Honor Magic V3 review: The new foldable phone design benchmark

I've always known that a device like the Honor Magic V3 was possible — it was purely a matter of timing. Previous Honor foldables offered strong design but outdated components, but this new model turns things around just seven months after the previous Honor foldable went on sale outside China. And it's debuting at just the right time.

This won't be the foldable phone for everyone. It's not available for purchase in the United States, it gets fewer software updates than its rivals, and there's a bit of an inconsistency problem with its cameras. But what Honor has done with the Magic V3 is make the world's thinnest foldable that you can easily use like a standard phone most of the time, with a super skinny and light build that just so happens to open up to a massive display that's the ideal canvas for running multiple apps or trying out Honor's unique AI features.

As you read my full Honor Magic V3 review, you'll hopefully see exactly what I mean when I say it belongs among the best foldable phones around. And maybe then you'll think about buying one for yourself or lament its lack of availability where you are, and demand more from the brands that you can buy.

Honor Magic V3 review: Specs

Honor Magic V3 review: Price and availability

Honor has kept the Magic V3 the same £1,699 price as the Magic V2 model this new phone replaces. That makes the Magic V3 a little cheaper than most of the competition. In the U.K., you have to pay a minimum of £1,799 for a Galaxy Z Fold 6, or £1,749 for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, with the OnePlus Open still the cheapest of the bunch at £1,599.

As with all Honor phones, the Magic V3 isn't going to be available in the U.S. Enterprising individuals will be able to import one of course, but for most users, it's a far better option to pick up a phone that's in stock where you live for cell coverage and customer support reasons.

Honor Magic V3 review: Design and display

Honor has cracked foldable phone design with the Magic V3. The new phone is a similar size to its rivals, but it manages to still be the thinnest and lightest foldable on the market today. Though this depends on where you live, since as we mentioned, U.S. shoppers can’t get their hands on the Honor Magic V3.

Whether folded or unfolded, the Honor Magic V3 is certainly thinner than the Galaxy Z Fold 6, Pixel 9 Pro Fold and the OnePlus Open. Plus it's lighter than these foldable phones in addition to weighing less than some conventional flagships like the Galaxy S24 Ultra.Whether folded or unfolded, the Honor Magic V3 is certainly thinner than the Galaxy Z Fold 6, Pixel 9 Pro Fold and the OnePlus Open. Plus it's lighter than these foldable phones in addition to weighing less than some conventional flagships like the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

Despite its relatively featherweight status among foldables, the Magic V3 still feels sturdy even when open, similar to when you hold a premium tablet like an iPad Pro. When folded, the Magic V3 feels the closest to a standard smartphone of any foldable I've handled, with no difficulty in typing or swiping imposed by the second layer of phone hiding beneath it. That means you can open or close the phone as you see fit for the task you're doing, rather than the inner display feeling like the one you have to use on rival phones with narrower cover screens.

Moving between folded and unfolded modes feels satisfying too, with the phone springing open and closed once you move the hinge past a certain point. And with the help of Honor Super Steel parts, the hinge is apparently rated for half-a-million folds, more than enough to keep the mechanism going until your next smartphone upgrade.

On the back, we can appreciate the Reddish Brown, Green or Black (pictured) color of the Magic V3, which fits nicely with its luxurious-feeling matte glass back and glossy metal hinge and side rails. Honor's new centered octagonal camera block looks good, though that placement makes it hard to balance the phone on a flat surface whether it's closed or open. Fortunately, there is a case included in the box that comes with a fold-out stand, but it would be better if you could keep the phone stable without an accessory’s help.

The screens on the Magic V3 are a 6.43-inch OLED on the outside, and a 7.92-inch OLED on the inside, both with 120Hz adaptive refresh rates. The two displays also have stylus support — a contrast to the Galaxy Z Fold devices that just include stylus support for the inner screen. It's just a shame that, like Samsung and its S Pen, Honor’s Magic-Pen stylus is sold separately.

