Honor MagicBook 15 - Full Review with Pros and Cons

Honor enters indian laptop market with the launch of budget friendly Honor MagicBook 14 and Honor MagicBook 15.It features premium level build and powerful specs at a very aggressive pricing.Honor offers Space Grey and Mystic Silver as two colour options with Blue Chamfered edges giving it a stunning look.

This laptop comes with a two in one fingerprint sensor and power button. It has a Pop-up webcam placed on the keyboard.

Build and Quality

The Honor Magicbook 15 comes with an aluminium chassis with Azure Blue chamfered edges which feels sturdy and gives it a quite premium feel. Laptop feels to be well put together with good weight management.It is a very portable laptop weighing just 1.53Kg and is only 16.9mm thick at its thickest point ideal for the people who like to work on the go.The lid can be easily opened with one hand signifying quality hinge construction.The bezels are kept narrow at 5.3mm giving is a screen-to-body ratio of 87% which is good and like all the other laptops in the market these days.

This laptop comes with a very fast and accurate fingerprint sensor embedded in the power button enabling Windows Hello feature. Camera is placed in the keyboard which is hidden and is a pop-up unit which adds on to the privacy.

Ports, I/O and Connectivity

The laptop features a respectable number of ports for an ultralight machine.To the left there is a single USB 3.0, 1x HDMI port and a USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1 port which is also used for charging. To the right there are 1x Type-A USB 2.0 and a 3.5 mm combo jack.

The laptop comes with a dual-band 802.11 ac Wi-Fi card along with Bluetooth 5.0.

Honor Magic-Link 2.0 creates a cross collaboration Honor smartphone and MagicBook 15 with a simple tap via NFC. This makes it easier to share smartphone screens and files,allowing you to edit them with the same keyboard and mouse.

Maintenance

On removing the bottom panel, one gets access to the PCIe NVMe SSD along with the Wi-Fi card. The memory modules are soldered onto the motherboard and are thus non-upgradable. The laptop features 8GB of DDR4-2666 MHz Dual channel memory. The Wi-Fi module and NVMe SSD is user-upgradable and can be swapped out for a new one.

Input Devices

Keyboard – The Honor MagicBook 15 comes with a full size keyboard. Typing on the keyboards feels decent with well spaced keys and ample amount of travel along with some tactile feedback. The keyboard does not come with backlighting and this can be a deal breaker for few people.The keyboard also houses a pop-up camera between F6 and F7 keys.

Touchpad – The plastic touchpad has a ‘clickpad’-style layout and does not feature dedicated buttons. It is decently sized for a budget device. The touchpad does support Windows Precision drivers and is very precise. The click definitely feels premium for the laptop of this price.

Display

The Honor MagicBook 15 Horizon comes with a 15 inch 1080p Anti-Glare IPS display. The display has a wide viewing angle upto 178 degrees and the colors are punchier as compared to TN panels. The colour accuracy is good enough. The display is TUV Rheinland-certified to reduce blue light, so it facilitates a safe and comfortable viewing experience.

Performance

MagicBook 15 embodies a Ryzen 5 3500U processor, which has a hexa core processor with clock speed of 3.1GHz and Turbo speed of 4.1GHZ. The performance is decent and allows the user to carry out most takes expected of an ultrabook. The laptop comes with a discrete Radeon vega 8. This allows the laptop to run some light e-sports titles at 60+ FPS with mediocre settings. Heavy gaming is not something to be expected of an ultrabook and a gaming laptop may be a better choice for those who want to do so.

The laptop comes with a fan with intake vents on the bottom. The fan does not get too loud with a max of 40 dB which makes for a quiet laptop though it may get hot when running heavy applications and games.

As the laptop comes with a soldered 8GB Ram it becomes a barrier for heavy work such as editing big files which might result in heating the laptop a bit even.

Storage

Honor MagicBook 15 offers two storage options, 256GB/512GB PCIe 3rd Gen NVme SSD which has 3000MB/s sequential read and 1800MB/s sequential write speeds, which is almost 5 times faster than standard SATA SSD. This results in faster transfer speeds, boot-ups, game-load and a very smooth experience overall.

Speakers

The Mi Notebook 14 comes with dual bottom firing speakers which provide for a sub-par experience.Speakers are loud enough and are better than most of the laptops in this price range.

Battery Life

The Honor MagicBook 15 houses a 3665mAh Lithium-ion Polymer Battery, which can easily last for 6 hours of continuous usage. It is not the best but adequate for this laptop of this form factor. Ths battery can be charged to 53% in half an hour with the supplied 65W charger.

Aluminium Chassis.
Aggressive pricing.
Dedicated Graphics.
Narrow bezels.
NVMe SSD.
Charging via USB-C.
Fingerprint sensor.