Honor Magic V3 review

Design, build quality, handling

The Magic V3's design priorities revolve around making it as compact and lightweight as possible - as close to a high-end conventional phone, when folded. With the handset's thickness at 9.2mm and weight at 226g, Honor has indeed succeeded.

When in phone mode, the V3 is reasonably wide and nicely thin. Its gently curved panel edges and rounded over frames do aid the perception of thinness, but it's also objectively slender.

When opened into tablet mode, the device continues to impress - or is even more striking in this state? Honor quotes the thickness at 4.35mm, but there are probably asterisks there, because our calipers show a fraction more than that (as is the case with the overall thickness). Then again, we were more or less surprised how close we were to their numbers.

There was some serious R&D put into materials science for the Magic V3, we're being led to believe looking at the promo pages. The company was so confident with the phone's build that they sent us two units - one to review, and one to put in a washing machine, among other 'tests'. You can have a look at what happened to the poor thing.

Speaking of tests involving water, the V3 carries an IPX8 rating, which has now become fairly common, even among foldables. The difference is that the Honor is said to be able to withstand submersion 1m deeper than the standard's 1.5m requirement - so 2.5m, still for up to 30 minutes. It's not the iPhones' 6m submersion rating, but where's the iPhone's hinge that needs insulating?

Honor's press materials say that the phone uses Special Fiber for its back panel, which makes it up to 40 times more impact-resistant than that of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, while also being 40% thinner.

The Super Steel Hinge, meanwhile, has been rated for half a million folding cycles by the SGS. Again, that's the hinge, not necessarily the display that hinges on it. It's the thinnest hinge in the industry too, as per Honor's claims, at 2.84mm.

Then there's the Anti-scratch NanoCrystal shield for the cover display. That's a lot of names.

Finally, the Super Armored Inner Screen. Supposedly, there's a silicone gel substance among the folding panel's layers that solidifies within milliseconds upon impact, making the phone more impact resistant than your other regular gel-less foldables. It all sounds almost like crazy talk, but then we have the surviving beaten up unit to testify that there must be something at play here.

Honor doesn't throw around labels about the frame material, but it's aluminum - just not proprietary enough to warrant a name.

The fingerprint reader is on the side, in the power key. It's a capacitive solution and in our experience was both quick and reliable for unlocking, while also not discriminating against lefties. It's no under-display sensor though, and we do like the ultrasonic readers (plural, too) on the vivo X Fold3 Pro.