Honor MagicPad 4 Review: iPad & Galaxy Tab Killer?

The Honor MagicPad 4 is the thinnest tablet in the world at just 4.8 millimeters, with insanely slim display bezels and an OLED panel that hits up to 2,400 nits. When Honor announced it at Mobile World Congress, I was genuinely excited. I’ve spent a few weeks with it now, tested it extensively, and compared it head to head with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 and the OnePlus Pad 3. And I’ll tell you this right off the bat: in one specific area, the MagicPad 4 actually beats Samsung’s ultimate flagship. But it also comes with a few downsides.

Design and Ports

Let’s start with the design. 4.8 millimeters is wild. For comparison: the iPad Pro M5 measures 5.1 mm, the Galaxy Tab S11 sits at 5.5 mm, and the OnePlus Pad 3 comes in at just under 6 mm. Honor takes the crown here, and at around 450 grams, the tablet is surprisingly light too. The MagicPad 4 feels premium and absurdly thin. Really great. That said, a unibody metal build always feels a bit more high-end. Here, you only get a metal frame with a plastic back.

What’s really impressive, though, are the display bezels. They’re insanely thin and give you a 93 percent screen-to-body ratio. Side by side with the Galaxy Tab S11, you can immediately see just how narrow the MagicPad 4’s bezels really are.

For ports, you get a USB-C 3.2 port that you can also use to hook up an external monitor, plus pogo pins for the keyboard cover. There’s no headphone jack and no microSD slot, which is pretty much standard these days. One thing I find really disappointing is that there’s no fingerprint sensor either. So you can only unlock it with a PIN or the front camera’s 2D face recognition, and that’s not very secure.

On the front you get a 9-megapixel webcam, and on the back a 13-megapixel main camera.

Display and Speakers

Now, onto the display, which for me is one of the most exciting things about the MagicPad 4. Honor packs in a 12.3-inch OLED with a resolution of 3,000 by 1,920 pixels. The adaptive refresh rate goes up to 165 Hz, a nice step up from the usual 120 Hz on the iPad Pro and Galaxy Tab S11. Honor rates HDR peak brightness at up to 2,400 nits.

Without HDR, the MagicPad 4 is noticeably brighter than the OnePlus Pad 3 and also a hair brighter than the Galaxy Tab S11. For HDR content, Honor and Samsung come out pretty evenly matched. It’s hard to spot a difference between them. Both displays are better than the OnePlus Pad 3. Black levels are obviously way deeper than on the OnePlus, since that one only has an LCD.

Out of the box, the Galaxy Tab S11 looks a little more yellow and the MagicPad 4 a touch more blue, but you can tweak the color temperature in the settings anyway.

One thing did bug me, and it was while watching a long YouTube podcast. The screen automatically dims after a while, and you have to tap the display to bring the brightness back up. It’s probably meant to save battery, but it can be annoying. I messed with every setting I could find, but couldn’t turn it off. This is likely a software bug that will hopefully get patched in an update.

For speakers, Honor goes with an eight-speaker setup. And honestly, I was surprised. I figured Honor would cut corners here and the sound wouldn’t be quite as good, partly because the tablet is so thin. Turns out, the speakers on the MagicPad 4 and the Galaxy Tab S11 are basically on par. Both are really, really good and get quite loud.

Honor and Samsung aren’t perfect, though, because the OnePlus Pad 3 has slightly better bass and delivers deeper lows than the other two.

Pen

The MagicPad 4 pairs with the Magic Pencil 3. It connects over Bluetooth, snaps magnetically to the tablet, and charges there too. Unlike Samsung, Honor doesn’t include the pen, so you either buy it separately or spend a little more on a bundle.

When I jotted down my first notes in Noteshelf 3, I was honestly a little let down at first. The pen was laggy. In Honor’s own notes app, it ran nice and smooth. Then I went into the display settings and locked the refresh rate at 165 Hz instead of using the dynamic setting, and suddenly the pen ran beautifully smooth in Noteshelf 3 too. So it was the display, not the pen. With a fixed 165 Hz, the Magic Pencil 3 works really well, similar to Samsung’s S Pen.

You can angle it for shading, but there’s no squeeze gesture like on the Apple Pencil Pro. And there’s no gyroscope built in either. Even so, I’m pleasantly surprised by the pen. It’s good enough for school and even for artists.

Hardware and Performance

Inside that thin shell sits the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, which we haven’t seen in any tablet until now. On top of that, you get 12 or 16 GB of RAM and 256 or 512 GB of storage. The storage isn’t expandable, and there’s no 5G model either.

