Honor will be launching its Magic 9 flagship series in September. This was confirmed by the company at the end of Guangzhou keynote where it launched the Robot Phone, and it opened blind pre-orders in China that same evening.
Thanks to leaks we have a small idea of what the phone specs will be. It’s like Honor is stacking every flagship number into one device: two 200-megapixel cameras, a battery above 8,000mAh, Qualcomm’s first 2nm processor, and a square selfie sensor like on the iPhone 17 series.
What Honor has actually confirmed
Three things:
- Launch: The series launches in September 2026, a month earlier than the Magic 8 series, which Honor announced on 15 October 2025.
- Cameras: The cameras are being developed with ARRI, a partnership the two announced at MWC 2026 on 3 March. ARRI is a Munich manufacturer founded in 1917 that builds motion picture cameras, lenses and lighting rigs, and has won 20 scientific and technical awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Honor is the first phone maker it has worked with, starting with the Robot Phone, which we covered in August.
Honor also said the Magic 9 gets the same video tools as the Robot Phone: native Log-C3 recording, LUT colour grading, and a cinema mode built to copy the look of ARRI cameras. Log is a flat, low-contrast profile that holds detail in the brightest and darkest parts of a shot so a colourist can grade it afterwards. It matters to people who edit footage rather than post it straight from the camera roll.
The teaser image shows an off-centre circular camera module with a knurled metal ring, close in style to the Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica Edition. One sensor inside the phone is as a 200MP 1/1.4-inch unit with optical stabilisation.
Everything else
Almost every outlet now gives 28 September, in Beijing. Honor has not confirmed the date itself, so we wait to see.
This year, we are seeing lots of launches with the PRO MAX moniker. We’ve seen that with Redmi, OPPO, vivo, and others. So, there’s speculation the Magic 9 Series may feature a Magic 9, Magic 9 Pro and a Magic 9 Pro Max.
Leaked Specs:
The big model gets a 6.8-inch LTPO OLED panel at 1.5K resolution, with gently curved 2.5D glass rather than the heavily curved edges of older Magic phones. LTPO means the refresh rate drops on static content to save power.
The processor is the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, on TSMC’s N2P 2nm process.
Three cameras:
- A 200MP main sensor at 1/1.28 inches with an f/1.57 aperture and three degrees of optical stabilisation. vivo is chasing the same thing with the gimbal camera on the X500 Pro Max, which we wrote about this week.
- A 200MP periscope telephoto at 1/1.4 inches, f/2.6.
- A 50MP ultra-wide.
On the Magic 8 Pro the main camera was a 50MP 1/1.3-inch sensor and only the periscope was 200MP. The main sensor is the change.
The front camera is the unusual one. Leaks say the Magic 9 Pro uses a 1:1 square selfie sensor, the format Apple introduced on the iPhone 17 in September 2025. A square sensor lets you shoot portrait or landscape selfies without turning the phone, because the software crops the frame afterwards. No Android phone has shipped one, though we might be seeing one with the Find X10 series.
Battery capacity is expected to be somewhere between 8,000 and 8,999mAh. Two Magic 9 models cleared China’s 3C certification with 100W wired charging in late August.
Also expected with the series is: wireless charging, ultrasonic in-display fingerprint reader, 3D face unlock and IP68 and IP69 ratings.
What global buyers should expect
The Magic 8 Pro launched in China on 15 October 2025 with a 7,200mAh battery and 120W wired charging. The global version dropped to 7,100mAh and 100W. The European version shipped with 6,270mAh, or 930mAh less than the Chinese phone under the same model name. If the Magic 9 Pro launches in China with 8,500mAh, that may not the number a phone sold outside China will carry.
We expect the same launch pattern: China in October, the rest of Asia in November, Europe in January.
Honor sells in Kenya through authorised resellers rather than a full local operation, and they stock mostly X-series and mid-range models. The Magic flagship line has never had a formal Kenyan launch. Same case with the Robot Phone which is China exclusive.
However, with recent stats, as we reported from Omdia’s figures in May, Honor does have reason to care about this region. It took 7% of Africa’s smartphone market in the first quarter of 2026 and grew 101% year on year.
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