Honor Magic V3 Review: World’s Thinnest Folding Phone

September 6, 2024:

With a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor and 12 GB of RAM, performance is silky smooth. You also get a generous 512 GB of storage. I played hours of Kingdom Rush: Alliance on the Magic V3 without a stutter, and it never got warm. The big screen is ideal for gaming and video, but I enjoyed reading on the Kindle app too. I prefer a laptop for work, but the Honor Magic V3 also proved handy as a surrogate second screen when I was missing my dual monitor setup.

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.

Final Hurdle

Hand holding a foldable mobile phone in the fully open position with the inner screen displaying app icons and the timedate

The Honor Magic V3 is a delightful device. Honor’s hardware is deeply impressive, but there’s always a but. As I found with the Honor Magic 6 Pro (7/10, WIRED Review), its software doesn’t quite reach the same heights. Pleasingly, the Magic V3 feels far more polished, but I still encountered a few wee irritations.

The transition between the front and inside screens occasionally went wrong and displayed something stretched or squashed. Once, the inside screen was completely unresponsive, but closing and opening fixed the issue. I got sick of the battery warning about the Oura app but could not find any way to stop it. Certain apps, like the Play Store, kept displaying the wee red icon to show something new long after there was nothing new to see.

Hand holding slim mobile phone showing the large camera on the back

The Honor Magic V3 runs Android 14 with MagicOS 8 on top, but it is easy to customize and comes with just a sprinkling of bloatware. You can also decide how to take advantage of the dual screen with multiple windows and different layouts in the settings. You can expect four years of OS updates and five years of security patches (short of the seven years Google and Samsung promise, but not bad).

The obvious competitors for the Magic V3 are the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 and the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and it’s a familiar trade-off: Do you opt for slick software or superior hardware? The Xiaomi Mix Fold 4 is the closest device in terms of design, but won’t be released outside of China, so the Honor Magic V3 is a better choice for most folks. Despite the minor foibles, this is a truly excellent folding phone, maybe even the best folding phone you can buy right now. That said, you still don’t need a folding phone.

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