Honor Magic7 Pro goes head-to-head with Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

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Summary

The Honor Magic7 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra were both launched globally this month. Priced at £1,249 in the UK and €1,299 throughout Europe, both are also highly premium devices aimed at the top-end consumer. While there are many similarities between them, the subtle differences actually expose the product strategies of each brand.

Crucial to these differences is how AI is implemented. Samsung is pushing its new voice-activated Galaxy AI Agent and its multimodal understanding and app interconnectivity. This contrasts with Honor’s sleek touch-activated Magic Portal user interface, which enables more seamless navigation between apps.

The camera hardware also reveals differences in strategy, with Samsung promoting professional photography options with its 200-megapixel main camera and 10-bit HDR video. Honor, in contrast, is doubling down on super-zoom and action camera modes with its 200-megapixel telephoto and accompanying AI visual engine.

200-megapixel telephoto vs. 200-megapixel wide camera

Samsung first put a 200-megapixel wide camera on the S23 Ultra and has retained it on every Ultra since. With the S25 Ultra, the main camera remains the same, with the upgrade going to the ultrawide, going from 12 megapixels to 50 megapixels.

On the Magic6 Pro, Honor introduced a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto camera with a large 1/1.49” sensor and 2.5x optical zoom. Now with the Magic7 Pro (see Figure 1), this has been upgraded further to 200 megapixels with a larger 1/1.4” sensor and 3x optical zoom. Loading a smartphone’s highest resolution sensor onto the telephoto camera is an unusual decision; typically, it’s reserved for the wide camera, as has been done on the S25 Ultra. However, this move gives us insight into Honor’s camera strategy.

A higher-resolution and larger telephoto camera shortens the exposure time needed, therefore enabling better low-light photography and action shots. These are two features that are highly advertised on the Magic7 Pro. AI Super Zoom utilizes the Honor Image Engine to photograph at longer focal lengths, between 30x and 100x zoom, using AI to post-process the photos for greater clarity and sharpness. While HD Super Burst uses the Honor AI Motion Sensing Capture to freeze high-speed action at 10 frames per second.

Figure 1: Honor’s Magic7 Pro phone Source: Honor

This is in marked contrast to Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra, which will perhaps give a more well-rounded photo experience to users, as the wide camera will be the most often used. However, the Magic7 Pro will likely have an edge over Samsung on zoom photography, nighttime photography, and action shots.

Powering each of these phones’ cameras are the AI Honor Image Engine and the Samsung Pro Visual Engine. There is a big difference in how each of these is being implemented, though, with Honor clearly targeting consumer on-the-fly photography and Samsung aiming to provide professionals with more control over high-end HDR footage.

As can be seen in Table 1, Honor beats Samsung in almost every area from a hardware perspective. It has a brighter display, higher RAM options, better front camera, bigger battery, and faster charging. The Galaxy S25 Ultra is thinner and has an additional periscope camera, but if Samsung wants to remain the most popular premium Android smartphone, then it needs to focus on user experience and AI – which is exactly what it has done.

Table 1: Honor Magic7 Pro vs. Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra specifications comparison

Source: Samsung, Honor

Galaxy AI Agent vs. Honor Magic Portal

At the center of Samsung’s Unpacked event, which was streamed around the world on January 22, is its new Galaxy AI Agent – a multimodal model that runs on-device and enables the Galaxy S25 series to interpret text, speech, images, and videos, which hopefully allows for more natural interactions that bridge the applications together. One example shown was asking when your favorite team’s next sports game was and having it automatically added into Samsung Calendar in a single voice command. Another example, as shown in Figure 2, is taking a photo of the inside of your fridge and asking what recipes you can make from the ingredients inside. This is a powerful example of multimodal AI computation, needing to both accurately recognize ingredients and create a sensible recipe based on thousands of recipes found online with similar ingredients.

Figure 2: Galaxy AI Agent in action

Source: Samsung

This is, in theory, a slight step ahead of Honor’s current multimodal solution, the Magic Portal. This was introduced at MWC 2024 in March 2024, and allows users to select images or text and drag-and-drop into another app, such as Messages, Notes, or Search. But now, with MagicOS 9.0 on the Magic7 Pro, Honor is claiming to have made big improvements on Magic Portal 2.0. Key to this is the “Portal to Anywhere” feature, which allows users to circle with their knuckle to search and send text, addresses, images, and products to a range of apps. This may sound similar to Google’s Circle to Search, but is crucially different in that it allows a range of functions on top of just searching.

