Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Honor Magic Vs: The Thinner, Bigger, Lesser Foldable”.
This video is sponsored by surfshark. Stop me if you’ve heard this before great Hardware underdone software, if that sounds like a line straight out of a Huawei phone review from 2016. Well, that tracks, because honor began its corporate Life as a youth, focused sub-brand of that now beleaguered Behemoth, and even though honor is now an independent phone maker shipping, its first Global foldable, Google, Apps and all well. A lot of its software still feels stuck in Shenzhen. Still it’s a folding phone from a brand that historically has competed on price, so the honor magic vs might be an important step toward broader foldable adoption.
If that price is right from Mobile World Congress and Barcelona for the first time in years, I’m Michael Fisher – and this is the Mr Mobile review – you should know that it was honor that flew me to mwc, where it also provided lodging and fed me for three Days as you should also know, however, that did not mean the company got to approve this video, provide any editorial input or even see it ahead of publication. This isn’t just my first review of an honor phone in longer than I can remember. It’S the first chance folks, outside of China, will have to experience Honor’s vision for a large format, foldable and, as I intimated in the intro. The hardware, at least, is a very nice piece of work. Compared to the Galaxy fold, 4. The magic vs gets larger screens inside and out a less tall aspect ratio, so it’s more comfortable to use one-handed and a new hinge that lets it clap flat without a gap. Now, that’s not new. Most foldables not made by Samsung can fold flat, but going gearless means honor was able to reduce the number of components in its support structure from 92 in the prior generation to just four in this model, it’s also traded in some aluminum and steel parts for magnesium Titanium and polymer and the result of all that is a phone. That’S much lighter than you expect. I’M not saying it’s featherweight, in fact the all-glass version.
I have here masses a few grams more than the fold 4, but it feels lighter because of the size to weight ratio, not to mention a thin profile that only xiaomi’s mix fold 2 Beats top it off with a gorgeous surface treatment that lends a lot of Depth to this Scion glass and we’re off to a great start, which continues beneath that glass, the 4 900 to 5000 milliamp hour battery, depending on which part of the spec sheet, you believe, is the biggest you’ll get from a modern, foldable and yeah. It pays off over 12 days of testing on two carriers across two continents, with ultra heavy use, including a ton of photo and video. The worst I ever got was 11 hours from Full to dead, seven hours of which were spent with the screen on that’s the kind of hang time you want from a phone. That’S meant to stand in for your tablet and even occasionally, your laptop and to honors credit.
It achieves that without resorting to the usual tricks of force, killing background apps. So I haven’t seen the missed notifications problem. I sometimes do on other China Market models. Weird fun bonus Point here, as on most phones made for that market, there’s an infrared Port up top, which I’d normally gloss over because they’ve fallen out of fashion on Western phones, but, as luck would have it, the batteries in my home HVAC remote died. Just after. I got this phone in for review, so I downloaded an app from the Play Store, fired it up mom.
I can condition my air again thanks honor. It thanks also for the factory installed screen protector on the cover which took the brunt of the fall when I accidentally dropped my review unit onto my concrete floor from about five and a half feet high. The Protector didn’t make it, but incredibly, there’s not a scratch on the rest of the device.
Now I do have to dock points for the deletion of wireless charging, not just because it’s gone, but because on our first teased us with a fast wireless charging, stand this time last year and then released a flagship phone this year that can’t take advantage of it. It has compensation you do get a brick and cable in the box with a Max charging rate of 66 watts and that’ll, get you from dead to 45 percent in 15 minutes and back to a full tank of gas in a little over 45 minutes packed between Those points are the table. Stakes must hits that thankfully honor also gets right.
The speakers are solid, with plenty of space for the sound to spread out whether you’re sending enemy battleships to the bottom, or calling your PR contact to help you get unlocked on your way. To that briefing, the power plant driving that experience is the Snapdragon 8 plus gen 1, not the newest SOC, but certainly among the best. And while it is a little weird that the outer display can crank up to 120 hertz, while the inner one is capped. At 90., I can’t say it’s something I ever cared about or even noticed same with, all of Honor’s Eye Care features. What matters is the screens are beautiful, they’re bright and while the inner crease may not be invisible, at least it’s no worse than Samsung’s, it all amounts to what could be a magical experience if you’ve had any time of your own with a large format. Foldable, you know what a game changer a Deployable display in your pocket can be and the nearly eight inch canvas of the magic vs feels truly vast.
It’S only with this much acreage that features like windowed multitasking makes sense. I can drag in from the side jot something down on my memo pad and dismiss it all without leaving the game I’m playing or the video I’m watching and full screen apps benefit from the same added scale. Of course, I I can see a lot more of the page in Kindle and even replicate that crisp text optimized feeling in other apps with a dedicated reading mode. Unfortunately, that’s just about as much fun as I had when it came to the Android 13 based magic OS software.
