We’ve just attended the launch of the Honor Magic V3, the brand’s latest and potentially greatest foldable phone, live at IFA 2024 with CEO George Zhao on hand. Just a couple of months after the release of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, the new foldable competitor is more than ready to take on the Korean market leader.
So, what is the Honor Magic V3? It’s the brand’s latest foldable, with a pretty impressive spec sheet, including a 7.92-inch OLED folding display, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset powering top-tier gaming performance, and a triple camera set-up consisting of a 50MP main lens, 40MP ultrawide lens, and most impressively of all, a 50MP 3x telephoto lens. Still, it’s the phone’s slimline design that makes it a real competitor in terms of the best foldable phones on the market.
As stated in our new Honor Magic V3 review, this thing couldn’t be much slimmer, with the 4.5mm unfolded display only just leaving enough room for the USB-C charging port. Not only does the thin design feel great unfolded, but it also means it feels like a regular candybar phone when you fold it together again, which is more than we can say for some of the other folding phones out there. Unsurprisingly, the Magic V3 is officially the world’s thinnest foldable, which shows just how dedicated Honor is to continuing to break technological boundaries.
While even the best flip phones and folding phones don’t have the best track record in terms of durability, Honor also seems to be pushing innovation in that department. The Magic V3 is IPX8 rated, which is one of the most impressive waterproofing ratings we’ve seen on a foldable while offering ten times more drop and scratch resistance than the V2.
To prove how durable the Magic V3 is, the launch presentation featured a short clip of the phone taking on the ‘washing machine test.’ As you can probably imagine from the name, this saw the expensive flagship tumbling around a washing machine for a 15-minute cycle, coming out completely unscathed.
Not content with just launching the world’s thinnest foldable phone, Honor also used its IFA keynote as a means of introducing the Honor MagicPad 2 tablet. Like the Magic V3, the MagicPad 2 is also super slim, with a 5.8mm design, but its display goes one better than the smartphone, offering 144Hz refresh rates for super smooth tablet gaming.
We also saw the Honor Watch 5, a rival to the best smartwatches from Google Pixel and Samsung, featuring a 15-day battery life, 1.85-inch AMOLED display, and precise GPS tracking. We’re going to try and get our hands on both of these new offerings while we’re here at IFA.
In terms of pricing, there’s some good news and bad news. The bad news is that, like previous Honor devices, it doesn’t seem like the Magic V3 or MagicPad 2 are coming to the U.S. anytime soon, so we don’t have any details on how much they might cost in U.S. dollars. The good news is that the V3 starts from £1,699 in the UK, which is cheaper than both the Z Fold 6 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, while the MagicPad 2 begins at £499. Pre-orders for the Magic V3 and MagicPad 2 are now live via the official Honor site in the UK and Europe.