Honor's high-end MagicPad 2 offers elegance and style

Honor rocked up at IFA 2024 with a plethora of products to show off, including its latest crack at building an iPad Pro killer. The MagicPad 2 is a 12.3-inch slate with a 3K, 144Hz OLED display that, the company says, will work harder than most to reduce eye strain. It’s a far cry from the LCD version its predecessor, the Magic Pad 13, shipped out with at the same time last year.

Understandably, Honor emptied a truck full of specs into this thing in the hope of making it a compelling purchase. There’s a Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 paired with an Adreno 735 GPU and 12GB RAM, plus your storage option of choice. There’s a 13-megapixel, f/2.0 rear-facing camera and a 9-megapixel f/2.2 selfie unit which is on the “top” of the device in landscape mode. But Honor is more proud that, when laying on a table, it stands 5.8mm tall, a millimeter less than the iPad Pros it’s measuring itself up against.

Certainly, the hardware oozes austere charm, with a nicely-machined edge and rounded corners that you’d expect from a pro device. I’m not sure we can separate this from the products it apes but you have to give some small credit for making it look good. Especially given the usual risk of hewing too close to your inspiration and looking all the more inferior for it.

Whereas the keyboard on the MagicPad 13 connected to the tablet with pogo pins, this time out the Smart Bluetooth Keyboard is all wireless. I’m a fan of the keyboard folio, which uses chiclet switches with 1.6mm of key travel and is perfect for working on. Sadly, it does have that slightly agricultural feel that comes from a lot of third-party tablet case manufacturers, but that’s a small crime. Certainly, when flipped down in tablet-only mode, I was surprised at how few times I was able to trigger a mis-key, even when holding the slate in my arms.

It, like the Magic Pencil 3, attaches to its parent with magnets and draws power via close contact with the slate. If there’s one downside, it’s that the documentation is, as usual, woeful, and the magnets that run along the tablet's “top” bezel are strong enough that you can mount the Pencil in the wrong place. Which leads to the risk that you won’t sit it over the charging coil, leaving you in the lurch when you need to jot something down. As for the stylus, it’s very Apple Pencil v1, but the slate is responsive to inputs and palm rejection works perfectly.

Of course, much of what Honor is selling with this device isn't the hardware so much as the AI insights it promises to conjure up. Like being able to recognize handwritten mathematical formulas and writing, turning them into text with the promise of fewer "Eat Up Martha's." I was impressed by the speed at which I could scrawl "Hello, I am looking for a new housekeeper" in Honor Docs and it instantly translated it —- albeit to "Hello, I am looking for a new horsesleeper."

My brief sojourn with the Magic Pad 2 won’t offer generous insights into its longevity but that 10,050mAh battery seems fairly sturdy. I spent an hour or more browsing the w… — okay, obsessively scrolling through Reddit – and watching a 25-minute YouTube video. But even that activity only managed to knock the battery life figure down by three percent and I’d be surprised if it didn’t offer more than a whole day’s worth of life, depending on how aggressive you use it.

Of course, like many products in this pantheon, the big question is how compelling its price will be. If Honor is expecting to charge the same sort of price as an iPad Pro, then you can imagine only the most diehard of Android fans will opt for this. But if Honor can keep the price at a level that’ll ensure only positive comparisons, then it may be on to a winner.