TL;DR
- HONOR’s Magic V3 is getting ready for its international debut at IFA 2024.
- The company’s latest Magic Portal software gets optimized for big foldable screens, supporting easy comparisons.
- AI-powered translation and image editing tools help round out HONOR’s suite.
For fans of foldable smartphones living in the West, it’s easy to go a bit myopic and lose track of all the options out there. Sure, you’ve got your Samsung, Google, Motorola, and OnePlus folders, but there’s a lot of interesting hardware out there in other markets, like the incredibly thin HONOR Magic V3, introduced in China just last month. This one, though, is not content to stay put, and HONOR has already shared plans to extend availability globally. As the company gets ready to show the Magic V3 off to the world at IFA, it’s shining the spotlight on some of the phone’s more interesting software features.
The HONOR Magic V3, you may remember, measures just 9.2mm thin, making phones like the Galaxy Z Fold 6 at 12.1mm feel huge in comparison. It’s got a big 7.92-inch folding screen, 6.43-inch cover display, and runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Pricing in China starts at 8,999 yuan (~$1,240) for the 12GB/256GB configuration, although anything could happen with that figure as HONOR gets the phone ready for international sales.
While that svelte hardware is what shoppers will be gawking at, there’s some fun stuff happening on the software side, too. In a new promo video, HONOR kicks things off by showing a preview of the latest changes to its Magic Portal AI-powered “app concierge.” The major thing here is being able to take advantage of that big inner screen to work with multiple pop-up windows at once (not unlike what you can do on Samsung phones), including dragging and dropping content between them — without messing with share menus.
We’ve also got translation software taking advantage of that dual-sided screen to show both sides of the conversation at once, HONOR’s own version of Google’s Magic Eraser, and a look at text-to-speech (with more translation) in HONOR Notes. It all seems fine, but like we said — the hardware looks like the star of the show here.
IFA 2024 gets started in just under two weeks, so it shouldn’t be long now before we get the rest of the story on HONOR’s global plans for the Magic V3.