Honor MagicBook View 14 review: 14-inch laptop for touch fans

The View 14's competitors include other streamlined 14-inch laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro, which also features a glossy high-resolution touchscreen and a CPU that isn't "properly" power-saving. Most contenders tend to opt for a 28-watt chip, which promises (even) longer battery runtimes. These include, for example, the MSI Prestige 14 Evo, the LG Gram 14, and the in-house MagicBook 14. All the laptops mentioned appear in the tables as comparison devices.

In terms of quality, the View 14 leaves no room for criticism. The aluminum chassis cuts a very high-quality and pleasingly sturdy figure. Consequently, the surfaces only flex a bit under strong pressure (e.g. in the keyboard area).

The device's design looks simple and elegant at the same time. Especially the display, which feels like it has no bezels, looks very modern, although the screen's glossy finish turns it into a real fingerprint magnet and makes cleaning it a frequent task.

The wide hinge construction makes a good impression. Although the base unit sometimes rocks a bit when you open the laptop, the desired position is maintained solidly. On the other hand, the maximum opening angle (approx. 135°) is something that the manufacturer could fine-tune a bit.

One of the biggest (visual) highlights is the slim build. While the footprints are only comparable to a certain extent due to the varying display aspect ratios, the View 14 boasts the lowest thickness within the test field with 14.5 mm on paper (without the case feet). The Honor laptop is heavier than the competition, although it's still comfortable to carry around 1.5 kg. According to the homepage, the 14-incher is also available in the Blue Hour and Space Gray colors.

Ports

In terms of connectivity, Honor follows the "Apple trend" towards increasingly fewer interfaces. This means that you don't only have to do without an RJ45 port (which would also have been a bit cramped in terms of space), but also without a card reader, a Kensington lock slot, and a dedicated DisplayPort.

Three USB ports is also pretty scarce, especially since one of the available Type-C ports has to be used for the included power adapter when charging or using the laptop plugged in. At least both Type-C ports support the DisplayPort function, which means that up to three monitors can theoretically be connected together with the HDMI port. Another highlight is the fact that one of the Type-C ports supports Thunderbolt 4/USB 4. The package is rounded off by a combined audio jack.

Since all the ports are located in the rear half of the laptop, there's enough headroom on the sides when an external mouse is used.

A wireless module from Intel handles wireless communications. Similar to the competition, Honor uses the Wi-Fi 6 AX201, a very fast and technically modern chip that performs particularly well in the View 14. In our Wi-Fi test (1 m distance to the Netgear Nighthawk AX12 reference router), the device achieves first place for both sending and receiving data.

The webcam is surprisingly good by laptop standards. This isn't surprising, because Honor doesn't simply use a 720p or 1080p resolution; instead, a 5 MP webcam is used, something that is definitely noticeable in our sample photos (keywords: image sharpness). Color accuracy is higher than what is usually found in most laptops as well, but you should, of course, not expect anything top-notch here, either. Great: In contrast to the MagicBook 14, the webcam isn't hidden in the keyboard ("nostril camera"), but it sits in the traditional position instead - albeit without a privacy shutter.

The power button, which is inconveniently placed right in the keyboard area, can be used as a fingerprint reader if desired.

As usual, the box contains only a few items. Besides a pleasantly light and compact 65-watt power adapter, you will only find a few info booklets.

We have mixed feelings when it comes to maintenance. Although the 10 Torx screws can be removed relatively quickly and easily with the right screwdriver, the bottom cover still sits very tightly and has to be pried out using a flat tool and considerable force, which might scare off many amateur or less experienced users (we almost gave up when we trying to open it out of fear of damaging the case or the hardware).

Once you have made it inside, you will see a very tidy layout. The SSD and wireless module are available, as well as the battery and the cooling system (dual-fan solution). On the other hand, it's a pity that Honor didn't opt for RAM slots to expand memory. The integrated 16 GB are soldered, which isn't a good idea when it comes to durability and repairs, and it's a big minus point for us.

There's hardly anything to criticize when it comes to the touchpad. On the one hand, it's exceptionally large for a 14-inch device (12 x 7.2 cm), and on the other hand, its gliding properties are very good due to the extremely smooth (almost too smooth) surface. Accuracy and gesture support are also satisfactory. The same goes for the built-in click areas, although the rigidity in the lower right corner leaves something to be desired.

Users looking for a laptop with a touchscreen have come to the right place with the MagicBook View 14. The 14-inch display, which has a 3:2 aspect ratio and a great screen-to-body ratio (almost 90%), provides 10-point multi-touch functionality. A resolution of 2520x1680 is also rather uncommon in the laptop segment. Although the amount of pixels chosen by Honor is a bit too high in relation to the display size (we recommend a Windows scaling of 150%), the high resolution ensures an extremely sharp picture.

Given the light and slim case, the MagicBook View 14 packs quite a bit of power - and it does so without a dedicated graphics card. 16 GB of RAM should also be enough for the coming years, as long as you don't have to deal with particularly demanding application scenarios. The somewhat tight 512 GB of SSD storage can be replaced with a larger M.2 model if necessary.

In the preinstalled PC Manager, which serves as an update center among other things, you can choose between two power or performance profiles. All our tests were performed using the Balanced mode.

The Core i7-11390H made it to our editorial office and through the benchmark course for the first time with the View 14. Like its other 35-watt counterparts from the Tiger Lake generation, the 11390H is rather rarely seen, as laptop manufacturers usually prefer to install a "full-fledged" 45-watt model or a power-saving 28-watt model. The 35-watt lineup attempts to combine the advantages of both categories (good performance coupled with solid energy efficiency).

From a purely technical standpoint, the i7-11390H, which is manufactured in a 10 nm process, makes use of 12 MB of L3 cache and four cores that can process eight threads in parallel via Hyper-Threading. Despite the slightly higher clock rates (3.4 - 5.0 GHz), the MagicBook View 14 barely manages to overtake the Core i7-11370H in the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro (3.3 - 4.8 GHz) in the CPU tests. After a while, the former's performance even drops below that of the Lenovo device in the Cinebench loop. However, the 11390H easily competes with the 28-watt chips of the other contenders and can usually outperform them by double-digit percentages.

The View 14 is at the top of the podium in terms of system performance. 5,475 points in PCMark 10 represent the first place among the comparison devices. Also subjectively, the operating system responds as fast as you'd expect from a modern device in the 1,000-Euro (~$1,136) range.

An NVMe drive from Western Digital is used for mass storage. The WDC SN730 is only marginally beaten in the benchmarks by the Phison SSD found in the MSI Prestige 14 Evo. With the exception of the LG Gram (SK Hynix), the rest of the comparison laptops are also equipped with a Western Digital model.