Honor MagicPad 3 review: Power, value for money and an odd omission

Best Prices Today: Honor MagicPad 3

The Android tablet market is a competitive space, with many brands trying to re-establish themselves to meet the surge in demand following the pandemic. Samsung dominates sales, as one of the brands that stuck to its tablet plans through thick and thin, rivalling Apple’s commitment to the iPad.

But the last few years have seen an increasing number of Android tablets pushing into this space, seeing the tablet market as an opportunity to offer an alternative to a laptop for light work, while delivering a convenient and portable entertainment hub.

That’s where we find the Honor MagicPad 3, sitting at the juncture of work and play, looking to offer everything you need in a neat package.

While it numerically replaces the Honor MagicPad 2, it’s been repositioned, losing one of the MagicPad 2’s best features: its OLED display. So is Honor’s 2025 tablet worthy of consideration?

Design & Build

• 5.79mm thickness, 595g weight
• Narrow bezel
• Accessories available

The Honor MagicPad 3 comes in two colours – grey and white – with a neat metal frame holding the composite rear in place. The tablet’s back is textured, reminding me of some types of laminate kitchen counter.

Using a plastic material avoids both the weight of glass and the fingerprints it acquires, although some may feel that the result isn’t as premium as some metal tablets that are available for less, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE+.

I’d happily use the Smart Touch Keyboard for light typing work and crunching through emails

But there’s a solid feel to this tablet and it looks smart too, although I can’t help feeling that the large camera module on the back could be smaller – but more on that later on.

Towards the bottom of the tablet there’s a set of pogo pins which connect to the MagicPad 3 Smart Touch Keyboard which I used to write this review, as you’ll see in various photos. It offers a nice chiclet keyboard action with trackpad, and has a full range of shortcuts to make using the tablet a little more fluid.

Honor also offers the Magic-Pencil 3, which enables drawing functions and is supported by the tablet’s AI features, one of which replaces handwritten notes with AI-generated handwriting. I didn’t have the Magic-Pencil, so couldn’t test it, but I’d happily use the Smart Touch Keyboard for light typing work and crunching through emails.

There’s no IP rating on the Honor tablet and, although that’s rare on tablets, it’s something we’re starting to see from various manufacturers.

Screen & Speakers

• 13.3-inch LCD display, 165Hz refresh rate
• 1000 nits peak brightness
• Eight speakers with surround sound virtualisation

Honor has moved from a 12.3-inch OLED display on the MagicPad 2 to a 13.3-inch LCD display on the MagicPad 3. Some might see that as a downgrade, losing the skills that OLED offers for an additional inch of space. With that comes only 1000 nits peak brightness – down from 1600 nits previously – but with a 165Hz refresh and a bump to 3200 x 2136 pixel resolution.

Adopting a 3:2 aspect ratio, a shift from the prior 16:10 aspect, the result is more space, more detail, a higher refresh rate and an aspect that’s a little taller in landscape. That makes it more suitable for browsing and document work. In portrait, it makes a great device for reading too.

The ratio aspect shift brings an increase in letterboxing when watching conventional movies (many of which are 16:9 or 21:9), but there’s a trick that Honor plays here with IMAX Enhanced support, allowing more of the screen to be used. About the only place you’ll find compatible content is on Disney+, where some Marvel movies offer the format. I watched Thor: Ragnarok and found some of the action sequences seamlessly moved over to the taller aspect, which is supposed (in the cinema) to give a more immersive experience for explosive scenes.

There’s a lot of tech crammed into this display that’s focused on eye care

The display itself is actually really good. Despite the fact that it’s not OLED, it makes a good showing for itself. It’s bright, colourful and detailed, although I’m not totally sold on the need for 165Hz. Honor suggests that it will smooth out apps when you’re scrolling a lot, but I can’t help feeling that it’s a spec sheet play rather than a necessity.

There’s a lot of tech crammed into this display that’s focused on eye care, with enhanced dimming and a whole lot more, designed to make this tablet more pleasant to use in changing light conditions. That also includes Honor’s Motion Sickness Relief, which puts moving dots on the screen. I’ve found this to be highly effective, meaning that working in the back of a taxi or on a bus is easier on the stomach.

There’s no sign of Dolby Vision, but HDR10+ content seems to be plentiful from various streaming services.

