Honor MagicPad4 battery life and charging tests: here are the results

The Honor MagicPad 2 12.3 from a couple of years ago received a good-but-not-great Active Use Score of 9:42h. It was dragged down by its so-so web browsing score of 7:56h. Today, we’re testing a newer generation 12.3” tablet from Honor – let’s see if it did any better.

The Honor MagicPad4 has a 12.3” OLED panel with 3,000 x 1,920px resolution and a 10,100mAh battery. It’s the same size screen as the MagicPad 2, but with a higher top refresh rate (165Hz vs. 144Hz) and a higher peak brightness (2,400 nits vs. 1,600 nits). The battery capacity is essentially the same (the older slate is down 50mAh) and charging is the same with support for 66W Honor SuperCharge.

The Honor MagicPad4 has a 10,100mAh battery and comes with a 66W charger

The tablet does indeed do better by nearly an hour – it achieved a 10:31h Active Use Score. This comes with a notable improvement in the video playback test by nearly 2 hours and a small bump in gaming. The call time is better too – note that since this is a tablet with no cellular connectivity, we test WhatsApp calling instead.

Anyway, web browsing remains a weak spot for the MagicPad4. It has a more powerful chipset, a 3nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, while the MagicPad 2 used a 4nm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. This also brings newer connectivity with Wi-Fi 7 (be) support, up from Wi-Fi 6 (ax). Do note that we test at a calibrated brightness, so the extra nits on the new panel don’t affect the score.

The Honor Pad X9 is an affordable slate with an 11.5” LCD (120Hz, 2,000 x 1,200px), a Snapdragon 685 and a rather small 7,250mAh battery. The X9, however, got an Active Use Score of 13:17h with a web browsing time of close to 12 hours.

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is a more premium offering with an 11.2” IPS LCD (144Hz, 3,200 x 2,136px), a Snapdragon 8 Elite and a small-ish 9,200mAh battery. This one did even better with an Active Use Score of 13:39h. The OnePlus Pad 3 also uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite and has a 13.2” IPS LCD (144Hz, 3,392 x 2,400px) and a 12,140mAh battery that is larger than the others. It only reached 10:49h Active Use Score, though, barely edging out the MagicPad4, despite having 2,040mAh more capacity.

Using the widget above, you can play around with the sliders to get a use pattern mix that fits you better, e.g. try reducing the call percentage or bumping up video playback time.

As noted above, the Honor MagicPad4 has a 10,100mAh battery and support for 66W SuperCharge. There are a few tablets with higher power ratings, e.g. the OnePlus Pad 3 and Pad 4, but the MagicPad4 is specced well in this regard.

However, the results are fairly disappointing. At the 15 minute mark, it was really only ahead of the Redmi Pad 2 Pro, which has mismatched hardware – a large 12,000mAh battery is paired with relatively slow 33W charging. This carries over to the 30-minute charging test.

Things look better at the end of the 100% charge test where the MagicPad4 crossed the finish line in 1 hour and 40 minutes. That’s a good but not stellar result. For example, it matches the OnePlus Pad 4, which has a larger 13,380mAh battery to fill – and a faster 80W charger to do it. Really, it’s only the affordable slates like the Honor Pad X9 and Redmi Pad 2 Pro that are slower. The Pad X9 took 24 minutes longer, but remember that a 100% charge on the X9 lasts longer than 100% on the MagicPad 4.

The Honor MagicPad4 shows improvement in battery life, but Honor needs to work on the web browsing time. Also, the company has multiple phones with 80W and even 100W charging, but only one tablet that goes above 66W. It’s time to change that. With that, we go back to working on the full review.