Honor Magic V3: Hands-On Review with Camera Photos and Video – the best just got better!
I’ve been lucky enough to be testing the Honor Magic V3, released today, for a little while. Here are my first impressions, with some camera samples, ahead of my full review.
Now I don’t want to be someone who stops people reading the whole post, but let me begin with the first sentence: ‘Wow’.
I could probably end it here, and that’s all you really need to know – but obviously that doesn’t work well ‘for the algorithms’, plus I’m sure you came for more than just a one word review.
At the start of the year, Honor launched the near impossibly thin Honor Magic V2, but somehow the company has managed to make the Magic V3 even thinner – and despite doing so, has managed not compromise on any functionality of its predecessor.
In fact, it has enhanced the device by adding in an IP-rating, a bigger battery, wireless charging, and a faster chipset. The cameras are enhanced also, bringing the quality up to the same level as the Magic Pro models.
Impossibly thin becomes unimaginably thin
I am not sure how Honor managed to do it, but Honor has been pretty proud of the fact it has released the world’s thinnest foldable smartphone – with a rather tongue-in-cheek dig at Samsung who appears unable to shift away from the same bulky design it has used for multiple generations.
In case you haven’t already been following the build-up hype to the Magic V3 launch, let me remind you that the folding smartphone is just 9.2mm thick when folded – or 4.35mm thick when open and flat. Yes, there’s a camera bulge, and yes there’s a case included in the box that you’d be mad not to attach, but the point is that when you have put the phone in its case – it is still going to be as thin as any ordinary smartphone that you’ll probably have in a case right now. And it only weighs 226g too.
It’s absolutely incredible to see what Honor has achieved, especially with a 5,150mAh third-generation silicon carbon battery that charges at 66W with a wired SuperCharge power adapter, or 50W wirelessly using a compatible Honor or Huawei wireless charger.
The Honor Magic V3 is now IPX8 water resistant, although I didn’t risk my review sample to test this out. There will be plenty of YouTubers out there willing to demonstrate this to you in the coming weeks!
The Screens
The inside screen is much the same as the Magic V2, which is no bad thing, and the 7.92-inch display can display over one billion colours, with a 1-120Hz refresh rate and 3,840Hz PWM dimming to reduce eye-fatigue. There’s support for the Honor Magic-Pen stylus that can be purchased for around £80 or may be included free if you buy the device soon after launch.
The outer display is 6.43-inch and has 4,320Hz PWM dimming and low power consumption, but can ramp up to 5,000 nits of peak brightness with suitable HDR content. It too displays over one billion colours and has Magic-Pen support.
Honor has also introduced AI defocus eye protection, as another way of reducing eye-fatigue. I am not entirely sure how this works – namely to counter the increase in nearsightness caused by long-term screen usage – and will try and learn more for my full review.
Both displays are more resilient than previous models to keep the screens protected, and Honor will include six months of screen cover that can hopefully be extended to give peace of mind for those worried about the fragility of foldable displays.
Frankly, in my experience of using the Magic V2 for some time, there’s no real reason to be worried as long as you use common sense on how and where you use it. It’s best advice not to take a foldable phone to a beach where sand could work its way inside and damage the hinge, or scratch the flexible glass. However, I think it’s fair to say this is common sense and not a fault of the device.
Pricing and Availability
The final price of the Honor Magic V3 was confirmed today as being £1,699, but if you order soon then you can get a pretty significant deal.
First of all, you’ll need to choose a colour – and Honor has released three variants for the UK; Reddish Brown, Green and Black. The model will come with 12GB of RAM (with up to 12GB of virtual memory) and 512GB of storage.
You can purchase from O2, Three, Amazon, Argos and Very – as well as direct at Honor’s website.
EE and Vodafone joins in later on, with further information and pricing to follow.
Having every main network onboard is a major step forward for Honor as it allows for the company to get its products seen by a far wider audience – as well as leading to many different choices of purchase.
However, if you opt to buy SIM-free from Honor direct then early birds can benefit from the following:
- £300 discount (code is AV3EB300)
- First 500 orders: Free Bang & Olufsen Beoplay HX headphones (worth £549)
- Special offers on other purchases and extra Honor points
- Free Magic-Pen (worth £79.99)
- Free 66W SuperCharge power adapter (worth £24.99)
- Honor Screen Protection for 6 months, with 1 change (worth £109.99)
- 24 months interest free credit
All things considered, that’s a pretty impressive deal. It’s maybe a little tricky to say it’s cheap, but for what you’re getting overall and given the technical engineering that goes into making a product like this, it’s certainly a good deal.
Will it be cheaper still in the future, such as Black Friday? Who knows, but you may not wish to wait and some of the bundled accessories may not be included next time. It’s also worth reminding people that you can pick up the Magic V2 for under £1,000 on promotion if you are happy with the original.
