Honor Magic V3 Hands On – First Impressions of the World’s Slimmest and Lightest Foldable That’s Coming to Malaysia

The arrival of the world’s current slimmest and lightest foldable phone in Malaysia is pretty much confirmed with Honor stating that their next-generation Honor Magic V3 will be launching this coming 5 September 2024. 

Ahead of the launch, we managed to get an exclusive first hand look in a closed preview session where we also got our initial hands on with the phone. Here’s our Honor Magic V3 hands on where we share our initial thoughts and specifications ahead of its official launch and our upcoming indepth review.

Honor Magic V3 Hands On – Insanely Slim and Light

Launched earlier in China and slated to debut in Malaysia at the same time as its IFA 2024 launch in Germany this 5 September, the Honor Magic V3 is an impressive milestone as their latest foldable is currently the world’s lightest, and slimmest phone while also being tougher and more powerful than ever before with flagship-grade hardware and cameras along with a lashing of hefty AI-powered enhancements.

According to Honor, the Magic V3 weighs just 226g while being an absurdly waifish 4.35mm when fully unfolded and just 9.2mm when folded down, making it a good deal slimmer and lighter than the incumbents in the market. 

While it sounds impressive on paper, my Honor Magic V3 hands on session did not actually prepare me for just how slim and light the phone actually was. When held in my hands, the phone had the dimensions and heft of a normal candybar sized phone though it is a full-fledged flagship foldable in every way. 

In Malaysia, the phone will come in three possible colourways which consist of either a matte Mossy Green with silver trim, a Silk Brown finish with a textured bronze hinge or an all-black . Our Honor Magic V3 hands on unit was the former and at first blush, the backplate looked posh indeed with a faint iridescent jade-green finish about it that also repelled fingerprints nicely. A Classic Black variant with silver trim is also available at launch though we only had a quick look at it during our preview session.

Honor have also kitted out the phone with the best hardware from their foundries with a slew of hardware and materials improvements. According to Honor, the Magic V3 uses a second generation hinge design that they’ve dubbed as the Honor Super Steel Hinge that is not only slimmer and lighter but also enables it to sit halfway up in a semi-unfolded position too with several features that take advantage of this mode in their updated Magic OS firmware including a new Face to Face translation mode where the front display and the main display can allow for two-way live translations.

Not only is it lighter, it’s also markedly tougher too. According to Honor, the Magic V3 the front 6.43-inch OLED display that also has a 120Hz refresh rate and a quoted 5,000 nits peak brightness has an anti-scratch resistant NanoCrystal Shield laminate that allows it to resist nicks, scratches and has 10 times improved drop and scratch resistance compared to its predecessor the Magic V2.

For additional weight savings, it also uses aerospace-grade fibre for the chassis, surpassing existing go-tos like Kevlar and carbon fibre for lightness and durability. That’s not all, Honor has also bumped up the water resistance too, with the design having an IPX8 rating meaning that it can survive in light rain, immersion and spills in up to 1.5 metres of water for 30 minutes at a time. 

They say the proof is in the pudding and in the preview session, they tossed the Honor Magic V3 hands on sample straight into a working washing machine where it rattled around for a good 30 minutes while undergoing a soaking before it emerged unscathed.

That’s not all, they even had the front display stabbed with both a chisel and a scalpel without any damage whatsoever. One thing to note though is that the NanoCrystal Shield laminate is only on the front display; the main 7.92-inch 120Hz AMOLED folding display that has 1,600 nits peak brightness has a different category of protection that they’ve dubbed as a Super Armored Inner Screen though we weren’t able to ascertain just how damage or scratch resistant it was in our short hands on time with the device.

Under the hood, our Honor Magic V3 hands on sample runs the latest top of the line Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor paired with 12GB RAM and an additional 12GB of virtual RAM assigned off the onboard 512GB of storage. This setup is flagship grade, enabling it to go toe to toe with the latest phones in 2024.

Seeing as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also has a potent NPU, the Magic V3 benefits from a slew of Google Cloud-powered AI capabilities including a ‘Circle to Do More with Magic Portal’ where users can circle a subject or item onscreen with a knuckle to search more about it, an AI Eraser mode to delete photobombers in captured photos and the aforementioned Face to Face Translation mode that pays homage to Samsung’s Live Translate mode in the Galaxy Z Fold6 with simultaneous use of the main and front displays for two-way translations.

The Honor Magic V3 also packs two additional custom chips which consist of the S1 RF enhanced chip and the Honor E1 power enhanced chip with the former offering a number sophisticated security and privacy features while the latter is intended solely for safer and more energy efficient battery usage by dynamically adjusting the voltage off the battery. All these tweaks enable the Honor Magic V3 and its large 5,150mAh battery to enjoy 66W wired fast charging along with 50W wireless charging too.

They didn’t skimp on the rear cameras either and our Honor Magic V3 hands on unit had a hefty rear triple camera array that has a main 50MP sensor, a secondary 50MP telephoto camera with 3.5x optical zoom and the ability to achieve 100x digital zoom and a 40MP ultra wide angle camera. Up front on the main display you get a 20MP sensor for selfies.

As first looks go, Honor’s latest wunderkind is going in at full tilt out of the starting gate. More so for the fact that they’ve sped up deployment times so that we’re getting it but a few weeks after its original launch in China in July rather than the months-long wait we had for the earlier Magic Vs and Magic V2. Stay tuned for our unboxing and full review! In the meantime, you can stay tuned to Honor Malaysia‘s official Facebook page here for the livestream this coming 5 September at 8.00PM.