First shown off at IFA 2018 along with the Kirin 980, Honor has now officially unveiled the much-anticipated ‘Magic 2’ in China. Honor Magic 2 comes with a full-screen display, a sliding mechanism for the front camera, and a total of six cameras. It also has its very own AI voice assistant, at least for the Chinese market.
Price and Availability
The Honor Magic 2 comes in three different configurations and has been priced starting at 3,799 yuan (~ Rs 40,000) for the 6GB+128GB variant. You’ll, however, need to shell out 4,299 yuan (~ Rs 45,000) for the 8GB+128GB variant and 4,799 yuan (~ Rs 51,000) for the 8GB+256GB variant.
The Honor Magic 2 will be available in blue, teal and red – with a gradient added to it, like is the case with most modern phones these days. It will go up for pre-order tomorrow and will be available for purchase starting November 6.
Specs and Features
In an attempt to extend the screen to the edges, phone makers are now going back to the sliding parts. Honor Magic 2 follows the lead of Oppo’s Find X and Xiaomi’s Mi Mix 3 with a manual slider for the selfie cameras, sensors and more.
Cameras
The Magic 2 packs triple cameras on the front and rear to win the award for the most number of image sensors on a phone. The triple cameras on the rear are a 16MP RGB sensor, a 16MP super-wide angle lens, and a 24MP monochrome sensor. As for the front cameras, which are hidden in the slider, Honor has included a 16MP+2MP+2MP setup to give you a total of six cameras.
Backed by the dual-core NPU of the Kirin 980, Honor says the phone is capable of identifying 60+ categories and 1500+ scenes automatically. Honor Magic 2 also supports ultra-wide-angle night mode, which sounds rather exciting!
The sliding mechanism not only holds the front camera but also the company’s 3D Face Recognition technology, which will help unlock the device with just a look. Honor says it has developed the 3D facial recognition in house and it can record tens of thousands of feature points on your face to make it more secure than regular face unlock.
Display and Processor
The Honor Magic 2 sports a 6.39-inch Full-HD+ AMOLED display, with a 1080 x 2340 pixels resolution. It’s said to bring a super high contrast and high color gamut to the table for an enhanced viewing experience. There’s an optical under-display fingerprint scanner here, which is 32.48 square millimeter in size.
As one would’ve expected, the Honor Magic 2 is powered by its parent Huawei’s in-house Kirin 980 chipset, coupled with Mali G-76 GPU, up to 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and up to 256GB of internal storage. There’s also a 3,400mAh battery in tow, which supports super-fast 40W charging.
With the release of this flagship device, Honor has followed the lead of its Chinese rivals and today debuted its own AI voice assistant ‘YOYO’ at the launch event. It’s part of the company’s updated Magic UI 2.0 ecosystem for China.
Honor Magic 2 runs Android 9.0 out-of-the-box, with the company’s EMUI 9.0 skin on top. As for connectivity options, the device brings along AI-powered dual-frequency GPS navigation, Cat.21 wireless connectivity (speeds up to 1.7Gbps), Bluetooth 5.0, and dual VoLTE among other things.
So, how do you like the Honor Magic 2? Does it seem like a worthy rival to the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.