The 1000 nits peak brightness will give HDR a lift – it’s just less dramatic than a lot of phones these days. I tested a selection of images in Google Photos that use Google’s Ultra HDR and found a nice HDR pop, but highlights didn’t get the intensity and brightness that they did on a phone with a higher peak brightness.

The screen is glossy, so reflections can be a problem, but in full sunshine it will fight back, with just enough brightness to make working outdoors possible.

Back to IMAX Enhanced, which is supposed to include DTS:X multi-channel audio. That’s something that does crop up on the Honor MagicPad 3 spec sheet, but it’s hard to pin down. Honor’s eight speaker array can produce a virtualised spatial audio soundscape and it’s rather impressive.

It’s not the sort of surround sound that you get from a soundbar or home cinema setup, but it makes the sound a little more involved through the speakers. Honor Spatial Audio is a global setting, so it affects all audio that comes from the tablet. You can switch to stereo, which is flatter and sounds like it’s coming from the centre of the screen, while the spatial audio just gives a bigger performance, although bass overall is lacking.

Specs & Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
• 16GB RAM
• 512GB storage

Performance gets a boost, with Honor turning to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to power this tablet. That’s flagship-grade hardware from 2024 and found in many of the best phones of that era. It’s also a step above the 8s Gen 3, which powered the MagicPad 2. There’s an uplift in RAM to 16GB too, with Honor very much looking to make this a powerhouse.

With serious power on offer, tablet gaming is a possibility on the MagicPad 3

There’s generous onboard storage at 512GB too, although no support for Micro-SD expansion, which you’ll find on some other tablets. Still, it’ll likely suit most users’ needs and seems rather generous when compared to Samsung’s tablets, considering the price and the hardware you get. It competes better with the OnePlus Pad 3, although that tablet has a newer processor for more power.

Honor has expanded the cooling system in this device to better cope with more intensive tasks and I found that longer sessions playing Call of Duty: Mobile went off without a hitch. I’m not a huge fan but, with serious power on offer, tablet gaming is a possibility on the MagicPad 3.

As it stands, this is a powerful tablet and that comes through in the day-to-day experience. It’s swift and fast and generally smooth in daily tasks, but consider that in the context of the software before making any buying decisions.

Once piece of hardware that’s missing is a fingerprint scanner. Honor only offers face unlocking as a biometric method and that’s something of a bind if you use apps that need security but don’t support face unlocking. I use a third-party password manager and each time I opened it, I had to use the full password. That’s nice and secure, but really inconvenient.

Honor MagicPad 3 benchmarks

Cameras

• 13Mp rear camera
• 2Mp macro camera
• 9Mp front camera

There’s a dual camera on the back of the Honor MagicPad 3, with a 13-megapixel main camera paired up with a 2-megapixel macro camera, allowing shots as close as 4cm. The latter is fairly ignorable, seemingly just bundled in so that Honor can say there’s a dual camera on this tablet. The front camera is a 9-megapixel effort, sitting in the bezel on one of the long sides.

Most people don’t buy a tablet for its photographic skills and that’s true of the MagicPad 3. While the main rear camera will snap a decent enough image in daylight, as soon as the light drops – even indoors in daylight – softness and noise come creeping in. That won’t surprise anyone, however. It’s par for the course for tablet cameras.

The front camera is in place for video calls and again there’s nothing exciting about its quality. It’s fixed focus, so can’t compete with the best cameras out there, but if you’re just jumping on Google Meet or a Zoom call, it does the job.

Video capture runs up to 4K, on only offers 30fps across the board. Again, that’s unlikely to deter anyone, as shooting video on a tablet is likely to be ad hoc rather than something you want to do on a regular basis.

There are document scanning functions to support the cameras, however, which better suit the light productivity that you might throw at it. It allows you to autoscan documents that the camera sees and then extract text you can use elsewhere. It all works quickly and surprisingly well.

Battery Life & Charging

• 12,450mAh battery
• 66W wired charging
• Silicon carbon battery technology

Honor has been one of the proponents of silicon carbon battery tech and the impact is felt on the Honor MagicPad 3. There’s a huge 12,450mAh battery which translates to days of battery life. The MagicPad 2 had a 10,050mAh battery, typical of larger tablets, and the MagicPad 3 dominates them all.

