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Should you buy the Honor MagicPad 2?
Since splitting off from Huawei, Honor has produced some great devices for Western markets where its former parent company struggles to compete. The Honor MagicPad 2 is the company's latest tablet, unveiled at IFA 2024, and it has a lot to offer.
In particular, this tablet has a fantastic AMOLED display and speakers that make it a great device for media consumption. It's become one of my favorite ways to watch YouTube videos (which I do much more often than traditional streaming), but you can also get some work done with it thanks to the keyboard accessory and great overall performance.
About this review: Honor provided me with the MagicPad 2 and the Magic Keyboard and Magic Pencil accessories for this test. The company also sponsored my trip to IFA 2024 in Berlin, including accommodation and meals. However, Honor has no influence on the content of this test.
Slim and affordable
Honor MagicPad 2
A lightweight tablet that's great for media
The Honor MagicPad 2 is a great tablet for its price. With its bright and vibrant AMOLED screen, it offers a fantastic media experience and the eight speakers provide powerful sound. Thanks to the keyboard, it's also good for typing text, although this is still a limited experience.
- High-resolution AMOLED display with a smooth refresh rate of 144 Hz
- The eight-speaker setup is loud yet remains clear
- Slim and lightweight design
- Keyboard accessories are pretty good
- Android is still not good for tablets
- No touchpad on the keyboard
- Not available in the US
Prices and availability
Honor initially launched the MagicPad 2 in China in July, but the global version was announced and released on September 5, 2024 during the IFA in Berlin.
The tablet is not available in the US, but costs £499.99 in the UK, including 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
What I like
Watching media is fantastic
What I like most about the Honor MagicPad 2 is that it's a great device for consuming media. I'm not a huge streaming fan, but I do enjoy watching YouTube, and the MagicPad 2 is fantastic for that. The 3K AMOLED panel has bright and vibrant colors, and the eight speakers are very loud while still sounding pretty clear, so it's a great way to watch the content you want.
Speaking of the display, it's worth noting that Honor has packed a lot of features in here. There's a Circadian Night setting that's supposed to help ease your eyestrain at night, although this is in addition to the usual night light feature and I'm not sure what's really different about it. There's also a 'Defocus Display' feature that's supposed to help improve your eye health, although I can't really comment on this.
The 3K AMOLED panel has bright and vibrant colors and the eight-speaker setup gets very loud
The screen also has very fast PWM (pulse width modulation) dimming at 4320MHz. I'm not one to be particularly bothered by a low PWM dimming rate, but if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, this is good news for you. It's especially nice on a tablet that's so cheap compared to an iPad Pro.
It's also worth noting that it has a 144Hz refresh rate, so everything felt super smooth on this screen
It is thin and light
Another advantage of the Honor MagicPad 2 is that it is so easy to carry around. However, I don't really use an Android tablet, so my only notable experience is the Windows-based Huawei MateBook E.
The problem with this tablet is that, despite the similar screen size, it is noticeably heavier, so I never feel like actually picking it up and using it in a more casual way. The Honor MagicPad 2, even with the keyboard attached, is much more engaging for me, so I find it much more fun to browse online forums or watch videos with it.
It looks really good in the Moonlight White color variant too, and I'm glad I chose that version rather than the black one. The keyboard does cover it, but that doesn't bother me too much.
I found it much more entertaining to browse online forums or watch videos.
Standby battery consumption is negligible
For me, as someone whose primary devices are always Windows and x86 based, the battery life, especially the standby time, was one of the highlights of using the MagicPad 2.
Leaving the tablet on overnight (in sleep mode, of course) has almost no effect on the battery, so I never had to worry about the tablet being dead when I picked it up.
The keyboard is actually pretty solid
Aside from the tablet itself, I'd also like to point out that I also like Honor's Smart Keyboard and Magic Pencil 3. The Smart Keyboard accessory serves as a case and stand for the tablet, so I never take it off because it also makes watching videos much more comfortable.
It was very comfortable to type on and I was even able to do some work on it.
But the keyboard itself is also quite nice. I've used a few tablet keyboards in the past, but this is one of the sturdiest options I've tested, and the keys also have a nice amount of travel, so typing was very comfortable and I was even able to do a bit of work with it.
Meanwhile, the Magic Pencil 3 is also quite comfortable to use. Handwriting seems to work well, and one of the few AI features I really care about (Honor talks about a lot of them) is the handwriting beautification in the Notes app. This will alter your handwriting to be closer to one of the available fake handwriting fonts, but the cool thing is that you can actually change how drastic you want the transformation to be. This lets you keep it closer to your original handwriting while also making it more readable while still retaining the personality of your handwriting. My handwriting is pretty bad, though, so this feature will sometimes alter one of my letters and mess up the look of the text.
What I don't like
I still can't use it for real work
Although the MagicPad 2's keyboard feels pretty good when typing, a few other factors kept me from using the tablet for full-time work. The keyboard doesn't have a touchpad, and without a mouse, it didn't always feel intuitive to work while browsing the web. It wasn't as natural as I would like. To be honest, based on other experiences I've had, touchpads on Android are terrible too.
Android is not so good for tablets
Despite the large number of Android tablets in existence, Android is – perhaps surprisingly – still not really optimal for use with large-screen devices like this one.
Some of this depends on the operating system itself. For example, I had some issues with apps not opening in landscape mode even though it was supported.
But most of the time it's the apps themselves that aren't properly optimized. Currently, Mozilla Firefox is my browser of choice, and that browser isn't optimized for tablets. I would expect a more desktop-like interface, but that's not the case with Firefox. I had to go back to my previous preference, Vivaldi, to get a good experience.
Beeper for Android, for example, doesn't support split screen or floating window mode out of the box, and I can't resize the conversation list. Even 3DMark, which I used to test graphics performance, only displays the display in portrait mode until the tests begin.
In many ways it's still a nice experience, but it's just not as great as it could or should be.
Notifications are not reliable
As different as they may be now, Honor still has a lot in common with what Huawei did, for better or for worse. One issue I've always had with Huawei devices in the past is that the notifications for many of my apps just aren't reliable.
One reason these devices have such good battery life in standby mode is because of the extremely aggressive power management. This means that many of your apps don't send notifications on time or at all. I had several cases where notifications arrived on my phone but not on my tablet. Just as I was writing this review, I opened Beeper on the tablet and was flooded with notifications from the past few days.
Should you buy the Honor MagicPad 2?
I'm not used to having an Android tablet, but in my opinion the Honor MagicBook 2 is a pretty good one, especially for the price. Considering the sharp and fluid display, powerful speakers and portability coupled with the build quality, this is a pretty good deal for what you get.
It's not a laptop replacement, but it doesn't pretend to be. Considering it's competing with things like an iPad Air, I'd say it's the better choice overall, especially for media consumption. You'll just have to put up with some frustrating apps that don't work as well on Android tablets.
Honor MagicPad 2
The Honor MagicPad 2 is a great tablet for media consumption and general use, despite some frustrating app compatibility issues with Android tablets. Given its relatively low price, it's easy to recommend.