Honor launches the Magic 9 series on 28 September in Beijing, and pre-orders opened on JD.com on 9 September. Over the past week the company has stopped teasing and started confirming, and the confirmations are all about the camera.
The Magic 9 Pro Max will hvae two 200MP sensors. The main camera is a 1/1.28-inch sensor at f/1.57 with 3-degree optical stabilisation, and the telephoto is a 1/1.4-inch periscope at f/2.6. Honor says the dual 200MP setup is on the Magic 9 and the Magic 9 Pro Max only.
Both sensors carry ARRI branding. ARRI is the German company behind the Alexa cinema cameras used on most large film productions. Honor describes the cameras as jointly developed with it rather than just badged. The phones will record natively to LogC3, ARRI’s log curve, and to AWG3, its wide colour gamut.
The camera module is a horizontal block with one large circle and two small ones, the ARRI badge sitting inside the large one. Honor’s images show it in a colour it calls Moss Green.
The G200 and the G500
Honor is launching two external teleconverters alongside the phone. The G200 is a 200mm lens roughly 81mm long and weighing about 88g. The G500 is a 500mm lens. Both clip around the camera module and extend the periscope’s optical reach rather than cropping into it digitally.
Honor has done this before. The Magic 8 Pro’s Professional Imaging Kit shipped a 2.35x extender that took the phone’s 85mm periscope to an effective 200mm. It weighed 207 grams, which is more than most phones, and it came bundled with a magnetic grip with a two-stage shutter button and a control dial, a case with Qi2 magnets, and three 67mm filter attachments. The new G200 reaches the same 200mm at 88g. That’s less than half the weight for the same reach, which is the difference between an accessory you carry and one you leave at home.
The G500 goes further than any phone lens so far. vivo set the current mark with the X300 Ultra, which ships 200mm and 400mm teleconverters as part of a photography kit with a battery grip and a case with swappable bezels. At 500mm, Honor takes the reach crown.
This is now the third flagship generation in a row where the answer to “we can’t fit a longer lens inside a phone” has been “then don’t”. At the top of the market the phone is turning into a camera body you buy lenses for, and once you’re carrying a lens, a grip and a case, it has stopped being the convenient option.
What Honor still hasn’t confirmed
Honor has named two phones so far, the Magic 9 and the Magic 9 Pro Max, both of them in the footnotes of its camera posters.
Battery figures are contradictory. One report puts the Pro Max at 8,800mAh, others claim a 10,000mAh top model. Prices range from CNY 4,999 to CNY 9,999 depending on which leaks you read.
The Magic 9 series is the first phone line to ship MagicOS 11, which Honor will launch on 15 September at its developer conference in Shenzhen, two weeks before the phones.
Kenya?
Probably we won’t see them in this form locally. Honor sells here through authorised resellers rather than a local operation, and they stock mostly X-series and mid-range phones, like the X9d we talked about in April at around KES 55,000. The Magic line has never had a formal Kenyan launch, and a 500mm clip-on lens probably won’t come here officially.
Honor grew 101% year on year in Africa in the first quarter of 2026 and took 7% of the market, the fastest growth of any major brand here, on a market of 19.9 million units. It is growing on mid-range phones with big batteries while its flagship work goes elsewhere.
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