For durability, Honor claims its Anti-scratch NanoCrystal Shield and Super Armored Inner Screen technology gives the Magic V3 protection against potential hard and sharp threats. The phone has also been rated as IPX8 water resistant, although to 2.5 metres rather than the usual 1.5 metres. That's good to have but it doesn't fully match the IP48 dust and water resistance that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 offers.

Honor likes to pack its displays with eye health tech, such as 3840Hz PWM dimming on the inside, and 4320Hz on the outside, a method of reducing eye strain. There’s also Dynamic Dimming, Circadian Night Display, and Natural tone systems to adjust the screens' colors to make them both more natural in different lights and different temperatures and brightness levels depending on the time of day.

The newest addition to this set of features is AI Defocus, a system designed to prevent "transient myopia" (temporary shortsightedness) by blurring the screen slightly to make your eyes adjust more regularly, as they would in your off-screen life. It's hard with these features to know if they are doing their job, since if they work, you won't notice a thing. But Honor assures potential buyers that this is backed up by scientific research.

Honor Magic V3 review: Cameras

While not quite up to the standard of its Magic6 Pro flagship phone, the cameras on the Magic V3 are still impressive for a foldable. The Magic V3 offers 50MP main and 3.5x telephoto cameras, plus a 40MP ultrawide sensor on the back. Identical 20MP cameras on the front and inside the phone can shoot selfies or film video calls.

I first tested the Magic V3's main camera against the Pixel 9 Pro Fold with a shot of this crossing near to Hyde Park. Everything's much more lively and colorful in the Honor image, and its dynamic range has helped to capture both the bright light coming through the trees above and the darker shaded areas of the trees.

However, in this comparison against the Galaxy Z Fold 6, we can see the Magic V3 has tripped up a bit. Both phones have made this planter on a canal-side path very saturated, but the Honor does it to the extent you lose definition in the petals, even if its warmer tone is more inviting.

Staying with the Galaxy Z Fold 6, we now have an ultrawide shot from within the Paddington Central Amphitheatre. The colors are stronger in the Honor's shot, and the image is less distorted than the wider-angle Samsung shot. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 has also given its image a higher contrast, letting you make out details in elements like the grass on the steps, but it's spoiled the colors with an unusual yellow-ish cast.

Next is a telephoto camera shot of a beehive on top of a building. Setting aside the difference in zoom lengths between the Honor (3.5x) and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold (5x zoom), the difference we see is that the Honor image is the brighter of the two, while there's more detail and better color balance in the Google version.

Standing in front of some green foliage for an outer camera portrait selfie battle between the Magic V3 and Galaxy Z Fold 6, we see the Honor phone's portrait effect is way worse than the Samsung, eating a big chunk from my glasses. The Magic V3 has also rendered me and my background in cooler and brighter colors, giving it a very different vibe to the Samsung.

Last of all, I checked what regular selfies looked like from the inner cameras of the Honor and Google foldables. The Honor is once again the cooler-colored of the two, with the Pixel 9 Pro Fold providing a warmer and more saturated take on things.

Honor Magic V3 review: Performance

Since it uses the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, you might expect the Magic V3 to offer roughly the same performance. But going by benchmark results, it seems like Honor isn't tapping into the chip's full potential.

It would appear that Honor's not stretching the Snapdragon chip's CPU to its maximum potential, with both the Galaxy and the Pixel beating its Geekbench CPU benchmark scores. However, the Magic V3 does very well on the 3DMark GPU test, scoring higher than any of the other phones here.

Despite some underwhelming results, gaming on the Magic V3 still feels great, provided you don't mind the unusual aspect ratio when playing on the inner screen. Genshin Impact at high settings at 30 frames per second didn't tax the Magic V3 much, but at 60 fps, you can feel the phone heat up quickly, even if it can still keep up with the action at that speed.

Honor packed 12GB of RAM into the Magic V3, on par with rival foldables. But the single 512GB storage option is a generous basic spec, since 256GB is the standard amount offered by the Samsung and Google foldable base models. It would be awesome if Honor also offered a cheaper 256GB model, though, to make the phone more attractively priced, or a 1TB version for users who want even more space for their files and apps.

