you might expect. You can get passable results in perfect lighting, but there's only so much you can do with such a low-resolution sensor. In low light, you should avoid it entirely.

The main camera, on the other hand, is quite decent. Just don't let the 108MP specification fool you into thinking you'll get exceptionally detailed shots. It spits out 12MP JPEGs by default, and you'll need a bright sunny day if you want to use the full resolution, as the pixels are quite tiny.

I had hoped that this high-resolution sensor would allow for big digital crops without much of a loss in quality, but that's not the case. You can see the quality degrade quite significantly at 3x zoom, and it gets worse as you approach the maximum of 10x.

Still, in the right conditions, you can get some great shots with the Magic 8 Lite. Honor's processing is a little punchy and contrasty for my tastes, but you are given plenty of controls to adjust the way your images look.

The selfie camera is fine, but wholly unremarkable. It's on par with most budget-focused handsets, and it gets the job done, but it doesn't have the edge that Instagram addicts will be looking for.

I found that portrait mode cutouts weren't the most reliable, often chopping off bits of hair. Plus, there's less control than I'm accustomed to. There's no way to change the blur level on the selfie camera, for instance; it's just on or off.

For video shooting, you can capture at up to 4K 30fps on the main camera, while the other two lenses top out at 1080p. Video stabilization isn't the most impressive, and the lack of consistency across lenses means that budding content creators will be left wanting more.

• Cameras score: 3 / 5

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Camera samples

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Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Performance

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• Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset
• 8GB RAM
• 256GB / 512GB storage

The Honor Magic 8 Lite is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 SoC. It's a healthy upgrade compared to the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 that was (strangely) present in both the Magic 6 Lite and 7 Lite.

Still, this is a budget-focused chipset, so you should temper your expectations when it comes to performance. It's paired with 8GB of RAM, which should be sufficient for some multitasking, and either 256GB or 512GB of storage.

In normal day-to-day use, when scrolling social media and responding to emails and WhatsApp messages, the phone feels quick enough. At times, though, you can feel the difference between this and a flagship device. You can expect to see the occasional stutter in the system animations, and sometimes things will take a split second longer to load. Honestly, though, it's very easy to live with.

However, when you boot up a demanding game, that performance gap widens significantly. In fairness, the Magic 8 Lite was still able to play Wuthering Waves, which is well known as one of the most challenging Android titles, but I had to stick to the lowest preset to get playable framerates, and I still saw the odd performance dip.

So, this phone is not a good choice for keen gamers, but if you're more into Candy Crush or retro titles, you might find this level of performance to be all you need.

• Performance score: 3 / 5

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Software

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• Magic OS 9, based on Android 15
• Plenty of AI features
• 6 years of updates and security patches (in EU regions)

The Magic 8 Lite runs Magic OS 9, which is the same software you'll find on Honor's 2025 flagships like the Magic 7 Pro and Magic V5. That said, we've already seen Magic OS 10 begin to roll out to these handsets, so it's a little strange that the Lite model is launching one step behind. Hopefully, the upgrade will materialize before too long.

Honor promises six years of OS upgrades and security patches for the Magic 8 Lite in the EU, so it will definitely get the new OS, but how soon it will arrive remains to be seen. Regardless, it's a very decent update policy at this price point; it doesn't match the seven years that you get with Honor's flagship phones, but it outdoes a lot of the similarly priced competition. It should be noted, though, that outside of the EU, this phone only gets two years of updates.

Magic OS continues to be a divisive Android skin. It's heavily stylized, and it changes a lot of the core fundamentals, so Android purists probably won't love it. Personally, though, I quite enjoy it. I think it looks nice, and it adds some genuinely useful features.

Honor's Magic Portal is probably the most unique offering. It allows you to drag text and images from one app to another, and I find myself using it quite frequently. I was pleased to see that Honor's "Knuckle to Portal" gesture is now supported on the Lite model, too, as it was missing when I reviewed the previous model.

In terms of functionality, there's a lot of overlap between Magic Portal and Google's Circle to Search, which is also supported on this phone. That said, having more than one way to accomplish a task is rarely a bad thing, because if one service isn't behaving the way you'd like, you can try the other.

You also get loads of AI-powered image editing tools on the Magic 8 Lite, like an object eraser, reflection removal, outpainting, background removal, and more. Again, a lot of these features are built into Google Photos, too, but if you use both platforms, you can see which one does a better job.

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I'm a big fan of Honor's Magic Pill feature, which is functionally almost identical to Apple's Dynamic Island. It's nothing particularly new, but it means you have quick access to things like media controls and timers, no matter which app is running in the foreground.

The aggressive power-saving measures that the OS applies by default are less impressive. If you want timely notifications, you might find that you need to go into the settings and tweak things. I often found I wasn't getting notifications from my video doorbell, for example.

• Software score: 3 / 5

Honor Magic 8 Lite review: Battery

• 7,500mAh silicon-carbon battery
• 66W wired charging
• No charger included

Without a doubt, one of the most appealing aspects of the Magic 8 Lite is its insane battery life. The 7,500mAh silicon-carbon cell is up there with the largest batteries available today (tied with the Oppo Find X9 Pro and RedMagic 11 Pro). The difference here is that it's paired with a less powerful and more energy-efficient chipset, which results in the best battery life of any phone I have tested to date.

When I was working in the office, and not playing too many games or taking a lot of photos, I found I was only using around 25% of the Magic 8 Lite's battery per day. I managed to make the phone last for four days on a single charge, and it wasn't particularly challenging to do so.

Of course, battery life varies wildly depending on how you use your phone, but even the heaviest of users should be able to achieve two days on a charge without any difficulty. So, if you're always forgetting to charge your phone, the Magic 8 Lite could be an absolute game-changer.

What's more, despite having a massive battery, the phone also doesn't take too long to charge. It supports up to 66W speeds using an official Honor charger, but sadly, you don't get one included in the box.

With the right charger, you can expect around a 50% charge in just half an hour, while a full charge will take just over an hour. Not too shabby.

As ever, I would have loved to see wireless charging support, especially since the feature seems to be making its way to more mid-rangers, but there's none of that here.

• Battery score: 5 / 5

Should you buy the Honor Magic 8 Lite?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Honor Magic 7 Pro review: Also consider

The Honor Magic 8 Lite is a battery life champion with great durability, but there are plenty of other great options around the same price. Here are a couple of competitors that are worth looking at:

How I tested the Honor Magic 8 Lite

• Review test period: One week
• Testing included: Everyday use, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
• Tools used: Geekbench 6, 3DMark, GFXBench, native Android stats

I put my SIM card into the Honor Magic 8 Lite and used it as my main phone for just over a week. I used it exactly as I would use any other phone, taking lots of photos, gaming, messaging, working, streaming video, and navigating with Google Maps and Waze.

I also compared the experience of playing graphically challenging games like Wuthering Waves and Zenless Zone Zero to my experience on other Android mid-rangers like the Nothing Phone (3a) and Samsung Galaxy A56. I also ran multiple benchmarks on the handset, including 3DMark, GFXbench, and Geekbench.

I assessed the battery performance based on my real-world usage, and charging times were measured using an official Honor 100W wall adapter and cable.

Read more about how we test

First tested November 2025