HONOR Magic V2 Review – This Foldable is Fun to Use

This is the HONOR Magic V2 or known as the thinnest foldable smartphone in the wold. After more than a month of its official launch in the country and using this device, we are honestly impressed with this flagship offering of the very aggressive brand HONOR.

So if you aren’t yet decided for this device, and didn’t take advantage of the HONOR Watch GS3 and a Harman Kardon Aura Studio 4 HiFi Speaker freebie worth PhP 28,000 then its alright as its important to know and understand your reasons before purchasing.

So here is our rundown for this foldable offering from HONOR

HONOR Magic V2 Specs

Hold it like a regular smartphone

When folded the HONOR Magic V2 is a candybar smartphone footprint gives you a 6.43″ OLED cover at 9.0mm. When unfolded the inner display will give you a huge  7.92″ as a main display at just 4.7mm thin. At 237g light, it’s also even lighter compared to other foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, but remember that its still a bit heavier compared to a regular smartphone.

Nevertheless thanks to this approach HONOR was able to spread out the device footprint and thus why they were able to make it just 4.7mm thin when unfolded. Making their claim as the thinnest foldable smartphone in the market.

The body of the device is feels premium with a glass body with a matte glass back finish in a premium purple hue that is multi-color refracting. Combined with the metal bezel and titanium back hinge with tapered in the edges, the HONOR Magic V2 holds solid while no annoying fingerprint marks will be seen as the glass is matte.

At the side is the gap for the HONOR Magic V2 with the tapered and smooth edges, making you have some learning curve to open the device as it will take some time to get used to the thin bezels as leverage to open the foldable.

When you unfold it 

Welcome a 7.92″ OLED display with high refresh rate of 120Hz, plus DCI-P3 color gamut range for a popping display that is more realistic versus other OLED displays.

Fun and Great Camera to Use

The rear camera’s ensemble is impressive with high quality a 50MP Ultrawide lens, a 50MP Main Camera and 20MP telephoto lens making it an all-good set of lenses to be utilized. Compare that to even other flagship smartphones until now incorporating a useless 2MP macro sensor.

The result? this camera set combined with the software of HONOR is a ridiculously impressive and a fun camera to use either day or night. We are happy to say that the shutter speed, color accuracy and even HDR capability is at par with other flagship smartphones in the market.

The 50MP main shooter is fast enough to be responsive in most situations especially if you are a point and shoot person, even portraits are cripys and with great foreground separation that its really story telling.

Night capability of the HONOR Magic C2 is also equally impressive with a proper detection for what is dark vs party lighting. Meaning dark clothes are detected as clothes and not mistaken as night. Even an ultrawide shot of a concert venue is very detailed that it has no problem in capturing the LED setup vs the audience properly.

The 16MP front camera is also snappy with great color accuracy, even in challenging lightings its able to capture sharp enough photos that its more than acceptable for social media.

Whatever HONOR did in the Magic V2’s camera system, they hit the right spots to make this a fun to use smartphone to snap moments with confidence. If we have just once complaint it will be that the camera system interface is too sensitive where a slight swipe can suddenly change mode to like video or portrait, making you be more careful when you are in the camera interfance.

Snappy Performance

The HONOR Magic V2 is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor with a 16GB RAM for intense multi-tasking, in our experience this was able to handle anything we throw at this smartphone especially in snappy changing between apps and even loading time of large files is flawless.

Thermal wise, only a minor head buildup was experienced behind near the camera module. But nothing to the point that this heat was thermal throttling the whole device and cause annoying jumps in graphics.

Battery and Charging

A 66W charging brick is provided that can full charge in less than an hour for the 5000mAh dual-cell battery system that is made of Silicon-Carbon which is a step up from the usual lithium-ion batteries cause of being more dense in capacity / power and improved management of thermals for longevity.

We are glad to say that the HONOR Magic V2 lasted us for a whole day of intense use including social media, work messaging, casual photography, and daily Genshin Impact comission runs.

Some concerns / obervations

1. Video content isn’t maximized to the screen size due to the aspect ratio – Due to the candybar form factor when unfolded the main display is a 4:3 aspect, which isn’t that friendly for movies and videos that are mostly 16:9 ratio when played. As a result, when playing videos there will be a huge black bezel both top and botton of the device.

One upside of this foldable screen aspect ration is that you will be able to maximize the multi-tasking mode even further with better scaling of vertical apps like Facebook and IG side by side in the screen.

2. App compatibility.– Building a foldable smartphone is challenging for any brand as the technology is fairly new, considering the scaling of apps on the main display HONOR is still to improve the continuity of some apps when opening the HONOR Magic V2 as it will tend to refresh the app to accomodate the app changing display. So if you are browsing in your Facebook news feed and opened the main display, the news feed will refresh by force unfortunately.

HONOR Magic V2 Conclusion – Fun to use foldable

Everyrthing you would ask for a foldable is here in the HONOR Magic V2, from having a bright & color screen, thin and portable, snappy performance, detailed camera, fun modes either candybar or using the main display, and a battery life that can last a whole day of hectic use especially for professionals.

Though not perfect in software adaptation this is really easy to forgive as HONOR is constantly improving this. We prefer this candybar type approach of the form factor that HONOR used versus the thinner display used by the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, thanks to this the apps doesn’t have to adjust to a weird aspect ratio display and keep you familiar to what you see either folded or unfolded.

One thing is for sure, this HONOR Magic V2 is one rare smartphone foldable that feels less serious but more fun to use cause of its very capable and easy to use package. Priced at Php79,999 (16GB+512GB) for a 16GB + 512GB configuration, this product is competitive versus Samsung’s foldable that is crossing the 6 digit price range.

Plus you can still get a free HONOR Watch GS3 smartwatch if you purchase now (As of writing), which is not a bad deal as you’ll be sure to use the smartwatch indeed.