Honor Magic V3 review: foldable style and power in a lightweight unit

Foldable phones can often end up being clunky but the Honor Magic V3 is lightweight and easy to use even in one hand. While at first glance, it seems like a slam dunk in the world of foldable smartphones, how does it fare when you dig into the details?

And how does it compare against the best camera phones on the market? I got one in for review, and spent the last several weeks with it as my main phone to find out.

The HONOR Magic V3 is an impressive all-rounder where the foldable screen is far from a gimmick. It genuinely enhances the experience of using various apps, reading e-books, watching videos, and more.

That’s paired with an impressive camera – although that’s probably not its strongest suit – and a sturdiness that belies its thin hardware. Here’s a closer look at our experience with the thinnest foldable phone on the market.

Honor Magic V3 review: Key specifications

Design and screen:

The design is clearly well thought out when it comes to the Honor Magic V3, taking aesthetics and sleekness to a new level. The lightweight feel of the smartphone is achieved through incredibly thin panels, at just 9.2 mm thick when folded and 4.4 mm when open.

The lightness of the phone means that you can fold and unfold it with one hand, meaning you can easily switch between its two modes on the go. You’d be hard-pressed to use it folded out with one hand as the screen literally doubles in size, but you could flip it out to read a book or watch a video on a wider screen without needing to use your second hand.

The Honor Magic V3 admittedly looks more polished when folded together, thanks to the glass screen on the front. When folded out fully, rather than at an angle, after just a few times, you do end up seeing the crease in the foldable OLED screen. However, that feels like complaining that water is wet: it’s seemingly an unavoidable part of having a foldable screen.

When actively in use, the crease becomes less and less noticeable, hardly being disruptive when watching videos or using apps in the folded-out format. What’s more, and perhaps most importantly, the crease doesn’t impact clarity or appear to actively damage the phone. Indeed, where foldable phones have a reputation for lacking durability, we didn’t notice any impact on folding the screen in and out on the stability of the screen.

Either folded or unfolded, the size and shape will take some getting used to. Folded is a narrower, thicker feel than most will have come to expect from a modern smartphone, while folded out is, of course, much larger. The shape when unfolded is closer to a square than a tablet, making for a unique shape that works well – once you’re used to it.

Features and performance

The MagicOS 8.0.1 is equivalent to Android 14 and doesn’t need take much adapting to for those used to Android smartphones. It’s got all the smoothness you’d want from a modern smartphone, scoring 5,646 points in multi-score testing with Geekbench 6 and a 14,866 GPU OpenCL score.

It might not be the most powerful phone on the market but that doesn’t stop it from introducing some intriguing AI features that you’d certainly be benefiting from on a day-to-day basis. Various ‘Magic’ features allow you to automatically extract text from a photo, or drag content from one app to another – most useful when folded out – so you can drag addresses into Google Maps, or copy content from an email over to WhatsApp, and so on. It’s a simple feature but one that speeds up the process of copy and paste-ing across your phone.

It’s not just Magic AI features either, but also ones powered by Google, liek Magic Eraser to clean up photos, Face-to-face Translation for fast-paced communication in different languages, and an auto-transcriber that can take notes on conversations in real time. As a journalist, that’s a major plus, but would also prove useful for anyone who spends a lot of time on work calls.

Camera

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AI comes into the camera capabilities as well, with auto-capture shots using AI Motion Sensing and AI Portrait Engine helping to beef up your selfies. When using the ultrawide features, I did get some distortion around the edges on some shots, but not all. It’s a slightly worrying inconsistency but seemed to be more to do with circumstances like lighting rather than serious tech flaws.

When on the move, you can easily shoot action on the camera, with responsiveness on all cameras that’s bound to impress. That also holds up on video and on video calls, offering flexibility for whatever you want to do.

Price

At £1,700 before discounts, it’s far from cheap – but it is relatively cheap when it comes to foldable phones. This is still an emerging form of smartphone and you pay for that new tech premium. Considering there’s no deal-breaking flaw that we encountered in the Honor Magic V3, it feels like a fair price.

The camera isn’t anything to write home about if you’re comparing to a modern Pixel or iPhone but it’s also strong enough that you probably won’t notice a difference unelss you’re a professional smartphone photographer. With all the other features impressively strong, it feels like a steal.