Honor MagicPad 2 Review: Brighter Than All Samsung Tablets

The Honor MagicPad 2 offers a lot for just 600 Dollars – namely, a very bright and pretty OLED display, really good speakers and a very long battery life. But there is a catch. Many might think that it’s the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, which is not a top-of-the-line processor. But actually, the performance is pretty good. No, the big weakness is something else.

Display: Amazingly bright OLED

We’ll get to that in a moment, but first I’d like to praise the beautiful display. We get a 12.3-inch display with a very high resolution of 3000 x 1920 pixels. So everything looks razor sharp.

It’s unusual that we get an OLED at this price. In direct comparison to LCD tablets like the OnePlus Pad 2 or iPad Air, you can immediately see that the contrast is stronger and black is really black. Really nice.

The colors also look well saturated, at least most of the time. The colors in Honor’s own video player look oversaturated, really terrible. However, this seems to be a problem with the app. The colors are great on YouTube and Netflix.

Even more unusual than an OLED in this price range is that the display can be up to 1600 nits bright with HDR content.

We compared all premium tablets in great detail recently and the MagicPad 2 is not only brighter than the iPad Air, but also brighter than the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9+ and Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra. The latter is very expensive.

In fact, in our comparison, it is even roughly as bright as the latest Apple iPad Pro with M4 chipset. That can also be up to 1600 nits bright. The 13-inch version costs 1300 Dollars, which is more than twice as much as the MagicPad 2.

I worked with the tablet on a train while the sun was shining on me and the display from the side. And I was still able to read and work wonderfully. The bright OLED is really a great highlight, and not just for this price range, but in general. As I said, it is brighter than the Samsung flagships.

It’s also nice that it supports up to 144Hz.

Speakers

The display is almost perfect for watching movies and in fact, the same applies to the speakers.

In our comparison, it was even a bit louder than the 13-inch iPad Pro, but the bass is a bit weaker and the Honor lacks a bit of treble – so it doesn’t sound quite as good as Apple’s. But the sound quality is a good bit better than the iPad Air and Galaxy Tab S9+, so it definitely belongs to the upper top class in terms of speakers.

Design & Build Quality

I think the black version of the MagicPad 2 looks quite nice, but the white version made a cheap impression on me. I played with that one at IFA. This is because the case is not entirely made of metal, but only the 5.8mm thin frame is. The back is plastic.

Although it’s one reason the body can be quite light at 555g, the transition from the glass and the back to the metal frame is not quite as high-quality as on the competitors’ flagships. But yes, they are also more expensive.

Unfortunately, a headphone jack and a MicroSD card slot are missing. I also miss a fingerprint reader. Instead, you can unlock it using facial recognition.

On the right side, there is a USB C port, but in fact, it is only USB 2.0. I imported over 900 RAW photos from my camera’s SD card to the tablet and then to Lightroom, and it felt like it took forever. It’s a real shame. You also can’t connect external monitors.

A 9-megapixel front camera sits at the front, which is definitely good enough for video chats. However, the quality is not outstanding, and shadows get noisy quickly. The 13-megapixel main camera on the back is significantly better and takes solid photos. An LED flash sits next to it.

Hardware & Performance

Inside the Honor MagicPad 2 sits a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor with 8GB to 16GB of RAM and a 256GB to 1TB internal storage. There is no version with 5G, and GPS and NFC are also missing.

My Geekbench 5 and 6 benchmark comparison immediately shows that the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is significantly weaker than the standard 8 Gen 3 of the OnePlus Pad 2 and even lags slightly behind the older 8 Gen 2, which is in the Samsung S9 series. However, it’s more powerful than mid-range tablets like the Galaxy Tab S9 FE+.

In the 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme benchmark, it is even better than the Apple iPad 10 and is also significantly, significantly above the Honor Pad 9. But here you can see again that the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9+ and OnePlus Pad 2 are slightly better.

In everyday use, I always had the impression that everything ran smoothly and quickly. This is especially true for multitasking. So the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 may not be a high-end chip, but the performance is more than good enough for almost all purposes.

MagicPad 2 Gaming Test

The chipset reaches its limits a bit in my gaming test. Yes, I tried Fortnite and it actually runs well with epic graphics, 3D resolution at 100% and the frame rate at 60. Not only does the graphics look really pretty, but the frame rate is between 45 and 60fps, which is very smooth.

