MWC 2023 | Honor Magic Vs: Galaxy Z Fold4 competitor now available worldwide for an eye-watering price

Honor's second foldable, the Honor Magic Vs, has been around in China since its launch late last year. It brought many improvements to the original Honor Magic V, such as a larger battery and a telephoto lens. Honor has now made it available to global audiences, although its €1,599 price tag might be offputting for many. Whether or not the Honor Magic Vs Ultimate will be available globally remains to be seen.

The Honor Magic Vs features a 7.9-inch internal screen with a 2,272 x 1,984 pixels resolution, 90 Hz refresh rate, 800 nits peak brightness and 281 PPI pixel density. Its external 6.45-inch screen uses a more standard 2,560 x 1,080 format with 431 PPI pixel density, 1,200 nits peak brightness and 120 Hz refresh rate. Both employ an OLED panel with HDR10+, Dynamic Dimming and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage.

Honor uses a gearless hinge for the Magic Vs, which reduces the number of moving parts to just four, thereby resulting in fewer points of failure and better durability. In addition, the screen is rated for up to 400,000 folds, allowing it to run for a decade, even with heavy use. The foldable uses a mix of rare earth magnesium alloy and high-strength titanium alloy, weighing 267 grams.

The Honor Magic Vs uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC with 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. Its 5,000 mAh battery supports 66 Watt wired charging and can charge peripherals wirelessly at 5 Watts. While the power-efficient Qualcomm chip will help bolster battery life, the two OLED screens can easily make short work of the seemingly massive Li-ion cell.

Foldables aren't generally revered for their cameras. The Honor Magic Vs aims to remedy that with its 50 MP Sony IMX800 wide-angle lens, 50 MP ultra-wide-angle lens and 8 MP telephoto sensor (3x optical zoom). A 16 MP sensor at the front handles selfies and video calls. While that might seem like a downgrade from its predecessor's 42 MP sensor, Honor has baked in plenty of AI-driven features to level the playing field.

The Honor Magic Vs is available in two colourways, Black and Cyan. Connectivity options include 5G, Bluetooth 5.2, Bluetooth LE, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi (no Wi-Fi 6, unfortunately), and a USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port. The foldable runs MagicOS with Android 13 out of the box and supports eSIMs. It will it shelves sometime in Q2, 2023.