Android 15 with MagicOS 9
The Honor Magic8 Lite boots Android 15 with the company’s own MagicOS v9 launcher. There is still no official information on the number of guaranteed major updates, but we can’t see this Lite phone getting more than 3.
Visually, MagicOS v9 closely resembles version 8. Lately, the core Android experience remains largely standard; we just get AI additions and some usability tweaks. That’s the case with MagicOS, too.
MagicOS basics
One standout feature is Magic Capsule, a pill-shaped notification similar to Apple’s Dynamic Island. It’s handy for managing timers, music, and video playback.
Another iOS-inspired feature is the system-wide Search button, located just above the app dock on the home screen.
Magic Capsule interface
Resizable folders are common on many Android skins, but MagicOS v9 lets you customize their size more flexibly.
Cards are widget-like add-ons for Honor apps that offer quick-glance info under their icons.
More MagicOS
MagicOS also contains Magic Portal, a smart drag-and-drop feature. Long-pressing on content, like an image, triggers a sidebar with app suggestions and actions, such as sending via email or creating a note. It also supports universal text extraction from the screen, streamlining tasks like copying and sharing information.
Magic Portal
MagicOS v9 integrates Google’s Circle to Search, Gemini assistant, real-time translation, AI text summarization, and AI meeting transcription tools, enhancing productivity and accessibility.
Google AI bits
Finally, all recent Honor models have some new cool AI tricks in the Gallery. While the Magic8 Lite does not offer the paid Photo to Video option, it still has AI instant movie and the video creation option, together with a couple of cool video templates.
Gallery
Other features include background change, removing reflections, removing people, AI upscale (of old photos), image expansion (AI Outpainting), background removal and change with another, and AI Eraser.
AI editor
And finally, Honor Share simplifies cross-device file transfers. When installed on an iPhone, it enables AirDrop-like functionality, making it easy to share files between devices.
Honor Share
The Honor Magic8 Lite runs on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 (4nm) chip, a modern version of the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 inside the Magic7 Lite and Magic6 Lite. And while it comes with newer CPU cores and a newer GPU, you should not expect that much of a performance boost.
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 packs an octa-core processor with 1×2.3 GHz Cortex-A720s & 3×2.2 GHz Cortex-A720s & 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A520s. The GPU is Adreno 810.
The phone is available with either 256GB or 512GB of UFS storage. As per our testing, storage speeds are close to UFS 3.1 territory. No matter which storage version you choose, you will always get 8GB LPDDR4X RAM.
And now, let’s run some benchmarks.
The good news is that the Honor Magic8 Lite does bring a noticeable improvement over the previous model, especially in the graphics department. Even better, it’s quite adequate for a mid-ranger, on par with most of its peers from the same price bracket.
The best part – it doesn’t throttle. We got 86% on the CPU test and 99.7% on the GPU test.
CPU test • GPU test
Finally, there are no hot spots on the Magic8 Lite even after prolonged stress testing. Yes, it does get warm, but never hot, not even close.
The Magic8 Lite has a good chipset for the class that provides adequate performance with no throttling. And we’d say that’s plenty.