Introduction

We tablet fans can be a picky bunch. When Honor’s last top-tier tab – the MagicPad 3 – rocked up, its switch from OLED to LCD screen tech went down like a lead balloon, despite it otherwise being a perfectly punchy device with gloriously svelte proportions. The MagicPad 4 is here to right that wrong, and has slimmed down even further in the process.

So much so, in fact, it’s skinnier than both an iPad Pro (M5) and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra – which can cost twice the price. The £600 MagicPad (it won’t be coming to the US) is pitched closer to mainstream rivals like the OnePlus Pad 3, with similar power levels and productivity-minded accessories.

It was announced before (but officially revealed a day after) Xiaomi showed off its Pad 8 and Pad 8 Pro for the first time. That tab is cheaper, but sticks doggedly to LCD. Has going back to OLED made all the difference here?

Design & build: thin when you’re winning

Have we now reached the points where tablets simply can’t get any thinner? At 4.8mm the MagicPad 4 is an impressively slender slate that puts far more expensive rivals to shame, albeit by fractions of a millimetre. It’s also very light; most tablets of this size would risk giving you a concussion if you dropped them on your face while late night doomscrolling in bed. Not so the Honor.

The skinny dimensions – and a screen that takes up almost the entire front face of the device – don’t leave the MagicPad 4 anywhere else to really stand out on the design front. It’s largely a repeat of last year’s effort, so very much like every other modern tablet. The unibody aluminium shell looks the part though, whether you go for the grey or white colour option.

A matte finish on my grey review unit’s casing helped prevent fingerprints. Branding is minimal and the square camera island only protrudes a teeny bit from the main chassis. There’s a 13MP sensor underneath but no ultrawide backup, despite there clearly being two lens cutouts.

Photo quality is about as good as I’d expect for a mid-range tablet. It’ll do just fine for document scanning and copes well enough in good light if you’re without a phone, but is bested by even a modest handset once the sun sets. The 8MP front camera is hidden in the display bezel and largely for video calls. It also supports facial recognition, but I wish Honor had found room in the budget for a fingerprint sensor as well. You’ll still need to enter a PIN or password for any banking apps.

The four sets of speaker grilles at the far sides are classy enough, as are the metal power and volume buttons that don’t feel at all weak or spongy. A set of pogo pins on the back panel then hint at the tablet’s accessory line-up.

Honor sent me the Magic4 Smart Keyboard as part of this review; it physically grips the tablet rather than hold it in place with magnets, making it a bit fiddly to remove compared to say, an Apple iPad Magic Keyboard. You also only get two choices of viewing angle rather than free tilt adjustment. Still, it protects the tablet screen when folded shut and the faux leather finish feels nice enough.

There’s no built-in touchpad here, just an island-style QWERTY keyboard that doesn’t feel at all cramped. Each key has a bouncy action and a decent amount of travel, but there’s no backlight. It’s ideal if you plan on writing more than one line email replies, but I think rival versions are slicker still. Honor also needs to do a bit more to stop the onscreen keyboard from occasionally popping up while the external one is connected.

Screen & sound: back to black

After going with LCD tech for the outgoing MagicPad 3, my inner display nerd is very happy to see Honor return to OLED here. The MagicPad 4’s screen is an absolute sensation, with impeccable contrast and rich, engaging colours. Black levels are pretty much perfect and viewing angles are excellent. The aspect ratio is more media-friendly than many squarer rivals too. The Streaming the new series of Disney+ sci-fi thriller Paradise on was a treat on this tablet.

It is admittedly smaller than the previous generation, at 12.3in to the MagicPad 3’s 13.3in, and resolution has taken a minor hit as well. 3000×1920 is still mighty sharp at this size, though, and the 165Hz maximum refresh rate ensures scrolling and movement looks gloriously smooth. For the most part you’re only getting 120Hz, with certain games able to use the full range.

I can’t fault the panel for brightness, it being a huge jump from the outgoing model in pretty much every scenario. HDR playback can hit a peak 2400 nits now, more than double that of the MagicPad 3. It makes a big difference to compatible content, and is a big reason why I found the tablet so fun to use for streaming.

The eight-driver stereo speaker setup certainly helps as well. The MagicPad 4 delivers strong, dynamic audio for something so thin, with somewhat convincing spatial upmixing (if you like that kind of thing) and good overall clarity. Just don’t expect to be overwhelmed by bass, as there’s not an awful lot of it.

