Getting started with the Honor Magic V2: a folding, premium and (almost) featherweight smartphone

Still young on the folding smartphone market, Honor only offers one model of this type in Europe, the Magic Vs, a variation of a Magic V launched in China at the very beginning of 2022. It is its successor which appears today, again on the Chinese market, but with a European launch in sight, which we can expect for the end of the year.

The smartphone is logically an update of the Magic V, and it is clearly gaining in maturity. If we find the main lines of the first city – difficult to really innovate when it comes to creating a folding smartphone in “fold” format -, the Magic V2 illustrates the brand’s efforts to offer a smartphone much more compact. We feel a certain lightness in hand, the device not exceeding 231 grams (a little less than an iPhone 14 Pro Mac), when a Magic Vs or even a Galaxy Z Fold 4 weigh around thirty grams more. The effort is visible if we compare it to the Magic V, which for its part displayed 288 grams.

If the smartphone is lighter, it is by the choice of materials such as a titanium alloy composing its hinge, and undoubtedly because the manufacturer has revised its dimensions downwards, despite a screen with the diagonal maintained at 7 .92 grams. The device, open, thus measures 156.7 x 145 x 4.3 mm, revealing a thinness surpassing that of the Mate X3, Huawei’s filiform smartphone. When folded, the terminal measures 156.7 x 74.1 x 9.9 mm, the two halves of its screen showing no “gap”. We also appreciate the appearance of curved edges, like those of the Mate X3, matched to a photo block also all in curves. Too bad, however, that the smartphone is not entitled to an IPX8 type certification attesting to its durability in passing, and that it ignores the eSIM.

Screens that promise to be very bright

The Magic V2 nevertheless promises many improvements compared to its predecessor. Its two screens (6.43 inches outside, 7.92 inches inside) have common characteristics: they are OLED Full HD+ panels with a dynamic refresh rate thanks to LTPO technology (up to 120Hz). The folding screen promises a maximum brightness of 1600 cd/m² and the cover display announces up to 2500 nits, in the wake of the Xiaomi 13 Ultra; we will check if the conditions to be met to benefit from it are also precise. Anyway, these two screens satisfy the eye, and deserve a passage under our probes to assess the exact brightness. And we note that the central fold of the interior screen, very discreet, is similar to that of the Magic Vs.

Under the hood of the Magic V2 sits the latest premium chip from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. This is flanked by 16 GB of RAM and storage of 256 or 512 GB, and even 1 TB. It is therefore no surprise that the smartphone, during our first tests, shows flawless fluidity of use. It is to be hoped that the brand’s cooling system, which includes a vapor chamber, is efficient, to limit heating during gaming type uses, but also during charging. Note in this respect that the Magic V2 houses a 5000 mAh battery, despite its thinness, and that it is compatible with a 66 W charge. However, wireless charging is still not part of it.

Finally, let’s finish with the Magic V2 photo block. All in curves, as we mentioned above, it has three modules. The main one is based on a 50 megapixel sensor with wide-angle optics (f / 1.9), which seemed to us to offer high sharpness, but also a slightly saturated colorimetry; the second is entitled to a sensor of the same definition, with stabilized ultra-wide-angle (f/2) optics. The telephoto module of the Magic Vs improves here, since we have access to a 2.5x zoom accompanying a 20 Mpx sensor. On the front and inside the device, a 16 Mpx sensor is in charge of selfies. On the video side, it is possible to film up to 4K at 60 fps.

For now, the Magic V2 is only announced in China, running Android 13 accompanied by MagicOS 7.2, with the promise of three years of software updates and five years of security patches. Its price is set at 8999 yuan (around €1135 at the current exchange rate) in 16/256 GB, and at 9999 yuan in 16/512 GB (around €1260); it will logically cost a few hundred euros more on the Old Continent. Remember all the same that the Magic Vs, launched a few months ago in France, costs for its part 1599 €, for an announcement at 7999 yuan on its domestic market.