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Foldables are making a grand comeback in the smartphone industry. Every brand is racing to come up with better, lighter, and thinner foldable screens, clamshell and bookstyle. While they’re far from going mainstream yet, there’s no doubt that foldable phones are really gaining traction.
Here, we have the newest addition to the foldable market: the HONOR Magic V2, touted as the lightest and thinnest book-style foldable on the market. My first impression of the phone is certainly that: at the launch preview, they even floated it in a tank of water on a piece of paper!
But it's never good to judge a book by its cover (heh), so we got our hands on one of these. Here's what we think about it after two weeks of using it!
HONOR Magic V2 Specifications
- Display: 6.43 (Exterior), 7.92" (Interior), Foldable OLED, 120Hz, 1600 nits/2500 nits, Nanocrystal glass 2.0
- Processor: Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
- Operating System: MagicOS 7.2 based on Android 13
- Memory: 16GB + 512GB
- Rear Camera: 50MP Wide + 50MP Ultrawide + 20MP Telephoto
- Front Camera: 16MP (both)
- Connectivity: USB Type-C charging port, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, eSIM
- Weight: 231g
- Thickness: 9.9mm (folded), 4.7mm (folded)
Design
The design is probably the HONOR Magic V2’s most impressive feature. The book-style foldable weighs only 231g and measures 4.7mm in thickness—9.9mm in thickness when folded. That means it’s no thicker than other regular candybar phones.
In fact, when folded, it feels exactly like a regular phone, in both thickness and aspect ratio. The 6.43” external screen has the same aspect ratio as a normal phone, which makes it very comfortable to hold and look at. Sometimes I even forget that I’m holding a foldable phone, that’s how familiar the exterior screen feels in hand.
That said, I feel that the phone is a little too thin when unfolded. I know, first-world problems and all, but while it doesn’t feel flimsy per se, the paper-thin body just invokes a terrifying sense of fragility. That’s going to take some getting used to.
Perhaps the most important part of a foldable phone is its hinges. The HONOR Magic V2 makes use of a Titanium Hinge that is, like everything else on this phone, super-light and sleek. The hinge is made out of titanium alloy, which is 42% lighter than stainless steel, allowing the phone to achieve its “lightest and sleekest foldable” status.
Impressively, but also quite expected, the hinge leaves no gap between the screens when the phone is folded, something that some manufacturers are struggling with. My biggest gripe with the hinge is that it’s somewhat springed—the HONOR Magic V2 doesn’t sit halfway folded—laptop style, if you will—on itself, which is essentially half the point of having a foldable phone. On the bright side, HONOR included a case with a kickstand, which does the job.
Another thing that I found strange is that the external screen doesn’t stay on even if the phone is slightly unfolded—the inner screen activates even when the phone is only cracked open a little bit. That means it’s impossible to prop up the phone with its own form factor and use it at the same time, on either screens, which, again, rather defeats the purpose of a foldable phone.
Display
The HONOR Magic V2 employs second-generation Nanocrystal Glass, which gives it exceptional durability and 10 times better drop resistance, certified by SGS. That’s all well and good, it still doesn’t stop me from wincing whenever the phone shuts with a snap. Hazard of the form factor, really.
With 120Hz high refresh rate and a multitude of eye care features, the HONOR Magic V2’s screen is a pretty nice eye candy whether you’re using it for entertainment or reading. The external screen has a peak brightness of 2500 nits, while the internal screen has 1600 nits, which is more than enough to ensure that the screen is clear and readable even under direct sunlight.
If you’re an under-the-bedcovers-reader like me, that’s fine too—the Magic V2 comes with HONOR’s proprietary 3820Hz PWM dimming technology that minimizes eye strain. Combined with the Circadian Night display and dynamic dimming, it’s all too easy to spend the whole night just reading on this phone, and that’s speaking from personal experience!
Performance
Like all other foldables, the large interior screen provides a tablet-like experience, complete with split screens and taskbars. For book-style foldables, the focus is often on the productivity and multitasking capabilities of the phone: video calling + working, watching a video + notetaking etc.
Powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the HONOR Magic V2 can do all that and then more—but I have to admit, the performance hadn’t exactly impressed me.
If we’re just talking about regular daily stuff like social media and word processing, the phone performs exceptionally well, but when it comes to more intensive tasks like gaming, the Magic V2 falls short of expectations.
Take Genshin Impact for example. I tried playing the notoriously graphic-demanding game on the cover screen, which worked fine for a while. An hour or so in, I noticed that the phone was overheating, resulting in noticeable lags in gameplay. Granted, during this session, I’d set all the settings to high—but even after lowering the settings, the phone only performed a little better than when it was at high, insofar that it's just less laggy.
Other more casual games like Clash of Clans and Harry Potter: Magic Awakened were fine, though the overheating issue persisted.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was last year’s flagship processor, so it should’ve been powerful enough for even Genshin Impact, but the slim and lightweight design of the HONOR Magic V2 means that there’s less space for cooling components and the likes that make a flagship phone a true powerhouse. There is a reason why smartphones have retained roughly the same size and thickness over all these years, after all.
Apart from this, some games aren’t yet optimized for foldables, so they may not load properly on the interior screen. Not an issue with the phone itself per se, but this is just proof that foldables have yet to really break into the mainstream.
Camera
The HONOR Magic V2 is equipped with a triple camera setup on the rear: a 50MP wide camera, a 50MP ultra-wide camera, and a 20MP telephoto camera. On the front, it has a 16MP selfie camera on both the external and internal screen.
The benefit of a foldable phone is that you’re able to snap photos in just about any configuration—for example, you can use the external screen as a preview when you’re snapping selfies with the rear camera for better quality, or just to keep an eye on your friend to make sure that they’re not taking unflattering photos for blackmail.
Now, as a foldable, the HONOR Magic V2 can act as its own tripod, which HONOR terms it the Superior Hover Photography Experience. You get to preview your taken photographs on the same screen without having to tap out of the camera, preview photos (making sure your friend isn’t taking unflattering photos for blackmail or just snapping selfies with the rear camera), etc. Mostly things that other foldables can do, really.
But remember: the phone doesn’t actually sit well in “laptop style” without the kickstand case. It can, but you just have to make sure it’s at that very specific angle, or it’s just going to snap itself shut again. That means it’s not “all-angle photography” like other foldables: it’s either exactly 90 degrees or none.
Once again, it’s clear that HONOR has prioritized the phone’s design over just about everything else. The results of the camera are just passable, not bad but also not impressive. Lighting is balanced, with a tendency to oversaturate things slightly, but nothing that can’t be fixed with a little tweaking in the settings.
Battery
On the battery front, the HONOR Magic V2 has a 5000mAh battery capacity, which is quite impressive for how slim the phone is. The phone uses a silicon-carbon battery, the likes of which are more commonly seen in EV cars. The battery is pretty long-lasting, all things considered. It lasted a good day and a half on regular usage with about two hours of casual gaming thrown in.
However, the issue of overheating affected the battery life during gaming. When we were testing the phone with Genshin Impact, the battery life dropped from 99% to 68% within the hour, which was a little alarming to see.
There’s also no wireless charging on this phone. It does come with HONOR’s 66W fast charger in the box, which can juice up the phone to full power in a little over an hour.
