Introduction :

In an effort to challenge Samsung’s market dominance, Chinese foldables are entering foreign markets left and right, and the Honor Magic Vs is the most recent to do so. The Magic Vs, a second-generation folding from Honor, improves upon the V from a year ago by enhancing the moving parts, enhancing the camera system, and adjusting the displays and battery.

Late last year, we got a sneak peek at the Magic Vs, and while the hardware on that device was ready for prime time, the software wasn’t. You will receive the typical test findings for this one, including battery life (spoiler: solid) and camera samples, which we were unable to test three months ago.

Samsung’s Z Fold4 can run at 120Hz, but the Magic Vs’ 7.9-inch folding OLED display is still limited to 90Hz. Honor claims that the 6.45-inch cover display, which can update at up to 120Hz, is now brighter than the V’s.

Specifications for Honor Magic Vs at a glance :

Body: 160.3×141.5×6.1mm, 267g/261g; Glass front, glass back or eco leather back, magnesium alloy frame, titanium alloy folding mechanism.
Display: 7.9″ Foldable OLED, 1B colors, 90Hz, HDR10+, 1984x2272px resolution, 10.3:9 aspect ratio, 382ppi; Cover display: OLED, 1B colors, 120Hz, HDR10+, 6.45″, 1080x2560px, 431 ppi.
Chipset: Qualcomm SM8475 Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (4 nm): Octa-core (1×3.0 GHz Cortex-X2 & 3×2.5 GHz Cortex-A710 & 4×1.80 GHz Cortex-A510); Adreno 730.
Memory: 256GB 8GB RAM, 256GB 12GB RAM, 512GB 12GB RAM.
OS/Software: Android 13, Magic UI 7.1.
Rear camera: Wide (main): 54 MP, f/1.9, 27mm, 1/1.49″, 1.0µm, PDAF; Ultra wide angle: 50 MP, f/2.0, 13mm, 122˚, AF; Telephoto: 8 MP, f/2.4, PDAF, 3x optical zoom, OIS.
Front camera: 16 MP, f/2.5, (wide).
Video capture: Rear camera: [email protected]/60fps (10-bit), [email protected]/60fps, gyro-EIS, HDR10+; Front camera: [email protected], gyro-EIS.
Battery: 5000mAh; 66W wired, 5W reverse wired.
Misc: Fingerprint reader (side-mounted); NFC; Infrared port; stereo speakers.

90Hz inside Display, 120Hz on the front :

The bendy display inside a foldable is what makes them so popular, and the one on the Magic Vs isn’t terrible at all. It is a 7.9-inch OLED with a size of 1,984×2,272px and a 10.3:9 aspect ratio (382ppi pixel density). The spec sheet’s maximum refresh rate is 90Hz, which is a little bit lower than the 120Hz capacity of devices like the Galaxy Z Fold4, Mix Fold 2, or the Oppo Find N2.

On the other hand, the exterior display of the Magic Vs does update up to 120 times per second, just like the others. It offers a size advantage over the Find (5.54″) and better proportions than the Galaxy (23.1:9) with a 6.45-inch diagonal, though you could argue the Mix Fold 2 wins on both counts in this case (6.56″, 21:9).

Both screens have 1920Hz pulse-width modulation for brightness control, so even those with the most sensitive eyes shouldn’t notice any flicker. On both spec documents, there is support for HDR10+ and 10-bit colour.

When adjusting the slider manually, we recorded a maximum brightness of 594 nits on the internal display. However, when the Magic was unfolded and put in bright light, the maximum brightness increased to 876 nits.

The Galaxy Z Fold4’s maximum brightness is 1000 nits, the Mix Fold 2’s maximum brightness is 1054 nits, and the Find N2’s maximum brightness is 1216 nits. These are not astoundingly high figures. The others may be a little bit livelier, but we wouldn’t say the Magic’s outcomes are poor. For what it’s worth, the Honor has significantly more brightness than the Mate X2 and Mate Xs 2, which are somewhat similar.

Hardware-checking applications have verified the Magic’s claimed HDR10+ compliance, and HDR streams were available on YouTube. Netflix wasn’t as helpful, but this might change once the phone reaches the market and is added to the streaming service’s whitelist. Due to the Widevine L1 certification, we have access to FullHD viewing on Netflix even as it is.

There are four selections available on the refresh rate page. The maximum refresh rate for both displays is fixed at 90Hz for medium and 60Hz for standard. High will give you a screen that runs at 90Hz internally and 120Hz externally. There is no activity-based downswitching in the majority of these hard options.

