LONDON, January 9, 2026, 09:51 (GMT)
- Honor says the Magic8 Pro is on sale in Britain for £1,099.99, with launch bundles running through Feb 4
- Reviews praise a very bright OLED screen and eye-comfort tools; early hands-on tests question camera processing
- Wider EU timing remains unclear; a German retail listing shows €1,299 and points to possible Jan 15 pre-orders
Honor said it has started selling its Magic8 Pro flagship smartphone in Britain for £1,099.99, bringing the device to Europe after earlier releases elsewhere. “HONOR is committed to creating the most exciting, intelligent, and advanced smartphone innovation for premium flagship buyers in the UK,” said Bond Zhang, chief executive of HONOR United Kingdom and Ireland. The phone is available through operators and retailers including EE, VodafoneThree, Virgin Media O2, Amazon and Currys, with a gift bundle offered from Jan 8 to Feb 4, the company said.
The timing matters for Honor because the premium end of the smartphone market is unforgiving. It is crowded, expensive, and dominated by Samsung and Apple, leaving little room for brands that do not have deep carrier relationships or a long history of software updates.
Honor is trying to buy itself a seat at that table with cameras and on-device AI features, plus hardware that reads like a spec-sheet dare. It is also leaning on promotions and accessories to soften the blow of a four-figure price tag.
The Verge wrote that the Magic8 Pro pairs a 200-megapixel telephoto camera for zoom with 50-megapixel main and ultrawide cameras, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip. It also has a 6.71-inch OLED display that can vary its refresh rate — how often it redraws the image — up to 120Hz, and uses a 6,270mAh silicon‑carbon battery in Europe, a chemistry designed to pack more capacity into the same space. The Verge said Honor is pitching the phone against Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro Max and Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra and plans seven years of software support in Europe.
Android Central’s Nicholas Sutrich said the phone’s display stood out for both brightness and eye-comfort features, and he measured around 3,600 nits of HDR brightness — a unit of screen brightness — in testing. He wrote that Honor relies on DC dimming across most brightness levels and shifts to high-frequency PWM dimming, a rapid pulsing method that some users find uncomfortable, at the low end, while adding a built-in flicker checker that grades nearby lights using an IEEE standard.
Britain’s launch does not settle the rest of Europe: the UK is outside the European Union, and Honor has not confirmed an EU-wide on-sale date. Notebookcheck said German retailer MediaMarkt has listed the Magic8 Pro at €1,299 and pointed to clues suggesting pre-orders could begin on Jan 15. The site also said the European model appears to ship with a smaller battery than versions sold in China.
But early hands-on coverage suggested the camera still needs work: T3 said its sample photos showed uneven processing and AI-driven artefacts, echoing last year’s Magic7 Pro before software updates improved results. The magazine said Honor may need months of tuning to match the best at this price, and that the Magic8 Pro will draw comparisons with the OnePlus 15 as well as Samsung and Apple flagships.
For Honor, the bet is that buyers will accept a few rough edges if the hardware is strong and the company keeps shipping updates at pace. If the camera improvements do not land quickly, the launch bundles may not be enough to keep a £1,100 phone in the conversation once the next wave of big-brand launches hits.