Honor Magic V3 review: Battery and charging

Honor overshadows the battery capacity of its rivals with a split 5,150 mAh silicon-carbon battery, the material allowing greater density and therefore smaller overall battery sizes compared to regular lithium cells.

This sophisticated battery drained by 20% after playing a YouTube video at 1080p for 3 hours on the Magic V3 inner display at 50% brightness. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 drained by 18% on the same test, while the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold lost 21% of its maximum charge. The Samsung foldable has smaller displays and battery than the more similarly-sized Honor and Google models, but it's not that far ahead of what seems to be the par score for foldables in this test.

The Magic V3 is equipped with 66W wired charging, with the brick still supplied in the box. 50W wireless charging is on offer too, if you buy a separate Honor-made stand. 

The 66W charger managed to fill the phone to 36% full after 15 minutes plugged-in and 67% after 30 minutes, reaching 100% at the 54-minute mark. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold reached 56% and 47% respectively in charging testing, with the OnePlus Open reaching 85% after half an hour with its 67W charger.

Honor Magic V3 review : Software and special features

The Android 14-based MagicOS 8.0.1 brings us typical Honor features and style whether the Magic V3 is open or closed. The large inner display works especially well with MagicOS's unique widgets and large folders, and helps deal with the default app drawer-less home screen layout.

While clearly derived from the iPhone's Dynamic Island, the MagicCapsule is still handy. It's a persistent UI element that lets you quickly return to your currently playing track or video or a running timer. But unlike Dynamic Island, MagicCapsule is quite unintrusive since it can live fully in the top bar of the Android interface rather than sitting around a Face ID cutout.

AI naturally makes an appearance in the Magic V3's headline software features. For instance, Magic Portal provides the ability to drag text and images to relevant apps that pop up on the side of your screen, such as Google Lens or Maps, or Gmail for sending your findings on to another user. Compatibility is mixed outside of the standard Google apps, but that still offers a lot of easily accessible utility, even compared to the standard copy/open relevant app/paste routine.

The Magic V3 offers more AI via Google Cloud, such as its AI Eraser feature. Compared to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold and Galaxy Z Fold 6's own photo erasers, the Magic V3 took the longest to process my sample photo, but the resulting attempt to remove two people walking in front of Duomo di Milano is arguably cleaner than the Galaxy Z Fold 6's attempt, despite the weird pink artefact that's appeared. If that could be removed, it would be on the same level as the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's version.

Image 1 of 4

As well as these features, you get a Face to Face Translation app that lets you use both displays to converse more easily with someone in a different language, similar to what Samsung and Google offer on their own foldables. Meanwhile Honor's Notes app also gets voice-to-text, live translation and user ID abilities that helps reduce the chance of background noise interfering with your transcribing by locking onto your voice alone.

Honor's current update policy for its phones delivers three years of major Android updates and five years of security updates. That's not a great offer given Google and Samsung both provide seven years of full updates, and even the OnePlus Open gets four years and five years of mainline and security updates, respectively.

Honor Magic V3 review: Verdict

I've fallen for the Honor Magic V3 in a way that I didn't for previous Honor foldables, despite their overall quality. This is a seriously good foldable, which makes it even worse that it's not available in the U.S.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, which prioritizes usability and design polish in a similar way to the Magic V3,  is the closest equivalent to the Honor foldable for American buyers. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and its AI and stylus support could also appeal to users who want a pocketable productivity machine, even if the hardware's getting a bit stale. The OnePlus Open, despite being a year old, remains a better foldable overall thanks to its aggressive pricing, strong design and ingenious approach to multitasking.

But the Honor Magic V3 excels with its record-breakingly thin design, meeting the goal of a foldable that's easy to use both folded or unfolded with great displays inside and out. Even if it's still behind on photography, software updates and some aspects of its performance, the Magic V3 could still be the foldable that turns you into a folding phone believer, were you to give it a chance.