Honor Magic V3 review: The prestige

The Honor Magic V3 arrives into an already tense showdown. It launches around the same time as fellow foldable phone, the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and comes with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 still very much looming over this particular corner of the phone market.

The unique selling point that Honor is keen to highlight is the Magic V3’s slim and lightweight build, and with good reason: this phone is barely any thicker than a standard phone when folded and unfolds to ludicrously thin proportions. It’s the most comfortable foldable phone I’ve tested thus far but, for this kind of money, phones need to offer more than just a solid design. So how does the Magic V3 stack up against the industry’s big dogs?

Honor Magic V3 review: What you need to know

Diminutive dimensions aside, the Magic V3 has plenty of high-end specifications that should help it go toe-to-toe with Samsung and Google. The flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor is tucked inside, along with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space. There’s also an above-average 5,150mAh battery that supports 66W wired charging and 50W wireless.

The foldable display is a 7.92in AMOLED square with a 2,344 x 2,156 resolution and an adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate. The 6.43in cover screen is an OLED panel with a sharp 2,376 x 1,060 resolution and LTPO technology allowing for a 1-120Hz dynamic refresh rate.

Both also support PWM dimming (up to 3,840Hz on the internal and 4,320Hz on the cover) as well as the new AI defocusing technology, which strategically defocuses the display with the aim of further reducing eye stress and and deterring myopia (nearsightedness). That’s obviously tricky to fully test but I like the idea of AI being used in this way.

There’s a 20MP (f/2.2) selfie camera on each display, while the octagonal rear module houses a further three lenses. The main camera is a 50MP (f/1.6) unit and alongside it are the 50MP (f/3.0) telephoto camera, offering a 3.5x optical zoom and hybrid zooms up to 100x, and the 40MP (f/2.2) ultrawide lens with a 112-degree field of view.

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Honor Magic V3 review: Price and competition

One initial advantage that the Honor Magic V3 has over the competition is its price. There’s only one model coming to the UK, with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and it’s set at £1,699 – the same launch price as the Honor Magic V2.

The main competition is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and this starts at £1,799 for the 256GB model. For the equivalent 512GB, you’ll have to pay £1,899, and there’s also a 1TB variant for a whopping £2,099.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is another pricey one. The 256GB model is £1,749 and the 512GB variant goes for £1,869 – both of which are the same as the first Google Pixel Fold.

Finally, a dark horse in this race comes from Honor’s fellow Chinese brand OnePlus, with the OnePlus Open. At £1,499 for the 16GB/1TB model, this is considerably cheaper than the rest of the competition but it doesn’t have as robust an IP rating, and omits features like wireless charging.

Honor Magic V3 review: Design and key features

Folded up, the Honor Magic V3 could easily pass for a regular smartphone. It comes in three colours – Black, Reddish Brown and the Green reviewed here – and there’s a large octagonal camera housing on the rear. It weighs a fairly solid 226g and measures 74 x 9.2 x 157mm (WDH). Unlike standard phones, however, it can then unfold into a 145 x 157mm square with a ridiculously thin depth of just 4.35mm.

Despite the airy proportions, the Magic V3 feels solid in the hand and has a laundry list of durability credentials. The phone is rated IPX8 for water resistance, meaning that it can survive a 30-minute dunk, there’s a layer of Honor’s proprietary CrystalShield glass sitting over the cover display for scratch protection and the steel hinge is apparently good for 500,000 folds – that’s 100,000 more than than the Magic V2 and works out to roughly 274 times per day for a total of five years.

The power button on the right-hand edge doubles as a fingerprint sensor and both selfie cameras support face unlocking – though neither includes the Honor Magic 6 Pro’s 3D TOF sensor, so we aren’t getting iPhone-levels of security and responsiveness here. There’s also an IR blaster on the top edge, which is a fairly rare inclusion in modern smartphones that allows you to use your phone as a remote control for your TV.

Honor Magic V3 review: Displays

Both displays add decent brightness to their lists of accolades. In manual mode, I recorded the brightness at 522cd/m2 on the internal display and 745cd/m2 on the cover screen. Both were much higher on adaptive brightness with a torch shining on the light sensors, hitting 983cd/m2 and 1,515cd/m2, respectively.

The internal display recorded a peak of 944cd/m2 when displaying HDR content. As the test panel was situated over the crease, and that is the least bright part of a foldable display, I initially thought that this figure may not be telling the whole story. After folding the phone to display the test window on one panel only, however, the result was roughly the same. The external display is a lot more straightforward, hitting an absolutely outstanding peak of 2,102cd/m2 when displaying HDR content.

I was also suitably impressed by the colour accuracy on display. With the aforementioned HDR content, you’ll want to stick with the Vivid colour profile, but Natural offers excellent accuracy on both displays. The internal display recorded an sRGB gamut coverage of 96% and a total volume of 97.4%, with an average Delta E colour variance score of 0.97 (anything under 1 is excellent). The cover screen was even better, with sRGB gamut coverage and volume of 99.2% and 101%, respectively, and an average Delta E of just 0.84.