Dynamic mode falls somewhere between Medium and High, keeping things mostly at 90Hz but occasionally bumping to 120Hz on the cover screen for specific apps. When idle, it still won’t change to 60Hz.

Honor Magic Vs battery life :

The Magic Vs has the biggest battery of any current foldable, with a capacity of 5,000mAh; the other large ones have batteries in the range of 4,500mAh. The Mix Fold 2 and the two-year-old Mate X2 are two choices with bigger screens, but the Honor’s bendable display is bigger than those on the Galaxy and the Find, so the additional mAhs wouldn’t hurt.

During our tests, we recorded 11:33 hours of Wi-Fi online browsing while using the large monitor and a constant 120 Hz phone speed. We measured 14:20 hours during video viewing, this time at a fixed 60Hz refresh rate. The contact time of 31:24 was also reliable. The Magic Vs’ Endurance ranking came out to 85h after accounting for a largely average standby draw.

charging voltage :

The Magic Vs comes with a 66W adaptor labelled Honor SuperCharge and is capable of 66W charging.

With that adapter, it took us 50 minutes to go from empty to 100%, and 30 minutes into the procedure, we were at 85% (and 50% in the first 15 minutes as well). Although we haven’t tested Honor’s recently unveiled Magic5 Pro, the foldable can’t quite equal the Magic4 Pro’s 30-minute flat-to-full turnaround time.

The Magic Vs does, however, outperform its bendy competitors, especially in the first 30 minutes. Naturally, the Galaxy Z Fold4 does poorly in evaluations of charging speeds.

Speaker test :

Two speakers make up the Magic Vs’ speaker system, one on each end of the top portion of the handset (when folded). The top speaker performs two functions: it emits through an earpiece slit and a grille in the frame.

When holding the Magic in portrait orientation, whether in phone or tablet mode, the top speaker receives the right channel, which is a little uncommon because most other implementations give the top speaker the left channel. The phone will send the appropriate channel to each speaker in landscape mode in order to mirror the phone’s spatial orientation. Anyhow, each speaker will also produce some of the sound from the opposing channel, albeit at a much reduced volume.

The Magic Vs was given a “Very Good” grade for loudness during our testing, making it the loudest of the large-sized foldables and also louder than the majority of phones in general. Only the Mate Xs 2 offers greater bass and only marginally clearer vocals, so we’d say the Magic sounds better than the rest of its class.

Magic OS 7.1 running on top of Android 13 :

On top of an Android 13 core, the Honor Magic Vs we have here uses a custom version of MagicOS 7.1. And unlike Huawei’s software builds, which are in some way constrained, it is a completely functional version of Android 13 that includes full support for the Google apps suite.

In an effort to distance itself from its Huawei EMUI origins, Honor has changed the name of its Android overlay from UI to OS with this version. Although there are some differences, if you’ve used a fairly recent Huawei phone you’d feel right at home because Magic OS (or UI) and EMUI have shared a lot of similarities over the years and there are still remnants of that shared past. The Magic Vs is obviously in line with Honor’s most recent non-bendy models, even if they may still be on earlier Magic versions, if and where the two diverge.

While there are some minor differences between UI 6 and OS 7, the Magic overlay’s overall appearance and feel have not changed. The task switcher and notification/quick settings are the same as well, which is one area where the most recent EMUI and its Control centre differ. The Settings menu also doesn’t appear in the least bit different.

Large folders and the card bar, which appears beneath app icons to show that the app supports cards, are also available here (another name for the in-house widgets).

Speaking of widgets, the Magic OS on the Magic Vs lacks some useful EMUI elements like widget stacking and combined widgets.

You can have the onboard assistant pitch apps that it thinks you might be predisposed to use based on prior experience with a Yoyo suggestions card/widget.

Performance Honor Magic Vs :

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is listed as the processor inside the Magic Vs. Yes, it’s not Gen 2, but considering that it’s the flagship chipset for 2022, it’s still a platform with more than enough capability.

Regarding the CPU clock frequency, Honor gives the figures as 3.00GHz for the Cortex-X2 super-powerful core, 2.50GHz for the mid-range cluster of 3x Cortex-A710s, and 1.80GHz for the efficiency-focused 4x Cortex-A510s.

You’ll notice that the frequencies are the same as those on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 CPU if you have a habit of memorising meaningless numbers and you watch the smartphone industry (non-plus). How plus is the SD 8 Gen 1 in the Magic Vs, given that one of the main distinctions between the plus and non-plus versions of the SD 8 Gen 1 is the clock rates of the X2 and A710 cores?

Anyway, the Honor foldable’s international model has 512GB of storage and 12GB of Memory. Lesser 12GB/256GB and 8GB/256GB versions are also available in China.

