The Honor Magic V3 is a serious feat of engineering, packing a bigger battery, more advanced camera setup and more powerful specs than its predecessor into a phone that’s both thinner and lighter. Like the latest foldables from Samung and Google, it feels like there’s once again solid progress being made in the foldable space.
All of this comes at a steep cost, of course – the £1400/€1700 outlay is eye-watering – but you’re at least getting a bang-up-to-date spec sheet, including a new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. As for its triple camera setup, this now includes a 50-megapixel wide-angle shooter, a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto and an upgraded 40-megapixel ultrawide. There’s also a bigger 5150mAh battery, as well as a pair of LTPO OLED screens – the 7.92-inch foldable screen and 6.43-inch cover display.
Design
The Honor Magic V3 is available in three different colours – Black, Green or the Reddish Brown we received. It’s more on the red side, but offers a terracotta-type colourway that looks fantastic. It’s pleasant to see something a little different to the sea of grey and black slabs we’ve become used to in the phone world. Combined with the rose-gold accents on the side of the Magic V3, it looks excellent. Against the Magic V2 RSR Porsche Design we looked at earlier this year, the standard Magic V3’s back panel is entirely flat, but with a textured, leather-type finish. Its camera bump is more pronounced with a large black circle and a glossy, hexagonal rose-gold edging that’s in-keeping with the rest of the phone.
Even in spite of the larger camera bump, the Magic V3 manages to be an even slimmer phone that its predecessor. I’m not entirely sure how, but Honor has managed to trim down this phone to be just 9.2mm, a full 0.7mm slimmer than the Magic V2. For reference, the new Samsung Z Fold 6 is 12.2mm and Google’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold is 10.5mm thick. Honor’s option remains the only one to break the elusive 10mm barrier in quite an exciting game of foldable phone limbo.