Honor Magic V2 and V2 RSR Porsche Design review

Still Magic OS 7.2, and still Android 13 underneath

The Honor Magic V2 is still running MagicOS 7.2 on top of Android 13 - that's essentially the same software we had on the Vs before it, with only a 0.1 increment on the in-house layer. Either way, MagicOS means you get fully-functional Android with support for the Google apps suite, unlike Huawei's software builds, which are limited in one way or another.

Word on the street is that there's ongoing beta testing of an Android 14 upgrade for the foldable, but we're already way more than fashionably late with this review to be waiting any longer for another OTA. The Magic6 Pro from a couple of months ago is on Android 14 with MagicOS 8, but not so on the V2.

MagicOS 7.2 on the V2 looks and feels a lot like the 7.1 on the Vs, only with a bit of extra polish. You get the large folders functionality and the cards bar that sits under app icons to indicate that the app supports cards (another name for the in-house widgets). Still missing is an app info button upon long press - to get to the app permissions and such, you need to go through the main settings menu.

MagicOS 7.2 basics

On the internal display, you get the same homescreens as on the cover one, two of them side by side. Certain apps that have a tablet UI will switch to that, as will the settings menu.

Main screen interface

There's a rather well-implemented and intuitive multi-window functionality for the internal display. A horizontal split is also available - something you can't get on all foldables.

Multi-tasking on the main screen

Benchmarks

The Magic V2 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which isn't too surprising, given that it was announced last summer. But key competitors like the Galaxy Z Fold5 and the OnePlus Open are also on the same generation silicon, so it's not like the Magic will be underequipped in comparison.

And indeed, the 4nm SD 8 Gen 2 remains plenty powerful today. It's got an octa-core CPU (X3 + 2xA715 + 2xA710 + 3xA510 core configuration) with the prime X3 core clocked at 3.2GHz for our international version of the device (3.36GHz for the China spec). All variants feature 16GB of RAM and there are three storage options - 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. Our review unit is the 512GB version and the storage speeds we've been getting in benchmarks are consistent with the UFS 4.0 standard.

In our usual CPU benchmarks, the Magic V2 returned numbers that are about what you'd expect from its chipset, maybe just above the average. There was a bit of a difference in the CPU scores between the 'regular' and 'performance' modes, which also impacted the Antutu scores, but overall things are up to the expected high standard.

We've discontinued GFXBench graphics benchmarking as the app is often banned/blacklisted on the phones we receive for review. The graphics performance ranking in 3D Mark is just as meaningful, so we suggest you refer to that one instead.

What wasn't particularly great was the Magic V2's behavior under stress, with a fairly erratic graph in the CPU Throttling test and rather low results for stability both under prolonged loads both on the CPU and the GPU.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test

The hair comb effect in the CPU performance graph gets even more pronounced in performance mode, where the high-performance bursts are shorter and the dips are deeper. There was also an unusually choppy result in the 3DMark Wild Life Stress test.

All things considered, while far from ideal, the behavior is easily explained with the V2's slimline build, and we wouldn't expect much more from it. Nor would we make too big of a deal out of these graphs, really.

Performance mode: CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test