Honor's New Android Tablet Checks The Right Boxes, But Using It Left Me Frustrated

A few weeks ago, I headed to London to check out a trio of new releases coming from Honor. The headliner of the show was the Honor Magic V5, a ridiculously thin smartphone that challenges the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 in many ways. Next was the Honor MagicBook Art 14 2025, with a magnetic removable camera. Finally, came the subject of this review, the Honor MagicPad 3.

In many ways, the tablet is the lesser of the three offerings. It has the lowest price, and it comes with the lowest specifications and frankly the lowest expectations. It's a productivity tablet which is really my bread and butter, and at its £599.99 price point,(approximately $813 converted to US dollars, but it wont be sold in the US anyway), it's not a bad value for what it offers. But the truth of the matter is, there are a few things that it doesn't do very well, and it also leave out some really low-hanging fruit that is a bit confusing.

Of course, the most notable missing feature is its presence in the United States. Like anything Honor branded, this tablet will not see our shores because of reasons that are pretty well known by this point. Still Honor has a history of making really great products, so I was keen to take this tablet for a spin. Honor provided this device to me for this review.

The highlight of this tablet, and any tablet really is in the display. This is a 13.3-inch LCD display with a great resolution of 3200 x 2136 pixels and a respectable 165 Hz refresh rate. It gets up to 1,000 nits of brightness which is excellent for its class. The 16GB of RAM and the 512 GB of storage are equally attractive. The tablet gets Wi-Fi 7 802.11 which is also very good. Add in a 12,450 mAh, silicon-carbon battery, and this looks to be a great package.

Arguably the most disappointing cut corner is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor which is almost two years old at this point. Yes, that processor is quite fast, and it powered a whole generation of flagship smartphones in 2023. But it doesn't make this tablet particularly future proof. However, at its price point, some corners had to be cut.

The tablet is still capable enough and fast enough for most tasks, but you want a productivity tablet — one that competes with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra or the iPad Pro — to be as powerful as possible, and this tablet just isn't. On the flip side, this tablet costs about half of what those other tablets do so, again, a corner had to be cut.

The Magicpad 3 does not ship with the type cover, which is and always will be a complaint for me. You cannot sell a productivity tablet without a means of productivity, so as long as this (advertising productivity without providing the tools to make that productivity realistic), I will call it out.

That being said, this particular type cover isn't all that good. The keyboard itself is perfectly fine, with really nice travel on the keys — on the short side for those who prefer that — and good pitch in between them. But the trackpad is prone to skips and jumps of the cursor, which is a terrible experience. As often as not, I resorted to gorilla-arm tapping the screen instead of using the touchpad because of this issue.

Also, and this is a minor point of annoyance, but the kickstand is one of those where the top of the keyboard cover bends down to prop the tablet up. I've never been a fan of that mechanism. It's fine if you're sitting at a desk or a table, but it doesn't work when things are more confined, such as a plane — which I spend a lot of time on. This is more of a personal preference, but honestly, just no thank you.

Having used the Honor Magic V5 prior to this review, I really enjoyed the multitasking mechanism on that phone. Just tap the multi-app layout, and then tap the apps you want and just like that, you have multitasking. What's more, you get the 90/10 scheme of multitasking that gives you up to 3 full-sized apps to pop back and forth in between. The MagicPad 3 doesn't give you that option.

There is no way to do three apps side-by-side. Even if there was, you can't do the 90/10 split screen. You're stuck with 25/75, which is fine, but extremely dated. Speaking of dated, the MagicPad 3 ships with Magic OS 9 which is built on Android 15, so that's also not ideal (and likely the reason for the lack of 90/10 multitasking).

The software is the same, old school looking cartoonish app layout, which Honor has started to clean up in the V5, so I'm just not sure why that's not here too. It's a bit of a letdown.

Speaking of letdowns, Honor has prided itself on its ability to work in between devices quite well, but in order to make that work, you need to sign into an Honor account, and I can't manage to do that due to geo restrictions. That being said I saw some neat demos at the launch event, so I'm glad Honor is working on those.

The Honor MagicPad 3 ships with a massive 12,450 mAh battery and a 66W wired charger. Of course, that's a European plug, so I couldn't test that particular part. That being said, this tablet just keeps going. I spent a couple of afternoons working on this tablet and watched some movies on it in between and only then did I dip below 20% battery. Silicon-carbon batteries are simply a delight, and one of my favorite parts about working with devices that use this technology is how fast the batteries charge and how long they last while charged.

On the performance side, I already mentioned that this is a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor. Geekbench reports CPU scores of 2,225/6867 single/multi-core scores, which is about right for the processor. That doesn't really affect things in a day-to-day usage kind of way. The tablet is still capable of playing most games with decent framerates. Again, I'm just concerned about longevity.

I wouldn't be able to buy this tablet because of my address. This tablet is available for purchase in pretty much every other country in the world where you'd normally be able to buy a modern tablet, except in the U.S., which is a shame. Overall, this is a very nice tablet, but it comes with some compromises. Some of those compromises are avoidable — the software for example. Others are hardware limitations and a lack of optimizations, which leads to a not-great experience. I think things could be better if the type cover behaved better. That was really my main sticking point, made worse by the fact that a productivity tablet is not productive without a functional keyboard and mouse.

All the same, if you're looking for a good, midrange priced tablet that you can get some work done, but otherwise use to consume content, this is a good choice. But overseas, you probably also have other options like the Xiaomi Pad 7, which has always been and remains a favorite of mine to this day. For my money, I'd probably go with the OnePlus Pad 3.  

That's not to say the Honor MagicPad 3 is bad — it's not. But for its price there are a couple of better alternatives that you can go with, as is so often the case when you've got the vast array of selections available in most markets outside the United States.