Honor Magic 2 3D. Review of the Chinese smartphone

In the vastness of the domestic market, the average user knows few Honor models. The most common smartphones of this company are considered to be a pure "eight", "nine" and, recently released, "ten". However, there is another line that, in a short period of existence, has gained considerable popularity within the company's home market. The name of this line is Honor Magic. The Honor Magic 2 3D smartphone will be discussed below.

Brief information

The Magic series began its existence a few years ago, when the first version of the model was released. At that moment (in fact, the same as now), the Chinese line was not widely known in the vast domestic market, but was very popular within the manufacturer's country.Recently, it became known about the release of a new version of the smartphone, which is even more powerful and productive.

At its core, this branch of Honor is considered very expensive and productive. First of all, Magic devices were developed in small batches and entered stores for more advanced users to familiarize themselves with. The calculation is made to include as many innovations as possible with powerful hardware and wide functionality in the smartphone system. Naturally, the cost of these devices is not low, but it is worth considering the fact that magic 2 3D is considered a toy for demanding users.

Recently, modern smartphones have begun to acquire a not quite standard body shape, and we are talking about the design of the slider. Honor decided to use this innovation in favor of a new creation and implemented it in Magic 2 3D. It is a pity that the official sale of this device is not planned again on the territory of the Russian Federation, but it is worthy of due attention.

Specifications

Device design

The device has acquired a very original appearance, similar models have not yet been released. The body of the phone is made slightly thicker, and the design itself consists of two connected parts of the slider. The back side has a convex surface that merges with rounded ends.From the side, the smartphone looks like a children's toy - an ambiguous shape shimmering in bright color.

The front of the panel has glass, under which there is a mirror insert. It really serves as a handy mirror. Thanks to this glass coating, the device acquires an overly shiny surface, which would not be prevented by a small percentage of haze. However, it is worth considering the fact that the Magic 2 3D model was designed specifically for a Chinese user, so there can be no question of any haze.

As mentioned earlier, the design consists of two parts, which, in fact, must move apart relative to each other. Only in the case of this model, everything is not so simple. Previously, the face of the slider had to move up, but in this case it's quite the opposite. Now the front surface slides down, which makes the control not very convenient.

While moving down, the front side of the slider opens after itself all the necessary elements of the smartphone: camera, speaker, sensor, etc. Unfortunately, the device is limited to a front flash, but instead, the developers installed a triple main camera module. To be more precise, there is one main camera, and with it two additional ones, which serve as a depth-of-field regulator.

The main advantage of the design is the almost frameless display. Compared to most smartphones with a notch, this one has a very thin bezel surrounding the screen.

The rest of the device is too inconvenient to use.

The gadget is equipped with an unlock function using a face scanner, but to use it you will have to slide the front of the case down, find the camera, and then scan.There is also a fingerprint sensor and it is located at the bottom of the display. At first, it may seem that such an arrangement is very convenient, but in fact both sensors work too slowly.

On the right side of the case are the system power button and volume control. Against the background of the outlines of the design, the buttons do not particularly stand out. The bulge of the rear camera looks very ugly. Due to this, the device is not quite stable lies on the surface.

As for slots for SIM cards, the situation is poor. The device has two slots for cards, unfortunately there is no room for three. Also, you can not install a flash drive.

In terms of colors, the smartphone boasts pink, blue and silver colors. Each variant is equipped with a gradient glass insert under the glass. The disadvantage is that the smartphone was not equipped with protection against moisture and dust.

Display options

The phone is equipped with a 6.39-inch Amoled screen with a resolution of 2340x1080 pixels and a 2.5D protective glass. The display dimensions are impressive - 148x68 mm. The total screen area is almost 92 percent, and the aspect ratio is 19.5:9. In general, this indicator is very good, given that the dot density borders within 405 ppi. The dimensions of the surrounding frame are very small - 3x5x4 mm.

The front side of the display is made of glass thin plate, which has a shiny surface with a mirror image. The main advantage of this screen is complete resistance to various scratches.

In addition, the display surface is treated with a special oleophobic coating, thanks to which fingerprints are much less common than on other screens.

When setting a white background to the entire perimeter of the display, as well as manually adjusting the brightness, its value showed 420 nits - this is taking into account normal lighting. Under strong sunlight, the value changes to 530 nits, which ultimately indicates a good level of brightness. The minimum brightness level is 2 nits, which makes the screen comfortable to use even in total darkness.

As mentioned earlier, the device has an Amoled matrix - this is an active coating that functions on organic light emitting diodes. Like many other smartphones, the image is created thanks to three sub-pixels of green, blue and red colors. In the case of this screen, the level of reds and blues is an order of magnitude lower than greens, which indicates the RGBG type.

The advantages of the screen can be safely attributed to the wonderful viewing angles. However, with regard to white tones, the deviation even at the minimum angles plays a cruel joke with them. In this case, the screen begins to shimmer with pink, blue and green tones, but there is no distortion with a black background.

cameras

The front camera of the smartphone is equipped with a sensor with a resolution of 16 MP and an aperture of f / 2.0. In front of the device, two additional modules of 2 MP and f / 2.4 aperture are built in, which serve as a depth regulator and maintain the sharpness effect. The device takes wonderful, detailed pictures that are obtained even in terrible room lighting.

During the blurring of the background, some problems periodically arise, which are expressed in inadequate selection of the main object from the image against a certain background.Sometimes the background in the frame can be perfectly blurred around the face or hair, but various distortions occur regarding the contours of clothing.

