A special battery makes this new phone different from others

By Andy Boxall Published January 2, 2025

According to Honor, the new Magic7 Lite has a special, industry-first battery inside it, making it slightly more interesting than your average midrange smartphone. But what is new about it? The Magic7 Lite has a silicon-carbon battery instead of the more common lithium-ion battery, which allows for a greater capacity without increasing physical size.

The Magic7 Lite’s silicon-carbon battery has a whopping 6,600mAh capacity, and Honor estimates this will return nearly 26 hours of video playback on a single charge. It will also reliably operate in both hot and cold environments. Using its AI technology, Honor’s software will squeeze a 50-minute call out of the remaining 2% of the battery, which will make it useful in emergency situations. Using silicon can also assist with efforts to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

While interesting, don’t read too much into the whole “industry-first” statement, as silicon-carbon batteries have been doing the rounds for a while, and what Honor appears to mean is it’s the industry’s first silicon-carbon battery with such a large capacity. Honor itself has already put silicon-carbon batteries in phones, such as a 5,600mAh cell in the Honor Magic 6 Pro, while Vivo used a silicon anode in the battery inside the Vivo X200 series, and we expect the trend to continue in 2025.

What about the rest of the Magic7 Lite? It represents the first of Honor’s new Magic7 series to be announced in Europe (don’t expect a U.S. release though). The thin and light phone — 189 grams and 7.98mm thick — comes in two different finishes, Titanium Black and the eye-catching Titanium Purple. Honor claims the body is capable of withstanding drops from 2 meters, and there’s IP65M dust and water resistance for further durability. The 6.78-inch AMOLED screen has a 120Hz refresh rate and 3840Hz Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) dimming.

On the back is a 108-megapixel main camera and a 5MP wide-angle camera, and inside is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor with 8GB of RAM. The Snapdragon chip was also used in the Magic6 Lite, which also had the same camera system, making it unlikely to appeal to owners of its year-old predecessor. It’s also arriving with Android 14 installed and not the latest Android 15 software.

The Honor Magic7 Lite will be released in Europe and the U.K. on January 15 for 399 British pounds, or around $500.