This interface looks like it was designed by children, would be too insulting, but at points it does seem designed for children with its clumsy, spacing all caps text and cartoonish illustrations. More than anything, it resembles Huawei software Circa 2017. Before all the reviews that urged that company to drop its blatant aping of the iPhone there’s no option for an app drawer, so as you install apps, they just get dumped onto the home screen with no option even to alphabetize them dragging down on the home screen. Will get you the honor System, search? There’S no option to set this to a notification shortcut to make your one-handed life easier and on the subject of notifications, tap some of them and they’ll open their Associated app in full screen, tap on others and they’ll open in a window.
If you run apps side by side and want to swap them and sorry for you, if you open an app on one screen and then switch to the other or want to go full full screen on the inner one, the phone will warn you about potential wonkiness. With every single new app there’s no camera shortcut at all, not a double click on the power button, not even doing the same on the volume rocker a proper selfie mode to use. The main cameras for selfies is also missing, along with any hand or palm detection. Gesture, so you have to try holding the thing without fat fingering, the main display, which is impossible if you’re used to sharing things like links by pasting them to the clipboard and the share sheet well get used to something else.
It’S not here, you get it, you just toss in the occasional weird bug and for smartphone software. This all seems pretty dumb, but the only things I like are the multitasking screen and the oddly relaxing notification tone. I have. The good news, of course, is that honor can update this software and it informed me late in the review process that there will be one more update before release, which will add things like the app drawer, presumably address some of the other issues I’ve raised, but as We always say: don’t buy any product based on the promise of an update and for a company on its second foldable. I expected this to be more fully baked. That leaves us with just one more category to cover before we get to the price. The cameras honor. Didn’T slouch here, this leaf-shaped module contains an able Optical array led by a 54 megapixel Main and a 50 megapixel Ultra wide, whose resolution and versatility outmatch the Galaxy fold 4. Thanks to this ability to double as a macro camera, I went shot for shot a lot with the Samsung and, to be honest, it was back and forth all the way. Samsung will typically air on the side of brightness, which sometimes helps in a challenging backlit situation. Witness the text on the River Cafe sign here, then again, sometimes it’s honor that goes brighter here in an ultra wide comparison and then with the main camera in the low light of the excellent salt and charcoal Steakhouse in Brooklyn. Color reproduction also goes back and forth, as you can see in the loving attention Samsung’s algorithms gave to the gooey cheese cascading off these fries across the room, though I like the extra punch of brightness and color honor lens to the gruesome mouth-watering meat fridge at night.
There’S a pronounced halo effect on City buildings with the honor that isn’t really there on the Samsung and while neither phone does all that wonderfully in the dark, the added blurring on the honor shots betrays its lack of optical stabilization on the main camera honor chose. Only to apply that to its telephoto and honor also suffers from a borderline comical amount of noise in some exposures. Look how fuzzy the sky is surrounding this steel dinosaur is, while on the fold 4, I can actually pick out a few Stars when things are this close overall, it often comes down to what you can do with each camera instead of pixel peeping between the two. While the magic vs can kind of fake its own tripod posture, it’s almost impossible to use because of the floppy hinge and the fact that the shutter button gets buried in the crease. The fold 4, of course, has both a sturdy hinge and the software to do something useful with it. So, while the honor cameras are capable of Some solid and even beautiful results, given the right situations, I think overall I’d call The Fold four. The winner, as I said up top all that, boils down to what could be a very compelling competitor to the full four given the right price. But this, in my view, is not the right price.
1600 Euro would make sense if the fault 4 were still selling. For 1800, but in Spain right now you can get the Samsung for 1400 and you get a free TV thrown in even with new software to help close the gap. I just don’t see honor being able to bring enough value that anyone should choose this over the Galaxy fold 4. and even then honor will only commit to two years of platform updates to Samsung’s 4.. Look choice in the market is always a good thing and what the foldable Market needs in order for those prices to come down is more competitive pressure which derives for more options so yeah, I’m happy the magic vs exists, but, based on this Chrysler performance, I think Meaningful competition and foldables is more likely to come from elsewhere. If you’re, tired of hearing about surf shark, I get it and after all the company’s been my sponsor for four years. But if you think about it, that’s a good thing. It means surfshark has done its job of keeping me and its customers safe, while browsing the web all over the world.
You also might have noticed that I haven’t taken a sponsorship from any other VPN company since I started and that’s not because I can’t because I haven’t felt the need to use anyone but surf shark. In addition to securing my connection on Wi-Fi networks all around the world, it also guarantees I can still access media and services that might otherwise be restricted by the country I’m browsing from. If that sounds useful to you, get surfshark at the link in the description and use code, Mr mobile for 83 off and three extra months, free thanks to surfshark for sponsoring this video. This review was produced following 12 days with a magic vs review sample provided by Honor, but if you missed the disclosure up top, I made every effort to ensure the fact that honor hosted me in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress did not affect my editorial conclusions and The company received no special access or treatment as a result, they are seeing this review right alongside you for the first time, hey keep an eye out for more fun devices, even another foldable at mwc 2023.
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