Honor has been adding more and more compatible apps into Magic Portal over the past year, and has had a head-start because of this. Therefore, allowing as much cross-app compatibility as possible, as soon as possible, will be crucial to Samsung’s Galaxy AI Agent success.

Google Gemini integration on both

Both the Honor Magic7 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S25 series leverage Google’s powerful Gemini cloud model for larger tasks that require more complex thought or information from the internet.

With how quickly AI is developing, and how expensive large-capacity cloud computing is, only the largest companies will be able to deploy the most sophisticated models – as Google has with Gemini and OpenAI has with ChatGPT.

Smaller models, which have up to 7 billion parameters, are much more accessible for smaller OEMs to deploy on their devices. As such, it’s likely we will see a continuation of the current trend of phone companies partnering with either Google (for Android) or ChatGPT (for Apple) for more complex cloud AI computing, while still retaining their own on-device AI.

In fact, all S25 series devices come with six months of Gemini Advanced and 2TB of Google cloud storage. This will introduce the most capable AI models to consumers, but it raises questions over how access to AI features will be commercialized in the future – a question looming over the smartphone industry that has remained largely unanswered.

First phones in Europe powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite

The Magic7 Pro is officially the first phone to come to Europe with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite – the newest and most advanced smartphone chipset on the market – launching on January 15. This beats Samsung by just a week, which released the S25 series on January 22.

The 8 Elite is the successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This new naming convention (choosing Elite over Gen 4) reveals Qualcomm’s smartphone chipset strategy: a variety of CPU core sizes has been replaced by two “Prime” cores, aiming to bring high-end laptop-level computing to handheld devices, and potentially ushering in a new era for smartphones.

AI is key to Qualcomm’s 8 Elite strategy, as it is a central tenet of its research and development. It’s no surprise that both the Honor Magic7 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra demonstrate large AI improvements over their predecessors, both with generative AI image adjustments and multimodal understanding and search. Where once it was clear that Samsung and Google had a head-start on introducing AI onto their devices, now others have almost caught up. Qualcomm’s work and collaboration with a range of brands is a key reason for this.

Sustainability approach

A large part of Samsung’s announcement was also related to its progress on durability and sustainability. In contrast, Honor did highlight durability improvements, although much more so on the low-end Magic7 Lite rather than the Pro device. For Honor, these durability improvements are centered on the consumer experience rather than on external sustainability benefits.

The biggest and most interesting part of Samsung’s sustainability announcements was that every battery in the S25 series phones uses a minimum of 50% recycled cobalt – from previous Galaxy devices or the batteries discarded during the manufacturing process.

Cobalt mining is one of the largest sources of controversy in smartphone manufacturing, with many linking it to modern slavery and child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Smartphone makers, including Samsung, have transparency targets in their annual reporting with the aim to only ethically source key materials such as cobalt, lithium, tungsten, and gold. Using recycled cobalt is one such route and a good safeguard against any human rights abuses. Other brands are also likely to push for similar transparency, so refiners and component manufacturers further up the supply chain could see similar pressures to investigate.

Conclusions

As Honor grows its standing in Europe and other overseas markets in the Middle East and Latin America, the Magic7 Pro will be crucial to building on the positive momentum Honor has cultivated for high-end, cutting-edge products. Brand recognition is particularly crucial in the European market, where the smartphone market is fully matured and consumers are highly loyal to their smartphone brand.

Making the switch from Samsung to Honor, and in effect choosing the Magic7 Pro over the S25 Ultra, may come down to the camera improvements made on the device. Equally, those not convinced to make the switch from Samsung to Honor, instead choosing to simply upgrade to the latest S25 Ultra, may be influenced by how well implemented (and marketed) the Galaxy AI Agent feature is.

Appendix

Author

Aaron West, Senior Smartphone Analyst Europe, Components & Devices

[email protected]