Mario Bautista
I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. That’s not actually true. I love sand. It’s hot and smooth and feels like a holiday when your bare feet hit the beach, no matter whether you’re abroad or close to home. But it does get everywhere, that I can’t deny.
Everywhere includes fingernails, inside socks, and, as I found out while testing the Honor Magic V3 over the course of a month, inside hinges. After a lovely day of using the foldable’s camera capabilities, I got home to discover a skin-crawling crunching whenever I opened and closed the device. A few hours of cleaning sorted the problem out for the most part, but I still get the occasional piece of grit falling out of the otherwise smooth mechanism. So be careful.
Honor’s latest foldable iterates on the previous in every possible way. It’s not revolutionary, no matter what the marketing might tell you, but it’s capable and reasonably priced compared to its competitors. Despite small issues with the phone, which I’ll detail over the next thousand-or-so words, I found myself enjoying it more than the V2, and sometimes more than my Google Pixel daily carry.
I’ll start with how it looks. The Honor Magic V3 is bolder than its predecessor, with a gorgeous phthalo green back and an obnoxiously large camera, which I love. Like the V2, it folds completely flat and the screen crease is never noticeable. However, I have issues with the case.
While it comes in the same gorgeous green as the phone itself, the case doesn’t fit the phone. The back slips on nicely enough, but the side panel comes too far forward by a milimetre. This is likely to allow space for the front piece, which acts as a frame for the screen, but it also doesn’t fit. It’s too big, and the size affects the phone’s functionality. With both parts of the case attached, you can’t swipe from the edges of the screen to go back a page. With just the back case, you can’t swipe from left to right, but right to left swiping still works, so that’s the option I went for.
The case also has a strange bezel that surrounds the camera, which makes the thin foldable quite a lot thicker. It also folds out as if to be a stand, but it’s not strong enough to function correctly, and the unfolded device is unbalanced when propped up like this.
Other than the case, the Honor Magic V3’s design is great. However, it’s always the software that has held the brand back in my eyes. There’s a marked improvement in MagicOS for the V3, but it’s still not perfect. Home screen organisation is easier than ever, setting up the phone is a doddle, and most native apps work well. I still dislike the bloatware that’s automatically preinstalled, but once I removed Facebook and TikTok, I was happy with the device.
The camera is a mystery to me. The pictures it takes with those three enormous lenses look great, and the zoom is far better than that of my Pixel 6 Pro, which I had previously thought impressive. Where Google’s AI-assisted zoom makes photos look like paintings at high zooms, Honor has worked some magic (pun very much intended) to make its pictures look great even at 50x or a boggling 100x magnification.
Photos of a rhinocerous at around 10x and 50x zoom
However, there are simple things that it messes up. The portrait mode – a go-to for me when taking a thousand pictures of my daughter a day – finds it difficult to tell what’s foreground and what’s background. When it finally makes its mind up, the focus is off and barely works. It’s a shame, but something that could be improved in future with software updates.
The battery life remains excellent, and the phone can easily last for two days between charges with moderate use. This is especially impressive when you consider the power that the phone conceals in its green shell, the quality of the resolution and framerates, and just how much the Honor can do.
However, I believe the biggest question mark hanging over the Honor Magic V3 is not whether it’s better than other foldables, but whether it’s better than Honor’s own Magic6 Pro, the non-foldable version of its flagship smartphone. The Magic6 Pro can do most things that the Magic V3 can for a lower price and without a few of the foibles that come with the folding. The case fits better, the screen is a more agreeable size for typing (the V3 is slightly too small to type comfortably when folded and slightly too big when unfolded), and the internals are largely similar.
The camera can do macro photography too
If you need a massive, squareish screen, then go for the foldable. But, being completely honest, I don’t see the need for it in most situations. It was handy for taking notes – a shopping list on one side and my online retailer on the other – but few other situations called for it. It was nice to watch a YouTube video on a bigger screen, or fold the device halfway (the hinge is stiff enough to allow for that) to stand it up for a better viewing angle, but most apps just centred themselves on the larger screen and added borders on each side.
The Honor Magic V3 is by no means a perfect phone, but it’s not one to overlook. It falls behind established Western brands in some places, but excels and exceeds them in others. When the battery lasts so long and the phone looks this stylish while it does so, that’s a trade off I’m more than happy to make.
