Honor Magic 8 Lite review: the affordable phone for the accident-prone

Introduction

Honor’s budget-friendly phone range has quickly carved out a niche for itself with unbeatable stamina and reassuring levels of durability. The new Magic 8 Lite goes even further for 2026, with some of the best drop resistance and elemental protection you’ll find at any price: IP68 and IP69K ratings come close to the flagship Magic 8 Pro it launches alongside.

It follows the same basic formula as the outgoing Magic 7 Lite, right down to being a China-market model with a few tweaks for a European audience – namely a battery small enough not to break any import laws. There’s still enough capacity here to go the distance, though, along with a high pixel count camera and styling inspired by much pricier rivals.

Arriving at £399, the Magic 8 Lite goes up against the Samsung Galaxy A56 and models like the Poco X7 Pro. But with other internals not seeing nearly the same step up between generations, is there enough here to appeal to more than just fumbling phone owners?

Design & build: much more modern

Last year Honor was still doggedly clinging on to curved-edge glass, but the firm has finally let it go in the wake of shifting style trends. The Magic 8 Lite’s flat front and rear panels and squared-off frame help it look a lot more like its bigger brother. The camera island around back also gets a similar knurled edge.

It looks like a more modern phone as a result, and one you wouldn’t instantly think was from the affordable end of the price spectrum. The frame is polycarbonate rather than metal, as is the rear panel, but both have finishes that seem convincing from a distance and stave off fingerprint muck rather well.

I’m a big fan of my Forest Green review unit; it’s not as shouty as the Reddish Brown hue, but has more character than the Midnight Black version. There’s no real correlation to the Magic 8 Pro’s colour choices, possibly because this is essentially the China-market X9d rebranded for Europe, rather than a device developed side-by-side with the new flagship.

The flat frame gives you more to grip onto than the old phone’s curved one, yet hasn’t resulted in a thicker phone overall. Honor has actually managed to shave off a few tenths of a millimetre. At 7.9mm it’s more svelte than many modern flagships, including the Oppo Find X9 Pro I was using most recently. It’s a few grams heavier than the last-gen model, but I don’t think I could tell without putting both on the scales.

And yet this phone can survive 2.5m drops onto concrete, and is rated to survive both prolonged cold water dunkings and briefer hot ones. There aren’t many that can cope with a rinse under the hot tap after getting dirty. The Victus 2 display glass has stayed blemish-free throughout my testing, too. If you want peace of mind on the cheap, little else comes close to this. Being able to use the screen with wet fingers is something you don’t often get on an affordable phone either.

Screen & sound: HDR hero

The Magic 8 Lite’s ever-so-slightly larger display is down to its skinnier 1.3mm screen bezels, rather than Honor opting for a bigger panel than last year. It translates to an impressive 94.6% screen-to-body ratio, almost entirely filling my hand. Overall display resolution has dipped a bit, but not to a level that text stopped looking crisp or images lacked detail.

A 60-120Hz dynamic refresh rate is pretty common on budget phones now, but I can’t fault the way this one ramps up when it detects movement. The underlying AMOLED panel delivers exactly the sort of rich colours and dramatic contrast I would expect, which really helps games and movies stand out. You have a familiar set of colour modes and temperatures to pick from in the Settings menus, and Honor’s extensive eye care modes have now been siloed off into a separate screen to make it easier to understand what exactly they’re doing to soothe your tired retinas.

HDR streaming support wasn’t really a thing on previous Lite phones, but Honor has fixed that for 2026. The Magic 8 Lite plays nicely with Netflix and YouTube content. I can’t vouch for the claimed 6000 nits peak brightness for HDR content – a significant 2000 nit increase over the Magic 7 Pro, no less – but it was very competitive with rivals costing a lot more for outdoor visibility. I had no problem seeing what was onscreen on a crisp New York winter morning.

A downward-firing speaker and earpiece duo once again supply the audio, and get Exceptionally loud when asked. The 400% high volume setting doesn’t instantly obliterate all sense of nuance from your music either. There’s not exactly much in the way of bass, as to be expected from a phone, but headphones aren’t a must for even a quick scroll through your social video feed.

Cameras: time for a change

With one major exception, Honor has stuck with the same basic rear camera setup on its Lite handsets for three generations now. The Magic 6 Lite’s redundant macro shooter was ditched for last year’s Magic 7 Lite, which is where optical image stabilisation also made the grade on the main snapper for the first time. The underlying 108MP sensor is nigh on identical here, and it continues to be paired with a 5MP ultrawide that’s really showing its age.

Some under-the-hood algorithm updates aside, there’s little here I haven’t seen before. The fixed-focus ultrawide continues to squeeze in plenty of a scene, but it can’t preserve texture or fine detail to any real degree. Expect a more limited dynamic range than the main sensor, a less controlled exposure that’s prone to highlight blowouts, and lots of image noise even in decently lit indoor environments. Owners probably won’t reach for it very often.

