Honor Magic V3 Review: Thin as a pancake!

Behold the Honor Magic V3! The thinnest foldable on the market. It's thinner than an iPad Air and thinner than any smartphone you can think of. I was thinking of clever ways to start this review, but sometimes the blunt truth is the best way to go.

The Magic V3 is the latest iteration of the Chinese foldable, and its aim is to take on the Galaxy Z Fold 6. A couple of days prior to the official launch of the V3, Honor dished out a very bold and aggressive PR campaign, showing a tiny engraved message, engraved on the Honor V3's hinge. It was a dig at Samsung in the form of an "apology" to all Galaxy Z owners.

Long story short, it says something along the lines of "Sorry if you're feeling betrayed, our phone is better."

I thought the days of companies trolling each other were long gone, but this bold move shows the confidence Honor has in its product. And it is great. It's unbelievably thin, it sports a large battery, the chipset onboard is flagship-grade, the camera system is potent, and the charging is super fast.

But is it great "for a foldable" or just great? We're going to find out!



Our new rating system deserves a few sentences here. We've revamped everything, and we have a very thorough and scientific approach to rating phones. There are 10 different areas we evaluate, and each one consists of many smaller components you don't see in the final score. Also, different areas have different weight toward the final score, as some are more important than others. Finally, if you think our scores have suddenly become very conservative, you're right. Our top-rated phone at the moment (the Honor Magic 6 Pro) has an aggregated score of 8.0 out of ten, and a score of 7.5 is normally awesome. We've done this to leave ourselves wiggle room for future phones, which no doubt will get better and better ratings. With that out of the way, let's start the review.

Let's start with an overview of the Honor Magic V3 specs:

Okay, guys, I know that pancakes in the US aren't that thin, but where I grew up, they're almost transparent. So, I'm keeping the analogy! This thing is very, very thin. At 4.35 mm, it almost feels too thin. Looking at the bottom, this foldable is barely able to house the USB-C port.

When you fold the Magic V3, you get an almost compact phone with a 6.4-inch screen and around 9 mm thickness. I know the difference to other foldables isn't that huge (the Galaxy Z Fold 6 measures 5.6mm unfolded and 12.1mm folded), but a couple of millimeters make a huge difference. It's uncanny!

Now, after I've blabbered about the thickness of the device for far too long, let's check out the design. The phone uses exotic materials for its construction, such as Special Fiber (similar to fiberglass, Kevlar, and carbon fiber), Super Steel (the hinge should withstand 500,000 folds and unfolds), Super Armored Inner Screen (nanoscale coating allegedly making the flexible screen 500% more scratch-resistant), and NanoCrystal Shield for the cover screen.

While these are a lot of "Super," and "Special" words slapped here and there, the end result is quite sturdy and feels very premium in the hand. It's still a foldable phone, though, so I won't be doing scratch or drop tests.

It's worth noting that the stereo speakers are mounted in the left wing of the phone, so when you unfold it, they remain left side, resulting in a bit weird audio experience if you keep the phone vertical.

The volume rocker is on the left wing, while the power button resides on the right, and they're offset in such a way that when the Magic V3 is folded, you have good and intuitive access to both.

The back is matte and repels fingerprints quite well, the hinge is very shiny and polished, and the camera system on the back is housed in a circle, which in turn resides in an octagonal polished metal frame. Overall, the phone looks very stylish and premium.

The available colors are Black, Green, and Reddish Brown, all looking classy and somewhat business-y. The Magic V3 is also IPX8 water resistant, so you don't have to worry about a splash or two.

The box is also very stylish (which is to be expected, considering the asking price), it almost feels like a present box. The fast charger, the USB-C cable, and the included case are all nested in separate spaces, there's a magnetic lock on the box, and it's also made from high-quality cardboard. So much for saving dolphins and the planet (we actually prefer a well-stocked retail box).

Speaking of the included case, it's a leather coated back cover with a tiny additional frame for the cover screen. There's a metal ring around the cutout for the camera, which mimics the shape and material of the one around the camera itself, and it also serves as a kickstand thanks to a tiny hinge.

