The firm’s robust emphasis on enhanced, intelligent, and supportive on-device AI has made significant progress.
At the Snapdragon Summit 2025, Honor showcased its innovative “Dual-Engine” strategy for on-device AI concerning the Magic 8 Pro and Magic Pad 3 Pro. The keynote emphasized Magic Color, a cutting-edge on-device AI engine designed to assist everyday users and creators in producing edits reminiscent of professional work. The company is also aiming to elevate its gaming features, unveiling functionalities akin to DLSS seen on gaming PCs. The Magic 8 Pro and Pad 3 Pro from Honor are set to debut in China in October.
The Snapdragon Summit 2025 is currently in progress, and Honor’s latest participation signifies a pivotal moment in its AI advancements, propelled by Qualcomm’s latest chip. Honor hinted at “revolutionary” AI breakthroughs scheduled for its flagship Magic 8 Pro and Magic Pad 3 Pro in a press release to Android Central. For those eager to express their creativity with Honor’s upcoming flagship smartphone that will feature the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, the announcement mentions the pioneering “Agent-powered Magic Color” system. This innovation elevates the Honor Alpha Plan, the company’s prior promise of more powerful on-device AI, to an entirely new dimension.
Honor claims that Magic Color integrates its on-device AI with “advanced semantic understanding” to simplify the image editing process for average users and creators, delivering edits akin to those of professionals. Using “one-sentence commands,” Honor states users can modify their images, restyle them, and extract “key color tones” for other applications.
From a technical aspect, the enhanced capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 have enabled Honor’s “Dual-Engine” model for on-device AI. The company aims to address three primary challenges associated with on-device AI: computational power, memory usage, and energy efficiency. At the Snapdragon Summit 2025 event, Honor unveiled its Low-Bit Quantization technology, a first in the Android landscape. Utilizing Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU, this technology enhances computing performance by 15%, reduces energy consumption by 30%, and utilizes 30% less storage. This Low-Bit technology is also reputed to accelerate the speed at which the on-device AI can process and provide data.
Performance represents another facet of Honor’s “Dual-Engine” strategy this year. Concerning gaming, Honor has rolled out its GPU-NPU Heterogeneous AI Super Sampling technology. This implies that through AI reconstruction, Honor’s innovation can elevate low frame rates and resolutions, similar to DLSS found on gaming PCs. During trials, Honor asserts that this Super Sampling technology can achieve 120fps at 1080p from content initially running at 60fps on-device.
Fang Fei, Honor’s product president, remarked, “By collaborating with industry leaders like Qualcomm Technologies to continuously redefine the boundaries of on-device AI, we move closer to creating a shared, co-created world where everyone can reap the benefits of AI.”
These groundbreaking AI capabilities from Honor are anticipated to be available on the Magic 8 Pro and Magic Pad 3 Pro “next month.” However, the spotlight this week has turned toward the company’s forthcoming flagship device. The Magic 8 Pro made an appearance during Honor’s keynote at the Snapdragon Summit 2025, impressing with its rounded corners, flat sides, and a seemingly level display.
The design resembles what users experienced with the Magic 7 Pro. The next version will maintain its centrally positioned, rounded camera assembly with a glossy ring surrounding it from below. The device is set to launch in China in October, with no updates regarding a global release as of now.