The lead lens fares better, its f/1.8 aperture being wide enough to bring plenty of light onto the sensor when snapping outdoors. Honor has judged colour balance well here, not going full Instagram-levels of saturation but still remembering to keep some visual interest rather than flattening it all down.

Dynamic range is merely OK for the class, and while the sensor automatically bins shots down from 108MP to 12MP, there’s a reasonable amount of detail on display. OIS helps here, but I wouldn’t say it fares significantly better than any of its budget rivals, regardless of lighting conditions.

Sensor cropping and pixel binning are used whenever you pick the 2x or 3x toggles inside the camera app. Just like last year, I thought the 3x magnification produced cleaner, more well-defined snaps than the 2x zoom could. Neither mode puts in a particularly great showing at night, mind, with lots more image noise and blown-out highlights. The night mode can help, but it’s not a miracle worker.

The 16MP front-facing camera is fixed focus as well, with decent colour capture and a reasonable amount of detail in good light. It’ll do just fine for video calls and selfies, but equally it won’t blow you away.

Software experience: a kind of Magic

Honor has yet to reach software parity across its entire Android line-up, meaning the Magic 8 Lite arrives running Magic OS 9, on top of Android 15. That’s a generation behind the Magic 8 Pro, and visually not all that different from what we got on the outgoing Magic 7 Lite.

Depending on who you ask, that could be a good thing: Honor has gone all-in on aping iOS 26 with its latest skin, adding lots of liquid glass inspired UI elements. They’re MIA here, sticking with a flatter look that I find easier to use. Feature-wise there aren’t any major additions, with the Dynamic Island-like Magic Capsule still popping out from the selfie camera’s punch hole with music controls and countdown timers (but not a lot else). The context-aware Magic Portal is more useful, letting you quickly bounce text or images between apps.

Otherwise it’s a familiar user experience, with a decent level of home screen customisation, a wide selection of own-brand widgets and all the usual Google Gemini integration. AI is also on board for things like foreign language translation, audio recording transcription, and text summaries. The photo gallery has a few generative editing tricks, too. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before elsewhere, but it all works well enough.

It might not get quite as much long-term software love as Honor’s flagship models, but the Magic 8 Lite should still be in line for six Android OS updates and six years of security patches in its lifetime. That puts many affordable phones to shame, and is close to what you’ll get from Google or Samsung.

Performance & battery life: super size me

There’s a real arms race going on right now when it comes to smartphone battery capacity, and it’s the Chinese brands that are winning. Most of ’em are focused on flagships, but Honor is also using silicon-carbon tech nearer the entry level. Here that means the Magic 8 Lite arrives with a 7500mAh cell. That’s 900mAh more than last year’s model, which was already a 20% uplift on what most Western rivals were offering at the time.

Simply put, there’s nothing in this price range that can match the Magic 8 Lite for lifespan. With a little care, this phone will creep into a third day of use before it’ll need plugging in. I didn’t have to try in order to make it through two days, and unless you’re gaming pretty much non-stop, it should never be out of pep in the first 24 hours.

You’ll need to supply a compatible power brick to max out the Magic 8 Lite’s 66W USB-C charging speeds, as Honor doesn’t put one in the box any more. A full charge takes an hour and ten minutes, while half an hour is good enough for roughly 50% power.

It surely helps that Honor has stuck with a decidedly lower-tier chipset, keeping power draw truly in check rather than chase performance from the category above. The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 also has a newer generation CPU that brings some welcome extra oomph in apps and games over the outgoing phone. Here it’s paired with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of on-board storage.

This is still an affordable model at heart, so don’t go expecting world-beating power. Synthetic benchmarks put it firmly among rivals in the £300 class, but marginally ahead of those with MediaTek Dimensity 7300 power like the Nothing Phone 3a Lite. A Samsung Galaxy A56 is faster across the board.

It doesn’t feel especially speedy in general use, with apps taking a little bit longer to open than on a mid-ranger and images popping in a half-second slower when scrolling through web pages. I didn’t find it ruined the experience, but you’ll definitely notice the difference if coming from an older but more powerful handset. Animations are still smooth enough and you can still split-screen multitask without any major hiccups.

This really isn’t much of a gaming phone, with low scored in 3DMark (and a graphics incompatibility with one test) translating to most titles from the Play Store defaulting to lower detail settings. Things are better than last year, at least, and it’s able to maintain performance even after a prolonged play session.

Honor Magic 8 Lite verdict

It might not be a generational leap on the hardware side, with performance that’s merely OK for the money and cameras that are starting to show their age, but the Magic 8 Lite impresses in other ways. It’s truly built to last, with a sturdy construction that you simply don’t see among affordable phones and a gigantic battery that can go for days at a time.

Being an Android version behind the times isn’t much of a deal-breaker when six years of updates are promised, and though the ultrawide camera isn’t much to shout about, the lead lens can take some pretty tidy snaps for an affordable phone.

If you’re on a budget and want the most endurance possible, the Magic 8 Lite makes a lot of sense.

Honor Magic 8 Lite technical specifications