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Honor Magic V3 review: Performance and battery life

The 3.3GHz Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset is as powerful a performer as ever but the Magic V3 is competing in the major leagues here, and competition is fierce. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 sets the standard, outperforming the Magic V3 by around 5% in the single-core benchmarks and 25% in the multi-core.

Gaming is the one area in which large-screen foldables really shine and the likes of Genshin Impact and Asphalt Legends Unite looked terrific on the Magic V3’s expansive internal display. Both ran very smoothly but, as you can see in the chart below, the framerates you’re getting here aren’t quite as good as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6. The Magic V3 ran close enough to 60fps for my tastes but anyone who wants the highest frame rates possible may find the Galaxy more to their liking.

Battery life is on the better end of things. Running our looping video test on the internal display saw the Magic V3 lasting for 21hrs 19mins – an excellent result for a foldable and only around an hour short of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold. The external display was even better, lasting for a fantastic 33hrs 17mins. So between the pair, you should get plenty of life out of the Magic V3.

Where the Honor Magic V3 really outshines the competition is its charging speeds. The 66W capacity brought the battery to 60% in 30 minutes and filled it in around 55 – a far cry from the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s 1hr 15mins. Only the OnePlus Open’s 66W charging could match it, fully juicing the (smaller) battery in around 40 minutes.

Honor Magic V3 review: Software

The Magic V3 runs on Android 14 with Honor’s MagicOS 8 launcher on top. This is usually one of the more convoluted Android variants but, to its credit, the Magic V3 is relatively light on the bloatware front (though AliExpress and booking.com continue to turn up like bad pennies). There are still some quirks that irritate me – the Apple-inspired split notification shade and lack of an app drawer as default continue to feel obnoxious – but overall, this is one of the more refined implementations of MagicOS that I’ve tested.

Useful tricks from other Honor phones released this year pop up here, including the Magic Capsule, which expands around the selfie camera and displays additional information from the likes of the timer, media playback and recordings, similar to Apple’s Dynamic Island. We’ve also got AI suggestions in both an app folder on the home screen and the control centre, which learns from your behaviour and suggests apps based on what it anticipates you’ll need next. This gets smarter the more you use it and I found it pretty handy in testing.

Apps as a whole are still largely under optimised for the foldable format, and unless you’re watching one of the four things on Disney Plus that are still shown in 4:3 format, anything you stream on the inner display will have thick black bars above and below the content. The big canvas is a natural fit for sketching, and the phone is compatible with Honor’s Magic Pen stylus – though, just like Samsung, this isn’t bundled in with the phone, so that’s another £80 to take into account.

Software support is promised at four years for OS updates and five for security patches, which is the same as the Magic V2 and would be considered good if it wasn’t for Google and Samsung both now offering seven years of support. With the kind of money we’re talking about here, Honor really needed to step up its support offering, so the fact that it’s fallen behind the competition is perhaps the biggest challenge to its recommendation.

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Honor Magic V3 review: Cameras

The main camera is once again a 50MP unit but the aperture has widened since the Magic V2, now at f/1.6. More light passing through the camera allows for some fantastic dynamic range, with shots in good lighting producing wonderfully detailed images that are bursting with punchy colour and strong contrast.

The wider aperture also allows this camera to perform very well after dark. Detail capture is excellent and there’s no big chunks of visual noise clogging up the image. The only criticism I have here is that several of my night shots were washed in an unnatural green tint. It’s not dramatic enough to be a dealbreaker but it’s still not ideal.

The 50MP (f/3.0) 3.5x telephoto camera captures excellent optical zoom shots, matching the colouring and exposure levels of the main lens. Things get more smudgy the deeper down the zoom scale you go (100x images are barely worth the price of admission) but you can still get decent images with the 10x hybrid zoom.

I don’t have as much praise for the 40MP (f/2.2) ultrawide camera but it still has its merits. The image is solid enough, with good exposure and colouring that is close (but not identical) to the main lens, but the contrast is notably stronger here and you lose some detail in the corners of the image.

Throw in a pair of solid selfie snappers and a broad video offering that can shoot up to 4K at 60fps and capture 10-bit footage, and this is a very well rounded camera suite. You also get the same three Studio Harcourt-inspired filters that we saw on the Honor 200 and Honor 200 Pro – except it’s now easier to take selfies with these because you can use the external display to properly line up your shot.

Honor Magic V3 review: Verdict

The slender build makes for a good headline but like clowns in a tiny car, there’s a surprising amount of quality features smushed into the Honor Magic V3’s svelte frame. Performance and battery life, while not quite on par with Samsung, are still very good for a foldable, and the cameras are versatile and effective. The displays are also both wonderful panels, with the external display in particular standing out – if you kept this phone folded and only used that screen, it would still be one of the best phones around.

I still think the lack of optimisation for the full-screen format is a downside to foldables in general and MagicOS continues to mildly confound me but even with these issues in play, the Honor Magic V3 is a seriously impressive piece of kit. The Samsung may be a stronger performer but the Honor is still fast and long-lasting enough that these differences don’t matter. Unless you’re intent on getting the best gaming frame rates on your new foldable phone, I’d strongly consider picking the Honor Magic V3 over the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6.