Software experience: a kind of magic

The MagicPad 4 lands running the MagicOS 10 skin, which sits atop Android 16. As has long been the case with Honor, the interface is plainly inspired by Apple, with lots of glass-like elements. It’s one of the more egregious attempts at mimicry I’ve seen, with rivals trying just a little harder to be unique.

It has a bunch of Android tablet staples, like a floating app dock that can be brought up at any point with a short swipe; dragging an icon to one side of the screen then opens it in split view, with the option to add a third in a floating window. Split view is limited to a left/right split in landscape orientation and a top/bottom one in portrait. There’s no spilling off the screen into virtual space like OnePlus’ Open Canvas either – that remains the high bar for Android productivity in my opinion.

There’s then a further PC desktop-like mode that lets you scatter as many resizeable windows as you like across the screen. You can even extend the display onto an external monitor, not just mirror the tablet screen, giving it an edge over Xiaomi. With a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard this is a properly capable little work machine.

You get the usual extensive selection of Honor own-brand apps, with a few directly competing with Google’s defaults for your attention. Having them all dumped across multiple homescreens by default rather than tucked away in an app drawer can be overwhelming on first boot too. A lot of them play nicely with Honor’s growing list of AI offerings, from summarising video calls, organising screenshots and polishing written text to the Magic Portal sidebar, which is a handy way of bouncing text and images between various apps.

If Honor’s tablet software commitments match that of its flagship phones, you should be looking at seven years of both Android generation upgrades and security patches. That comfortably puts the MagicPad 4 up there with Samsung and Apple for long-term support.

Performance & battery life: more than mid-range

The MagicPad 4 is the first Honor tablet to get a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset; Qualcomm’s step-down silicon may not have quite as much oomph as the 8 Elite Gen 5, but it should still have the 8s Gen 4 inside the Xiaomi Pad 8 licked for performance, and take a commanding lead over more affordable alternatives that use MediaTek chips. My review unit had 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

Because it was running pre-release software I wasn’t able to install many of my usual synthetic benchmarks; as well as being blocked through the Play Store, it even refused to let me sideload APKs. That makes exact comparisons tricky; I’ll be updating this review later, one restrictions have been lifted. A score of 17.3 in the browser-based Speedometer test interestingly lags behind the Xiaomi Pad 8, but not by very much. A OnePlus Pad 3 and its previous-gen Snapdragon 8 Elite outscores them both.

As ever with Android tablets, you may not be able to put that performance towards as many creativity and productivity-minded apps as you think; Apple iPadOS still vastly outnumbers the Play Store for image and video editors, music creation tools and the like, though the situation is much better than it used to be.

In my experience, the Honor MagicPad 4 always felt responsive and never struggled when I was multitasking across three apps at once. Animations are smooth, media-heavy content loads quickly, and it coped very well with my more demanding games. Neither Rainbow Six Mobile and Red Dead Redemption defaulted to high detail settings, but that’s likely because the hardware hasn’t been whitelisted – both games ran smoothly, even when action got hectic in the former.

Honor has worked hard to make the cooling system as thin as it is, while still being able to cool the CPU under heavy load. The tablet definitely warmed up while I played, but not to uncomfortable levels and never enough to dent performance.

I also came away impressed with the MagicPad 4’s battery life. Honor has found room for a 10,100mAh cell, which is little down on the previous generation, but even with a high-end chipset and big OLED display it would comfortably last me several days between top-ups. 66W wired charging is particularly speedy for a tablet in this price bracket, too.

Honor Magicpad 4 verdict

Without that OLED screen, the MagicPad 4 would be a capable if modest generational upgrade, with the power you’d expect for the cash and a decent selection of productivity-minded accessories. Instead, Honor has equipped its tablet with a gorgeous panel that instantly makes it a great choice for telly addicts. The fact it’s so astonishingly thin is a bonus.

I’d still like to see Honor do its own thing on the software front, rather than borrow so liberally from Apple’s Liquid Glass, and with no backlight or floating hinge the optional keyboard lacks a bit of the Xiaomi Pad 8’s wow factor. Android still wouldn’t be my first pick for a tablet meant to get serious work done, either.

For sheer entertainment value, though, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck here.

Honor Magicpad 4 technical specifications