Honor MagicPad 2 review: Productivity powerhouse

Android tablets are often a bit of a tricky sell. While Apple has largely nailed tablet software (setting aside its laptop-replacement ambitions on the iPad), the experience of using Android on a tablet has been mediocre at best. Honor, however, thinks it might have the solution — and has released the Honor MagicPad 2, which, at least on paper, is clearly built to eat the iPad’s lunch.

But Honor itself struggles a little in the software department. Does the Honor MagicPad 2 do enough to overcome the hurdles associated with Android on a tablet?

Honor MagicPad 2 specs

A sleek design and premium colors

The Honor MagicPad 2 is clearly built for a premium experience. It’s incredibly slim, very sleek, and stylish, and it offers a great overall build quality.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

The tablet has a relatively large 12.3-inch display, which is laid out in a 3:2 aspect ratio. The result is that it’s a little bit shorter than most iPad models, but many prefer that anyway. It has slim bezels around the screen, which I found still offered enough room to easily hold the tablet without accidentally pressing the display. In horizontal orientation, there’s a USB-C port on the right side, along with a power button on the left side and a volume rocker on the top. The front-facing camera can also be found on the top edge, which is exactly where it should be.

Perhaps the back of the tablet is more interesting than the front, though. MagicPad 2 is available in a flat black or light blue. But the best color option is the Moonlight White option, which has a textured look reminiscent of a white marble countertop. It’s a great look, and I love that brands like Honor are experimenting more with color options.

A stunning OLED screen

Even better than the design of the tablet is its display. The display on the MagicPad 2 is absolutely stunning. It’s an OLED panel with a 1920 x 3000-pixel resolution, and it easily gets crisp and detailed enough for any task you can throw at it in 2024. Text is crisp, and images look stunning.

The tablet also has a high refresh rate, ranging up to an impressive 144Hz. Now, I don’t really think that manufacturers need to focus on refresh rates beyond 120Hz. It gets harder and harder to spot a difference in refresh rate the higher it gets, and most people find that a 120Hz refresh rate feels smooth and responsive.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

On top of the high resolution and refresh rate, the display also gets incredibly bright, especially for an OLED screen. I found that I was easily able to see content on the display even outdoors in direct sunlight, which is impressive for OLED screens in general. To be clear, the screen doesn’t get quite as bright as the iPad Pro, so don’t expect something that quite matches up to Apple’s Tandem OLED tech yet. But the Honor MagicPad 2 is also quite a bit cheaper than the iPad Pro.

Honor also makes use of some AI features to help improve the display experience on the MagicPad 2. For example, it has an interesting AI defocus display feature that’s built to help those with near-sightedness be able to better see what’s on the screen.

All this to say, the display on the Honor MagicPad 2 is absolutely stunning and easily the best thing about the tablet.

Great performance for the price

Under the hood, the Honor MagicPad 2 offers a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor coupled with either 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB of RAM. Our review unit has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, though storage ranges up to 1TB.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

Because of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor, the tablet feels fast and responsive and is able to handle anything you can throw at it in 2024. That includes heavier multitasking, which is very important for a tablet this size. While many users may buy a tablet like this solely for media consumption, others are looking for a tablet with a big screen for productivity reasons.

I experienced no freezes or stutters in the time that I spent testing the tablet. I also found that it loaded games relatively quickly and performed well while gaming.

Here are the benchmark results I achieved with the Honor MagicPad 2.

• GeekBench 6: 1,963 single-core, 4,662 multi-core
• 3DMark Wild Life Extreme:

These are solid results and show a tablet that’s easily capable. The MagicPad 2 doesn’t perform as well as the more expensive Galaxy Tab S9 series, let alone the much more expensive iPad Pro. But at this price, the tablet performs well, and again, in day-to-day life, it excels.

Good battery and fast charging

The Honor MagicPad 2 has a 10,050mAh battery, which delivers great battery life considering that it’s coupled with a relatively efficient chipset and an OLED screen. The battery isn’t going to break any records, but most users should find that it’s good for a full workday under light to medium workloads. You can push the battery with gaming and streaming, and when you do so, you should expect to get less than 8 or 9 hours. But that’s not bad, and again, most users should expect to get a few days of moderate use before needing to charge up.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

Speaking of charging, the MagicPad 2 supports fast charging at up to 66 watts using the included power adapter. That’s pretty quick and faster than most modern tablets can charge. It should take less than two hours to fully charge the tablet, which is pretty helpful.