The Honor Magic V3 also comes with a protective case (see image below) that includes a kickstand. These are colour coded to the device.
Honor Magic V3 Camera
I will have plenty more photos and video to share in the future, as part of my full review.
Camera Stats
- 50-megapixel periscope camera
3.5x optical zoom
100x digital zoom
1/2.51-inch outsole photosensitive unit
f/3.0 aperture
OIS optical anti-shake - 50-megapixel wide-angle camera
1/1.56-inch outsole photosensitive unit
f/1.6 aperture
OIS - 40-megapixel ultra-wide camera
2.5cm high-definition macro photography
112 degree ultra-wide viewing angle
f/2.2 aperture - 20-megapixel front-facing
f/2.2 aperture
90 degree wide-angle selfie
4K video recording
You can also use the rear facing cameras for selfies by folding the device flat and turning around to use the outer display as the viewfinder – which brings the maximum image quality possible.
What you can see from the images below is that the Honor Magic V3 camera is now on an equal footing with ‘ordinary’ smartphones and this is fantastic news as, until now, you generally had to accept you would lose functionality in some areas in order to get the foldable experience.
Now you no longer have to, and not only are the image sensors of a very high standard, but the camera interface offers a myriad of AI features to enhance your shots, dedicated movie modes, the ability to capture video for colour grading in post, professional capture modes, motion capturing (to automatically take a photo of sport, children and pets etc), and more.
With the large inner display, you get a larger user interface to control things or can partially fold the device to set the phone down on a flat surface to take timed shots, or time-lapse photography.
Honor completes the imaging package with enhancements to its own photo gallery app (which can be used in conjunction with Google Photos and its own photo features), to create movie clips automatically using AI, edit your movies and add colour profiles, sort your photos using AI and also make edits – including removing people or objects from images.
The Honor Magic V3 also includes the Harcourt portrait photography mode features from the recently launched Honor 200 series.
Google Photos gallery
Honor Magic V3 Photos
Honor Magic V3 Video
Chipset and Performance
There’s now a general acceptance that the newest chips will find their way into the Magic Pro models first, followed by the foldables in the latter half of the year.
The Magic V2 came with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, and the Magic V3 comes with the current flagship 8 Gen 3. It’s expected that the Magic 7 Pro will come with 8 Gen 4, and the Magic V4 will come with 8 Gen 4 and so on.
The V2 was powerful, and the V3 is even more so – perhaps to the level of overkill for most customers. While the large display will encourage some people to play games, most of which will struggle to push the chipset to its limit anyway, a lot of people are going to buy a foldable for enhanced productivity and multi-tasking, so there’s absolutely no need to worry about a newer chip being a matter of months away.
The AnTuTu benchmark rating for the Magic V3 is around 2,220,000 (v10) and everything is silky smooth all of the time. I’ve not managed to get the device to stutter once, and that includes opening and closing the device to switch from the inner to outer displays. Everything chugs along so seamlessly, you’ll quickly get to love the flexbility of having two displays to suit your needs at any given moment.
The outer screen may well be used most of the time, but as time goes on you’ll likely pop the phone open not just to run split-screen applications or windowed apps you can drag around for maximum flexibility, but just to get a more desktop like experience. And should you wish to extend this experience for an actual desktop, you can hook the Magic V3 up to a monitor and pair-up a keyboard and mouse for a true desktop-like experience.
When you look at all of these amazing features offered by Honor’s Magic OS UI, you will see that you’re getting a lot of bang-for-your-buck.
Connectivity includes the latest Qualcomm 5G modem, ready for standalone 5G and supporting multiple bands to offer the fastest possible 4G and 5G speeds. There’s Wi-Fi 7 support also, and Bluetooth 5.3 LE and support for most audio codecs.
In Summary
Foldables have now been around for some time, and we’ve come a long way from when Huawei first showed off its Mate X at MWC in 2019. Back then, it wasn’t just price that put people off. There were a number of compromises on things like battery life and durability, as well as the Android interface not yet taking full advantage of the extra (and non-standard aspect ratio) screen real estate.
Walter Ji (then CEO Huawei Western Europe consumer business group) believed in 2019 that in five years, foldables were likely to become the norm. It’s probably fair to say that they’re not yet the dominant form factor for smartphone buyers, but the choice in the market has increased massively and they are certainly starting to become more mainstream and accepted.
Every new model brings improvements to design and quality, as well as functionality, and pricing is getting more competitive all the time.
Some manufacturers, like Samsung, seem happy to rest on their laurels and churn out iterative updates each year, but Honor has pushed the boundaries and come up with an absolutely incredible package.
It’s no longer a choice between a flagship slab-phone or a foldable, wondering what you’ll miss out on if you stump up the extra money for the foldable model. Now the foldable is a flagship in every department.