Triple camera setup On the rear :

The three cameras on the Magic Vs’s back are arranged in an ultrawide-wide-telephoto arrangement, which is fairly traditional in theory. Five selfie cameras total, with two on each monitor.

The 54MP Sony IMX 800 sensor is used by the primary camera. Its optical format is 1/1.49″ and its pixel dimension is 1.0 m. The unusual optical format results from the 8,768x6144px native resolution’s peculiar 1.43:1 aspect ratio, which is also unconventional (4.28:3 or 12.8:9, depending on how your brain is wired). The 4:3 aspect-cropped photos from that imager do arrive in 4-to-1 binned form, measuring 4,096×3,072px for a total resolution of 12.5MP.

Although the 1.04x crop factor isn’t enough to make sense of all the numbers at once, there is a non-stabilized lens in front of that sensor, and the EXIF data on the full-res images shows a 23mm equivalent focal length compared to a 27mm on the cropped 12.5MP images. However, I diverge. The f/1.9 lens value.

An unnamed 50MP sensor with an unidentified optical format serves as the foundation for the ultrawide camera. Although we can’t corroborate Honor’s claimed coverage of 122 degrees, we can say that it is very wide—wider than most. The lens not only has a wide field of view, but it can also focus both close up and far away, opening up a “macro” mode in addition to its greater general utility for taking pictures of nearby objects.

There is also a telephoto camera with an 8MP resolution and a 3x optical magnification. OIS is present in this one. The picture data has an 81mm equivalent focal length and an f/2.4 aperture.

The two similar selfie cameras have 24mm-equivalent, f/2.45 aperture lenses with 16MP sensors.

The shutter release button on the Magic Vs winds up directly in the display crease if you attempt to use it in an unofficial “tripod” mode. The phone will also transition to the cover display if you fold the phone past a certain point, but you can’t see it or hit the shutter trigger because it’s now lying on the table.

There isn’t a simple method to take a picture. There is a choice for palm shutter release in the settings menu, but it is specifically only available for the selfie camera, so that is a no. You could attempt to squeeze the volume rocker, but doing so would mean covering the preview with your hand, negating its usefulness. In addition, do you really want to risk dropping your $1600 Magic by awkwardly stretching your hand?

The best option, in our opinion, is to use a Bluetooth release (which is how we took our samples), but that requires a separate device to carry around and doesn’t address the problem that the back of the device still has a full-screen active camera UI that can be accidentally touched to change modes or other things.

Of course, many of these issues have already been raised with other foldables, but most if not all of them have since been resolved. Given that the Magic Vs is Honor’s secon

d version and that foldables are no longer a novelty, such issues ought to have been resolved.

Selfies :

Each display on the Magic Vs has a single matching selfie camera. They take decent 16MP pictures with decent detail—if not precisely sharp—and minimal noise. Although skin tones and dynamic range are both respectable, total colour vibrancy isn’t quite as high as we’d like.

Mind you, operating the Magic unfolded may produce more shaky results due to the relative awkwardness of taking photos with a tablet by yourself.

Conclusion :

There are many things about the Magic Vs that are commendable, but there are also many areas where Honor should have succeeded with its second-generation mobile. One of the Magic’s main missed opportunities is the absence of a true camera function on the cover display when it is opened. By doing so, it gives up one of the form factor’s key selling points. Although the inherent benefits of a large display in a physically small device exist and productivity is largely taken care of by the software, we still want to snap selfies with the back camera! Here, the Galaxy is in the lead.

There are also a couple of features missing which are normally not to be expected from a handset of this kind, but the benchmark that the Honor is measuring up against has them, so they’re hard to overlook. We get that Honor was going for lightest with the Magic Vs, but how much heavier would it have been with a wireless charging coil inside? Water resistance is probably tougher to achieve, likely more so from a warranty and after sales perspective than the actual sealing, but in the end the Honor isn’t rated for it. The Galaxy covers both of these bases.

There is no denying that Honor’s foldable performs well in the basic areas. Its displays are difficult to fault (the internal 90Hz refresh rate is a pardonable offence), and we’d contend that they outperform that standard in terms of usability. Even if the great battery life isn’t enough for you, quick charging will have you back up and going in no time. The cameras have their quirks, but besides the subpar daylight footage, they are adequate. None of these are contests that the Galaxy can win with ease.

However, the Honor is losing the crucial one for total value for money out of all the Galaxy comparisons that are deciding one way or the other. Although it may seem absurd for cellphones costing around €1500, just because you obviously have a lot of money to spend on a smartphone doesn’t mean you don’t want to get the most out of it. Well, that won’t be provided by the Magic Vs.