Good-enough cameras

The camera module on the back of the Honor MagicPad 2 may be relatively large like Honor’s smartphones, but it only houses one camera. That camera is a 13-megapixel f/2.0 camera, and it’s coupled with an LED flash.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

Most people don’t use their tablets to capture photos in daily life, so the quality of the rear-facing camera on a tablet isn’t necessarily all that important. The MagicPad 2 can capture decent shots, and while they’re not going to compare with a high-end modern smartphone, they also don’t look terrible.

On the front of the tablet, you’ll find a nine-megapixel camera, which is hidden in the top bezel in horizontal orientation or the right-hand bezel in vertical orientation. That’s exactly where it should be. The front-facing camera also isn’t amazing, and if you use it to take photos, you may find highlights to be a bit blown out and subjects to be slightly blurry at times. That said, it’s perfectly adequate for video calls, which, frankly, is what the front-facing camera in a tablet is built for anyway.

Helpful accessories

These days, a tablet has to be accompanied by solid accessories, and Honor has clearly put some thought into the accessories that work with the MagicPad 2.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

For starters, there’s the MagicPad 2 Smart Bluetooth Keyboard, which is a relatively basic keyboard accessory that doubles as a protective cover. The Smart Bluetooth Keyboard is perfectly fine but not really anything to write home about. You’ll snap the tablet into the keyboard case like you would most other keyboard accessories, but that does mean that it’s not as easy to remove the tablet from the keyboard as the iPad Pro is from Apple’s Magic Keyboard. Additionally, the keyboard connects through Bluetooth, but the good news is that it charges wirelessly from the tablet itself when the tablet is placed inside it. The typing experience on the keyboard is fine, and the travel on the keys helps make for a reasonably tactile experience. I do wish there were a touchpad, though.

The tablet also works with the Honor Magic Pencil 3, which functions similarly to the Apple Pencil. The Magic Pencil 3 connects magnetically to the top of the tablet and is built to deliver ultra-low latency of only 2 milliseconds. The Magic Pencil 3 automatically charges when placed on top of the tablet.

The Magic Pencil 3 offers some helpful tools as well. On top of being able to use the stylus as a simple navigation tool, you can also use it to handwrite into any text field, and the tablet will use AI algorithms to convert that into plain text.

Software

So the big question is, has Honor solved Android tablet software? Well, no, it hasn’t, but it’s not true to say that the Android tablet experience of three or four years ago is the experience that you have today. Not only that, but Honor does offer some helpful features of its own, which may largely emulate iPadOS but do so relatively well.

You’ll get features like split-screen multitasking for using two apps next to each other and the ability to add an app in floating mode on top. There’s also a toolbar at the bottom that can help access apps and built-in tools to copy text and images between apps.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

As you would expect in 2024, there are also plenty of AI features built into the software. Honor allows you to quickly polish up drafts of text or change the tone of text. Additionally, there’s a voice-to-text transcription feature in Notes. Though as someone who regularly uses AI-powered voice-to-text tools, I found that it wasn’t all that accurate.

Conclusions

The Honor MagicPad 2 is an excellent tablet in its price range. It performs well, offers a stunning screen, and boasts premium build quality, all for less than an equivalent Samsung or Apple tablet. Of course, you have to live in a region where it’s available to get it, but if you do and you’re looking for a flagship-level Android tablet at less than a flagship price, the Honor MagicPad 2 is the way to go.

The competition

Competition in the tablet world has been heating up a bit. Most users will still find an iPad to be a little more intuitive and to support more helpful features. But if you’re looking at the Honor MagicPad 2, you’re likely looking for an Android-powered device. In that case, the biggest competition comes in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9+. However, the Honor MagicPad 2 is much cheaper. That said, it’s likely that Samsung will release its next-generation tablets in the near future.

Should I buy the Honor MagicPad 2?

Yes. It’s an excellent Android tablet at a great price.