Honor Magic V3 Review: Thin as a pancake!

The Honor Magic V3 features a triple camera system on its back, consisting of a wide angle camera, an ultrawide, and a periscope telephoto system. The main camera uses a Sony IMX906 stacked sensor with 1/1.56" size and f/1.6 aperture.

The ultrawide camera has a 40MP sensor under a lens with an f/2.2 aperture and 112-degree field of view. The periscope system uses a 1/2.51-inch 50MP sensor with f/3.0 aperture and 3.5x optical zoom.

There are two front cameras, one on the cover screen, and one on the main screen. Both use 20MP sensors and f/2.2 apertures. But these are all specs, and we all know that image samples are the ones that matter. You'll find them below.

Photos taken with the main camera look great, with good detail, and the dynamic range is also pretty wide. The saturation is on the higher end, and it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but overall, the exposition, white balance, and tone of the samples are all very pleasing to the eye.

Night images are, as always, a bit of a hit and miss, as they rely heavily on algorithms and your steady hand. Even with the night mode turned off, there's some post-processing going on, applying HDR and other tricks to get more details out. Generally, the end result is good, with the best photos being the ones snapped with the main camera. The ultrawide and telephoto both tend to produce artifacts, and there's some loss of detail in low light conditions.

The periscope zoom system is a handy tool when you want to frame a distant object and you don't have access to it, but also as a portrait tool. At 3.5x zoom, images are quite good, detailed, and there's minimal digital processing going on. Backgrounds can turn a bit soft and the colors are slightly muted (we would say natural, but they look muted compared to the images from the main camera), but overall the Magic V3 can take decent images at its 3.5x optical zoom range.

The selfie situation is a feast, really. You have two dedicated 20MP selfie cameras on both screens, and also the ability to use the main camera system to satisfy your narcissistic ideations. The latter yields the best results, as you can imagine, and you can also apply Harcourt effects to your self portrait. The bokeh is also pretty convincing, and we would use the main camera for such purposes, leaving the punch-hole ones for videocalls and other non-beauty-critical tasks.

The Honor Magic V3 comes with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor onboard, the current Qualcomm champion. Granted, the phone gets hot under extreme benchmarks, and the score is somewhat lower than other phones sporting the same processor, but it's understandable.

This ultrathin 4.35 mm body doesn't have a lot of cooling space, especially when you factor in the 5,150 mAh battery. The fact that Honor was able to cram in everything and still get these dimensions and weight, is very impressive.

But back on the synthetic benchmarks. The scores are slightly lower than the main competitor Honor is gunning for (Galaxy Z Fold 6), but real life performance is smooth and fast.

Honor was the first brand to commercially offer silicon-carbon batteries in smartphones outside China with the Honor Magic 6 Pro. The V3 sports the third-generation silicon-carbon battery tech, and thanks to it, we have a huge 5,150mAh battery onboard. We say huge because the body is so thin that it's really impressive. The phone houses a flagship processor, a periscope zoom camera, and a dual battery arrangement of the aforementioned capacity.

The stereo speakers inside the Honor Magic V3 are decent, we tested them against the Honor Magic 6 RSR, and, of course, the Porsche Design phone is far superior with Bluetooth-speaker-like volume and quality.

The Magic V3 is not the loudest phone out there, and there are some squished frequencies, but overall the quality is good, and there's no distortion at max volume. The only gripe we have with the speaker's arrangement is that they are positioned solely in the left wing of the phone, and when you unfold it, you get a strange one-sided sound.

Haptics are a bit weak though, it seems that the vibration motor is positioned in the right part of the body, so you feel a bit disconnected, vibration-wise, when you use it folded and tapping on the cover screen. When you unfold the V3, things get better, but haptics aren't the strong side of this device.

At the end of the day, the Honor Magic V3 managed to complete its mission. It beats the Galaxy Z Fold 6 by a hair (0.2 in our rating system). There are arguments to be made in favor of both phones, but if you want the thinnest foldable on the market (at the moment), you should try and get the Honor Magic V3.

We say "try" because availability is always a problem (as this thing is not officially sold in the US), but when there's a will, there's a way. The Magic V3 improves on every single area compared to its predecessor and finally achieves the foldable wet dream—it really feels like a normal phone when folded.

More importantly, it can compete not only against other foldables, but also against conventional bar phones of the more rigid nature. The only drawback here is the price, you have to be committed to the foldable concept to spend around 2000 euros on a phone. It's worth noting, though, that the Honor Magic V3 starts at 1,699 British Pounds Sterling for the 12/512GB configuration, and the similar storage option for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 costs 1,899 pounds. So, there's also that.