When I returned to the tablet after a week of not using it, I still had 85% in the tank

It’s more capacious than the OnePlus Pad 3 and, like that device, the result is that you can put in serious hours of work on multiple days before it needs a charge – realistically, it’ll give you 11 hours of intensive use. In lighter use, you’ll probably get through a week. What I like most of all, however, is that in standby it just hangs onto charge. When I returned to the tablet after a week of not using it, I still had 85% in the tank.

This is backed up by 66W charging which is, again, faster than most rivals. That’s really useful – because of its speed you can recharge if you find yourself racing out of the door and it’s not fully topped up. I found that 30 minutes on a charger at peak 66W charging restored 45% of battery life. Fully charging takes about an hour and a half, as things slow down as the tablet fills up.

You’ll need a compatible charger, however, and I found that a 90W charger I use for my laptop was perfectly happy to feed the MagicPad 3 at 66W.

Software & Apps

• MagicOS 9 with Android 15
• Honor bloatware
• Minimal updates

The Honor MagicPad 3 launches on Android 15 with MagicOS 9 layered over the top. While you might expect new phones to launch with the latest from Google, very few tablets have Android 16 yet, aside from the Google Pixel Tablet, so it can’t be judged too harshly in that regard.

What you do get, however, is the full Honor software experience. That means loads of customisation, a hefty wedge of pre-installed bloatware and a complete reworking of Android. On a tablet, however, I don’t find these software changes as annoying as I do on a phone, because I use a tablet in a simpler way.

Key to the experience here is a desktop-like dock so you can quickly get to apps. It’s easy to add common apps here so you don’t have to swipe into the apps tray. Honor also offers an AI suggestion box that’s constantly changing and basically offers you apps used recently – in reality, there’s not a huge amount of AI going on there.

There’s simple splitscreen working, so you can display apps side-by-side. With a screen this large, I’ve been able to have a Word document open on one side and a reference PDF on the other and still be able to see everything. The split between these apps can be easily dragged to suit your needs; sometimes it might take a couple of attempts to get the two apps you want side-by-side, but I always got there in the end.

Honor pushes its own office apps, as well as its own email, gallery, app store and more, with the latter offering updates to apps that you might install from Google’s Play Store, which only adds to user confusion. In reality, it’s easy to skip over most of what Honor offers and use stock Google apps instead, while Microsoft Office also runs nicely for those invested in productivity with 365.

Honor AI is imbued in many aspects of the MagicPad, so you’ll find options to dive into AI writing when copy and pasting, using AI to help your composition. I’ve never found that to be very useful, but it’s typical of the AI services that most brands now offer.

While I’m not the biggest fan of Honor’s phones, because I think they detract too much from how Android is designed to work, I don’t have a problem with Honor’s offering on a tablet: everything works the way I want it to. There is a downside though: Honor confirmed to me that the MagicPad 3 would get “at least” one OS update and two years of security updates, which is well behind expected levels.

Price & Availability

The Honor MagicPad 3 launches on 28 August with a retail price of £599.99 in the UK, although at launch there’s a £100 discount, so you can get it for £499.99 direct from Honor. It also comes bundled with the MagicPad 3 Smart Keyboard and the Magic-Pencil 3, although that’s said to be exclusive to the UK, so not all regions will benefit from that offer.

There is just the one version available, as detailed, with 512GB storage.

It’s not available in the US.

Should you buy the Honor MagicPad 3?

The Honor MagicPad 3 offers good value for money considering the screen size, power and the formidable battery. Bundled in with that keyboard and pencil it’s a great offer: once those offers expire and this tablet returns to full price, it will face tough competition from the OnePlus Pad 3.

I’ve enjoyed working and watching on the MagicPad 3 and while the loss of an OLED display is a shame, I think there’s enough to compensate for that. At the same time, Honor was the cheap OLED tablet of choice with the MagicPad 2; that distinction has now gone and there’s a little less to help Honor’s tablet stand out among the best tablets on offer.

Specs

• Android 15 with MagicOS
• 13.3-inch, 3200 x 2136, LCD, 165Hz
• Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
• 16GB RAM
• 512GB storage
• 13Mp, f/2.0 main camera
• Up to 4K @ 30fps rear video
• 9Mp front-facing camera
• Eight speakers with spatial audio
• Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be
• Bluetooth 5.4
• 12,450mAh battery
• 66W charging
• 293.88 x 201.38 x 5.79mm
• 595g
• Colours: Grey, White

Best Prices Today: Honor MagicPad 3