Moving to the display, or should we say displays of the Honor Magic V3. Honor has gone for uniformity when it comes to resolution, pixel density, and refresh rate between the inner and cover screens. Both are OLEDs with 402 PPI pixel density, and both use LTPO tech to provide 1-120Hz dynamic refresh rates. You even control both screens from a single tab in the settings menu.

This results in a very smooth and coherent visual experience. The inner display is also quite bright at over 1000 nits, the crease is still visible, but it's one of the less prominent we've tested so far.

There are some interesting health-related settings in the menu. In addition to the high frequency pulse width modulation (3840Hz and 4320Hz for the inner and cover screens, respectively), there's now something called Defocus Eyecare. It uses myopic defocus stimulation to relieve refractive stress on the eyes. You also get the Natural Tone toggle, which automatically adjusts tone depending on ambient lighting, and the Eye Comfort setting as well, which filters blue light.

Display Measurements:

In terms of biometrics, the Honor Magic V3 has facial recognition and a side-mounted capacitive fingerprint scanner, housed in the power button. Now, when you have a device that's 4.35 mm thick, you can only use so much space for a fingerprint scanner. It's tiny, and sometimes it fails to read your finger. Most of the time, however, it works as intended, so no huge problems here.

The facial recognition relies on a single front-facing camera, so it's not at the same level as FaceID or the facial recognition on the Honor Magic 6 Pro, for that matter.

Here's a quick comparison video against the Galaxy Z Fold 6. This video is recorded in 4K at 30 frames per second and shows that both phones are quite close. The Honor produces a bit warmer tones, but the Galaxy captures more detail in some situations, and less noise, especially in low-light conditions and using the ultrawide camera. When it comes to the main camera, image stabilization and overall quality, these two are close. What do you think?

The phone comes in just one storage flavor with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of onboard memory. There's no microSD card slot or anything of the sort present.

The Honor Magic V3 comes running MagicOS 8.0.1 out of the box, based on Android 14. There's a lot of customization at hand, you can choose the home screen style (drawer or everything on the home screen), the lock screen style, icon size, placement, and colors, fonts, text size, etc.

You can use split screen mode easily, and open apps in split screen or floating mode, you can drag them to the corner of the screen and access them from the side menu, and you can also split them horizontally or vertically and save them as pairs.

The AI features onboard include the Magic Portal, which allows you to select text and images from basically anywhere on the screen and drag them to the corner to send them to different apps (Facebook or Instagram for a post, Gmail to attach to an email, Notes, etc.).

There's a new Face-to-Face translation option that allows you to translate between 10 languages with voice-to-text live translation and vice versa. There's also AI suggestions in the form of a folder on the main screen and also in the taskbar.

What's even more interesting is that Gemini is available on our test unit, and this includes Gemini Advanced with Gemini Live. We're not sure how this collaboration works exactly, and we've reached out to Honor to ask for additional details, as we know that Gemini Live is a subscription service that's available on the new Pixels with a one year gratis period.

There are other goodies from the Google AI Cloud available, such as Magic Eraser, you can edit annoying colleagues out of your pictures, and we're pretty sure more AI features will be coming to the Honor Magic V3.

Overall, MagicOS looks more and more polished, and what's even cooler is that the Magic V3 will receive four major OS updates and five years of security patches. It's not on par with what Google and Samsung are offering in this department, but four years sound pretty solid.

The Honor Magic V3 obliterates the competition when it comes to web browsing and video streaming, and only loses by an hour and a half to the Z Fold 6 in our gaming test. This may be down to thermal throttling.

In real life conditions, the battery lasts a full day of heavy use easily, even if you use the inner screen most of the time. With more mixed and moderate usage, you can stretch this to two days (if you use the cover screen most of the time), which is again very impressive given the size of the phone.

The charging situation is also very impressive, the Honor Magic V3 supports 66W of wired charging power and 50W wireless (though you will need Honor's proprietary wireless charger to get the full beans). How they found space for the wireless charging coil in this 4.35 mm body is beyond us.

A full charge with the bundled fast charger takes only 48 minutes, and a quick 15-minute top-up will get you to 40%. We didn't get the chance to test the full potential of the wireless charging, as we're still waiting for the Honor SuperCharge wireless charger.