Honor Magic V2 Review: The THINNEST OF THEM ALL

There are a lot of foldables in the market, and in some way or another, they feel weird at some point. Whether its their form factor, the cover display – there’s always something that makes a foldable look and feel very un-natural when used. But not with this foldable.

Table of Contents

Design

Starting with the design — when laid flat, you would not think that this is a foldable smartphone, aside from the cover display that looks like any other regular smartphone. We meant that in a good way. It is also crazy thin at 9.9m when folded and 4.8mm when unfolded.

When it comes to the made of this device, the Honor Magic V2 is made out of a premium materials; Corning Gorilla Glass on both the front and back panel, and a magnesium alloy frame. It is also not that heavy at 237 grams.

The cover display is a 6.43-inch LTPO OLED panel. The external display almost has the traditional smartphone aspect ratio with a slight curve to it towards the right edge of the screen making it very ergonomic. There’s also a cut out for the selfie camera up top.

Placed at the back is the usual Honor branding and the triple rear-camera module – which we will be exploring more later.

For buttons and ports, when folded, up top we have the speaker, an IR blaster, and the secondary microphone.

On the right side we have the volume rocker and the sleep/wake button that doubles as a fingerprint scanner.

Down at the bottom we have the Speaker grille, USB Type-C port, main microphone and the dual SIM card tray.

Overall, the design of this device is very premium and is very natural to use even with one handed operation. We like how thin the phone gets when unfolded, but we are a little bit concern for its durability. Although we tried bending it while folded (still with a little care though) and we saw that it bends slightly more so when we tried bending it outward when unfolded, there you will really see that it is a little bit fragile.

Displays

For the displays, we have here a 6.43-inch LTPO OLED with a resolution of 2376 x 1060 external display and a sizable 7.92-inch LTPO OLED screen with a resolution of 2344 x 2156. Both external and internal displays have support for 120Hz refresh rate. Also, on both displays, we will find a hole punch cut out for the selfie camera.

Both the external and internal display are very workable under direct sunlight as these displays can reach up to a maximum of 2500nits peak brightness.

The folding mechanism of this devices good, although you will feel a little limited to the folding angles as it only stays flat. When we tried putting the half of the display folded 90 degrees, after a while it snaps back to its original position, but we don’t really mind.

Now when it comes to the audio quality, the speaker is not so loud though, but it is well balanced. Thanks to that stereo speaker setup, watching contents on the Honor Magic V2 is quite immersive. BUT then, we still do recommend using a TWS for a much more immersive experience.

Cameras

Checking out its cameras, we have a 50MP Wide Camera with f/1.9, another 50MP ultra wide camera with f/2.0 and a 20MP telephoto lens with f/2.4. All of these sensors that we mentioned also has OIS built in. For selfies we have a 16MP camera on both inner and outer displays.

If you are interested on how these cameras performs, here are some images we took.

Images taken from both all the cameras are good enough for social media postings. There is no noticeable difference when switching lenses, which is a good thing.
The images we get from these cameras has good contrast and color reproduction, as well as balanced HDR images when taking photos in broad daylight. Night mode is okay, but not really a night and day difference between a dark photo taken using the normal mode.

For selfies, they are a bit soft to our liking but thankfully, that can be adjusted through the settings.

For videos, the rear cameras can shoot up to 4K at 30fps. All rear camera sensors has OIS making sure that all the videos you took are stable.

Performance

Powering the Honor Magic V2 is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 4nm processor that features an Adreno 740 GPU. The unit we have has 512GB of on-board storage with 16GB of RAM. But there’s also a 256GB and 1TB storage option.

Performance wise, it is what you would expect on a smartphone that has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor. Everything is snappy, from multitasking, like jumping from one app to another, or even with 2 windows opened with one app in full screen, things are running snappy.

Playing games on the other hand is smooth with little to no hiccups – and much more immersive; we might add, thanks to that folding display. One thing that we noticed during our time with this device is that, it heats up easily, not to the alarming point though, but it is worth mentioning.

Unfortunately, the unit we have is the engineering unit and that being said, we cannot run all our trusty benchmarking apps, although we a pretty sure that it’ll perform just as fine as any other smartphone that has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor.

Battery

When it comes to the battery, we have here a 5,000mAh capacity with support for 66W supercharge as well as 5W reverse wired charging. In our case, with browsing the web under Wi-Fi, playing games from time to time, as well as taking a few photos and videos, we run at 11% at the end of the day which we think is good.

We put this device to the test to see how long it takes before the battery gets drained and we got a total of 18 hours and 23 minutes from our Video Loop Test. In our book, it is decent and might even last you a whole day even if you are a heavy user.

OS, Apps and UI

When it comes to its UI, the Honor Magic V2 runs on Android 13 skinned with MagicOS 7.2. The UI is pretty clean, there’s little to no bloatware aside from Google suite apps that comes pre-installed on this device.

There are a slew of customization options in the mix like changing the theme of the UI, customizable icons, and many more ensuring that you can tailor fit this device to you personality.

Multi-windowing is available, You can open up to a maximum of 3 apps all at once; two apps running on small window style, and one app in full screen. Do note that there is no drag and drop option which might be a deal breaker for most users.

Conclusion

Overall, the Honor Magic V2 is a good device. It is good productivity tool as you have plenty of screen real-estate at your fingertips. We admit that there is no special about this phone when it comes to features and performance – because it is all expected from a device at this tier, but, the fact that it doesn’t screen Foldable when you are using it?

We mean, the inner display is just hiding on that very thin chassis, giving you that feeling as if you are using a regular smartphone, but when you need a bigger display you can just easily flip it out and you have twice that bigger display than the cover screen and for us, that’s just simply amazing.

We have to break it to you but unfortunately, this device won’t be available in our shores anytime soon as this might be a China-exclusive device, but just to give you a perspective on the pricing, the 512GB variant is priced at CNY 9,999PHP 80,601USD 1,374INR 116,416EUR 1,308 or roughly PHP 76,700USD 1,307INR 110,801EUR 1,245CNY 9,518. It is expensive though, but not as expensive as compared to other foldables out there.

And there you have it, this is our quick hands-on of the Honor Magic V2. Let me know what do you guys think about this device in the comments section below!

HONOR Magic V2 specs:
7.92 inches LTPO OLED @ 2272×1984 pixels main display
90Hz refresh rate
6.43 inches OLED Cover Display @ 1060 x 2376 pixels
120Hz refresh rate
Qualcomm SM8550-AC Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset
1x Cortex-X3 3.36GHz + 2x Cortex-A715 2.28GHz + 2x Cortex-A710 2.28GHz + 3x Cortex-A510 2.0GHz
Adreno 740 GPU
16GB RAM LPDDR5 RAM
256GB, 512GB, 1TB internal storage
Triple-rear cameras:
• 50MP F1.9 main PDAF, Laser AF, OIS
• 50MP F2.0 ultra-wide AF
• 20MP F2.4 telephoto, PDAF, 2.5x optical zoom, OIS
4K @ 60fps (10-bit)
16MP F2.2 front camera
16MP F2.2 selfie camera
4K @ 30fps, gyro-EIS
Dual nano SIM with 5G, 4G/LTE
WiFi 6e
Bluetooth 5.3
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS
IR Blaster
NFC
USB-C
Fingerprint scanner (side-mounted)
MagicOS 7.2 (Android 13)
5,000mAh Li-Po battery w/ 66W SuperCharge, 5W reverse wired
156.7 x 145.4 x 4.7 mm (Unfolded)
156.7 x 74.1 x 9.9 (Folded)
231 grams (weight)
Black, Silk Black, Silk Purple, Gold