Honor’s Magic 9 Pro Max has a big camera and a bigger battery

Honor launches its new Magic 9 flagship phones in China today, and the 9 Pro Max features a design revamp, a capable camera, and a colossal battery.

This is Honor’s first flagship launch — Robot Phone aside — since it announced its collaboration with camera company Arri. The initial impact is twofold. The new camera island is Arri-inspired, drawing from the “three-lens turret” design first introduced in 1937’s Arriflex 35, complete with a knurled texture around the main lens.

Arri has played a part in the camera itself, contributing the ability to shoot in Arri LogC3, together with 14 preset Arri Look LUTs, access to Arri’s wider library of official and third-party LUTs, and support for the APV 10-bit 4:2:2 codec. The cameras themselves include a 200-megapixel main lens using a 1/1.28-inch-type sensor, a 3.5x telephoto using the same resolution and a 1/1.4-inch sensor, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide — though this latter lens doesn’t support all the Arri Cinema Mode features. A “cinema-grade” directional microphone should help with video recording too. Less technically impressive, but just as useful, will be the square-format selfie camera, which like Apple’s Center Stage will be able to capture in either landscape or portrait.

Honor says that the wider camera island is more space-efficient, leaving extra space for a huge 8,800mAh battery, now up to 40 percent silicon content. The 9 Pro Max is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. I asked Honor why it picked the Extreme version, given the 9 Pro Max doesn’t support the 8K60 or 4K240 video recording that chip enables, and was told it was “about delivering a complete and consistent flagship experience, rather than pursuing a single benchmark result.”

The Magic 9 series launches in China today. Honor has confirmed that an international launch is coming, but we’re still waiting to find out when.