We compared performance across a series of benchmarks. In Geekbench 6, the MagicPad 4 lands about 4 percent above the Galaxy Tab S11 in single-core, but roughly 5 percent below the OnePlus Pad 3. Against the Xiaomi Pad 8, it pulls ahead by around 40 percent, and against its own predecessor, the MagicPad 2, it’s up about 48 percent.

In multi-core, the MagicPad 4 edges out both direct competitors, with roughly a 6 percent lead over the Tab S11 and about 5 percent over the OnePlus. Against the Xiaomi Pad 8, it’s up around 50 percent, and compared to the MagicPad 2, nearly 87 percent.

On the GPU side, the picture flips. Here the MagicPad 4 is roughly 14 percent slower than the Tab S11 and about 8 percent slower than the OnePlus Pad 3. It leads the Xiaomi Pad 8 by around 29 percent, and the MagicPad 2 is way behind in GPU performance.

We see a similar pattern in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme: about 13 percent below the Tab S11 and roughly 7 percent below the OnePlus Pad 3, but around 31 percent above the Xiaomi Pad 8 and about 67 percent above the MagicPad 2.

The most interesting number, though, is in stability. Under sustained load in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, the MagicPad 4 hits a stability score of 84 percent. The OnePlus Pad 3 sits at 83 percent, basically tied. The Galaxy Tab S11, by contrast, drops to around 48 percent in the same test.

And this is exactly where the MagicPad 4 clearly beats Samsung’s flagship. For raw peak performance, the Tab S11 is faster, but if you push the tablet under load for longer stretches, the MagicPad 4 delivers way more consistently. So despite the thin body, the cooling is really good.

Gaming Test

You see the same story in gaming. Fortnite on Epic settings is unfortunately capped at 60 FPS, and it runs beautifully there at a rock solid 60 frames per second. Only when you drop down to low graphics settings does 120 FPS open up, and then the game actually runs at the full 120 cap. This chip is still pretty new, so it’s possible that 120 FPS on Epic settings gets unlocked later.

Delta Force runs smoothly on high settings, rock solid. And Roblox with 99 Nights in the Forest runs great as well. So the MagicPad 4 is genuinely a really solid gaming tablet, even though the chip inside isn’t technically the absolute strongest out there, just a really good one.

Keyboard Cover

If you want, you can get an official keyboard cover for the MagicPad 4. The keyboard itself is very solid, and thanks to the 12.3-inch display, it can be nice and big. You can type on it comfortably. The only downside is that it feels relatively cheap, and you can only prop the tablet up at two different angles.

What I also find a bit of a shame is that the keyboard in the west doesn’t have a trackpad. At Mobile World Congress, there was a version with a trackpad, and I liked that one a whole lot better. Whether that version ever makes it to international markets, I don’t know. I asked Honor about it, but haven’t heard back yet.

Software: MagicOS 10 on Android 16

On the software side, it’s running MagicOS 10 on top of Android 16. The system works well in day-to-day use. The only annoyance is the preinstalled bloatware, though you can uninstall it.

Since you can hook up external monitors, PC Mode becomes interesting. It lets you open apps in free-floating windows, similar to Samsung DeX. It works well, but doesn’t feel quite as polished yet.

On updates, Honor is ambitious this time: the company has promised six years of security and version updates. That puts the MagicPad 4 in a great position. Only Samsung still goes one better with seven years.

Battery Life

Let’s get into battery life. For our test, we always loop an HD YouTube video at max brightness. The MagicPad 4 lasts 9 hours in that test. Given how bright the display is, that’s solid, but not perfect. The Galaxy Tab S11 manages 12 hours and 45 minutes in the same test, roughly 41 percent more. The OnePlus Pad 3 comes in at 9 hours and 39 minutes, just a hair ahead of the MagicPad 4.

Honor MagicPad 4 Review: My Verdict

All in all, the MagicPad 4 is a pretty good tablet, but by the end of the review, I’m not quite as excited as I was at MWC. The reason is simple: prices of the Galaxy Tab S11 have dropped quite a bit and the S Pen is included. That puts the two at roughly the same price. Sure, the Tab S11 is quite a bit smaller, but along with the pen you also get Samsung Notes and Samsung DeX, both of which I find a little better than Honor’s equivalents.

What the MagicPad 4 really has going for it is that big OLED. The Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra and the 13-inch iPad Pro are significantly more expensive than the MagicPad 4.

Make sure to check out our Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 review next. That one isn’t perfect either, but if you’re considering the MagicPad 4, you absolutely need to have the S11 on your shortlist too.