However, if you set the maximum frame rate to 90, the graphics can no longer be set to “Epic”, but only to “low”. For this you need at least a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the S9 flagships from Samsung could do that with higher graphics.

Other games like Asphalt Unite and Zenless Zero run well at the highest graphics settings.

Magic-Pencil 3: Testing The Stylus

At first, I thought that the stylus was a weak point of the tablet. For about 24 hours, I had a problem with it, because it kept having very short dropouts – but clear dropouts. Since then, however, I have not been able to reproduce the problem and the stylus works well.

So I don’t know if it was because of some app in the background or something in my studio that caused interference. But after that one day, the Honor Magic-Pencil 3 works exactly as it should and works perfectly.

It looks like an Apple Pencil clone and is not only very precise, but also reacts quickly, is pressure-sensitive and even recognizes when you tilt the pen slightly. This is great for shading.

Since I had a temporary problem with the pen, I wrote a lot with it in various note-taking apps. As I said, I haven’t been able to reproduce the problem since then and it works well. And that’s why I can also say that the pen is great for handwritten notes.

It has a small downside, however. The pen works best in Honor’s own notes app. It responds well and very quickly here. However, a lag is visible in some third-party apps, for example in Noteshelf 3.

Keyboard Cover Test

Let’s move on to the keyboard cover. This is not the biggest weakness of the MagicPad 2 either, but it is definitely not a highlight. The cover is made entirely of plastic and protects the tablet when folded.

The keyboard itself is great. I was able to use it to write longer texts immediately. This is the case with many 12-inch tablets, simply because the keyboard can be large enough. However, it’s quite a shame that you can only set up the tablet in the cover at one angle. Often the angle is a bit too steep.

In some places, the cover also feels quite cheap. However, it costs under 100 Dollars and is therefore significantly cheaper than the competition.

By the way, it’s pretty cool that it’s a Bluetooth keyboard that is powered by induction from the tablet. So there is no physical connection.

You can use pretty much every keyboard with this tablet. I put a link with keyboards and other accessories we recommend for MagicPad 2 in the description below.

Software: Android 14 Without Updates

Now we get to the big downside and that is its software. The MagicPad 2 runs Android 14 with the MagicOS interface in version 8.0.1.

The software is good in itself, typical for Honor and previously also for Huawei. All the standard Android features run well and multitasking works great. Although the typical Google taskbar is missing, there are two docks at the bottom and on the side that serve their purpose.

The big weakness is updates. There is actually no open statement from Honor about this and certainly no serious update promise. According to some reports, it will get a major version update and maybe up to 3 years of security updates.

Read: The Best Android Tablets You Can Buy

Sure, that’s very little. Samsung now promises 7 years of major version updates for its premium tablets. I think it’s a shame that Honor isn’t going along with this. The MagicPad 2 is a really nice tablet, the display is amazing. As you have seen, it can even compete with the iPad Pro in many respects, and the display is better than that of the expensive Samsung flagships.

But okay, they save on updates. It’s a shame.

Battery Life

The battery life, on the other hand, is outstanding again. For my battery test, I always run an HD YouTube video in an endless loop at maximum brightness, and in this test it achieved a new record runtime of 13 hours.

Honor MagicPad 2 Review: Final Verdict

So, is the Honor MagicPad 2 a tablet for you? If you are looking for an outstanding media tablet, definitely yes. It offers a really nice and very bright display, nice and loud speakers, and a very long battery life. It’s perfect for an entertainment tablet.

It is even great for gaming, although it’s not the best of the best for this. The stylus is also good and the keyboard is solid.

The big disadvantage remains that it will probably only get one major update. I think that’s a real shame and if long updates are important to you, this is clearly not the tablet to get.

But I think for most people, updates are not that important, unless you work for the CIA or so. You will be able to use it for a good 3, 4, 5 years. At some point, it will no longer have the latest Android version, but almost all apps should still work.

Personally, I don’t think the Honor MagicPad 2 is perfect – it lacks some premium features such as a fingerprint reader, it only has USB 2.0, no water and dust resistant body, and the lack of updates is very unfortunate.

But I think the value is fantastic, really outstanding. The display, the speakers and the battery life are very good. If I didn’t review tablets for a living, the MagicPad 2 would be the device I would buy for myself personally.