The Honor Magic V3 is the best book-style folding phone I have used. The daring design is impossibly slim and light, there are some interesting AI features, and it ticks all the traditional flagship boxes with a versatile camera, long battery life, and fast charging.
It feels like a regular Android smartphone when closed, much like the new Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but you can always pry it open to play games or videos on the big screen. The big downside is it's not officially sold in the US, but for folks in the UK or Europe seeking something different, the slick Magic V3 demands a look.
This feature uses AI to defocus the display and reduce the risk of transient myopia (nearsightedness), which is prevalent because we spend so much time staring at close-up displays.Honor mentions various innovations designed to reduce the potentially damaging impact of the screens on our eyes, but the one that caught mine was the AI Defocus Display technology.
The AI features Honor showed off in the Magic 6 Pro are here. Magic Text lets you quickly extract text from an image. Magic Portal lets you drag content, such as a paragraph of text or a screenshot, over to the right to drop into another app, like Gmail or Notes. It works best for dropping addresses into Maps.
The 50-MP periscope camera supports 3.5X optical zoom and up to 100X digital zoom, though things get muddy the higher you go. It is well matched, with the main lens and handy for capturing something from a distance. The weak spot is the 40-MP ultrawide, which distorts at the edges and produces weirdly unnatural-looking photos. It crams plenty in but fails to color-match the other two lenses, often creating an oil painting effect (see the camera samples).
The two front-facing cameras are rated at 20 MP apiece and suffice for selfies and video calls.
Battery life is excellent.
Honor’s third-generation silicon carbon battery has a 5,150-mAh capacity, and I was surprised to find it regularly lasted two days between charges. When you need to top up, you can charge wirelessly at up to 50 watts or plug in for up to 66 watts, enough to fully charge the Magic V3 in under an hour. It warns you to unfold the phone to juice up the dual batteries at maximum speed.
