Honor Magic 5 Ultimate with Vegan Leather and Silicon Carbon battery

8/3/2023

After introducing the Honor Magic 5 series at MWC 2023, Honor has just launched the new flagship lineup in China which includes a more premium Magic 5 Ultimate edition.

Besides looking more expensive, the Honor Magic 5 Ultimate also features the industry’s first Silicon Carbon battery which offers a bigger battery without the extra bulk.

In terms of hardware, it looks similar to the Magic 5 Pro as it also gets a 6.81″ quad-curved 120Hz OLED panel that pushes 2848×1312 pixels resolution and a peak brightness of 1,800 nits. Under the hood, it runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 but it gets mated with a whopping 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Similar to the global Pro model, it still comes with 512GB of storage.

Over at the rear, it also gets a familiar triple-camera setup that consists of a 50MP f/1.6 main camera, a 50MP ultra-wide-angle camera and a 50MP periscope telephoto camera with 3.5x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom. Both telephoto and main camera get optical image stabilisation and the Magic 5 Ultimate also gets a 8×8 dTOF laser focus system.

For selfies, the front of the display has a pill-shaped cut on the top left corner that houses a 12MP f/2.4 front camera and a 3D depth sensor.

For an upmarket look, the Magic 5 Ultimate’s rear panel is wrapped in Vegan Leather while the camera bump gets an interesting dual-curved design. At a glance, it does look like a smart watch being embedded to the rear. The device is offered in two colours – Orange and Black.

The biggest highlight is the battery as the Ultimate edition gets a Silicon Carbon battery with a larger 5,450mAh capacity. According to Honor, this provides an improvement of 12.8% in energy density which explains the increase in battery capacity over the normal 5,100mAh battery found on the global Magic 5 Pro. Out of the box, it runs on Android 13 with MagicOS 7.1 skin on top.

When it comes to charging, the Magic 5 Ultimate still does 66W wired fast charging and 50W fast wireless charging. As an additional perk, the Honor Magic 5 Ultimate also gets a Montblanc Bespoke leather case. In China, the Ultimate model with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage is priced at CNY 6,699 (about S$1301.78). Meanwhile, the Magic 5 Pro 12GB RAM + 256GB storage is going for CNY 5,699 (about S$1107.46) and the 16GB RAM + 512GB storage version is going for CNY 6,199 (about S$1204.62).

The Magic 5 series is expected to arrive in Singapore as early as April 2023. Honor has confirmed that the device will come with 5 years of security updates and 3 major operating system updates. In case you’re still wondering, these smartphones come with Google Mobile Services with access to the Google Play Store.