The front camera has a function to support three-dimensional face scanning to determine the owner of the smartphone. Unfortunately, the camera does not have an optical zoom. Zoom options can be selected by yourself, by switching modes on the display.

The 24 megapixel module works very strangely, because you can't switch to it automatically, and you do it by selecting the resolution in the camera menu. At this time, there is a loss of the ability to zoom and support artificial intelligence. When choosing a resolution of 4224x5632, the camera produces good pictures, but as soon as artificial intelligence is launched, the system switches to a 16 MP module. Because of this, it is completely incomprehensible why the device has a 24 MP module.

While using AI, the device can easily recognize backgrounds and objects in real time, the camera learns more than 2000 scenarios and 50 types of shooting. The arsenal of functions includes a manual mode, portrait, monochrome, night modes, as well as the ability to save photos in RAW format (using exclusively manual mode).

The tangent of the main camera, things are not so smooth, the image quality is poor, the detail is weak, and there are more blur areas than you should expect. This level of camera is hard to categorize as a flagship.

In addition to the pluses, the camera has a night mode, with the help of which many frames are merged into one. Such a move was made specifically to increase illumination and screen out various noises.But, if you look at all this as a whole, then the camera in night mode cannot produce good photos.

Video shooting in the smartphone is carried out in 4K format at 30 frames per second, and in Full HD format at 60 fps. Videos are encoded in H. 264 and H.265, to choose from. Regarding the quality of the footage, everything looks not very good. The level of detail and sharpness is mediocre, and at night the camera is completely terrible. Here the sound is recorded perfectly, there is volume in it, no noise is observed.

Iron

The Honor Magic 2 3D smartphone is powered by the Huawei Kirin 980 single-chip chipset, which is based on 7 nanometer process technology. The chipset package includes three solid processors, namely:

• Dual-core Cortex A76 clocked at 2.6 GHz;
• Dual-core Cortex A76 clocked at 1.9 GHz;
• Quad-core Cortex A55 clocked at 1.8GHz. The GPU Mali G76 MP10 does a great job with the visual component.

The RAM card ranges from 6 to 8 gigabytes, depending on the configuration of the device.

The amount of internal memory is either 128 or 256 GB. Unfortunately, the board did not include a connector for a flash drive, but it is possible to connect the device to various memory storages using USB Type-c.

As for the chipset itself, it is worth saying that Kirin 980 is a powerful board made using a 7nm process. With Magic 2 3D and this chipset, we first tested the Cortex A76 processor with the Mali G76 GPU. Also in this combination there is a dual-core NPU unit.

The overall picture and some tests show decent power and performance of this platform, it can easily compete with the Snapdragon 845 chipset.

Such a system can be clearly attributed to the advantages of a smartphone, since the hardware can easily cope with all heavy games, applications and graphic editors. Ordinary use and surfing the Internet do not cause any trouble, the system quickly performs all tasks.

The functioning of games in this smartphone is worthy of the highest praise. Taking PUBG, Mortal Kombat X, Shadow fight 3 as an example, you can make sure that these strongest representatives of the android gaming sphere work without the slightest slowdown or glitches, and this is taking into account ultra settings. And if you remember that the device has a large screen, then playing on it is generally a pleasure.

Battery capacity

There are no problems with the battery in the phone. The Magic 2 3D has a built-in 3500 mAh lithium battery, which shows impressive performance during testing. In standby mode, the device can function for 3-4 days, and with a full download of applications, maximum brightness, Wi-Fi turned on and Full HD video, the whole day. The battery charging time takes an hour and a half, which also will impress any user. However, this requires a special Super Charge charger.

Testing of the device showed that in the arsenal of possibilities there is a power saving mode, which can even increase the autonomy of work.

Device software

The gadget runs under the leadership of the Android 9.1 operating system, which is equipped with a shell of its own production.The only difference from the rest of the shells is a special washed down for a specific model, and its name is MagicUI.

If you look from the visual side, then there are practically no changes. The main difference is noticeable in the very process of running applications, which is accompanied by an innovative artificial assistant called Yoyo. As they say, this is the main distinguishing feature and the main problem of the operating system. The fact is that most of the applications that work under the control of this assistant are in Chinese. Most of the features will be inconvenient or impossible to use. Do not forget that this model was intended for the Chinese market from the very beginning.

The capabilities of the virtual assistant Yoyo can be attributed to the recognition of various objects, the search for the necessary information on the network. It is very interesting to see how the device can detect various skin diseases, and then give advice on treatment. The virtual assistant can monitor the user's daily behavior, determine the algorithm for launching certain applications, calculate and advise on how to save energy and time.

Probably the most useful function of the assistant is the simultaneous translation of the conversation of the interlocutor with whom the user is communicating. During a conversation, Yoyo remembers the speech, translates it and brings it to the main screen in a text or voice message. Watching all this, it becomes clear that this is a very convenient and useful feature, and also worthy of the attention of many other smartphone manufacturers.

Sound accompaniment

Given the price category and sound quality, we can safely say that the speaker is worth the money.You can’t call the sound impeccable, but in general it doesn’t hurt your ears. The system has the ability to select different sound profiles - this is done specifically for an additional headset. This function is called Histen.

Both speakers and headphones boast excellent sound - in general, the sound is voluminous, clear, loud and rich. The disadvantage is that the smartphone lacks a standard 3.5 mm jack and FM radio. But the system has a high-quality voice recorder that can record sound without noise and interference. The microphone is quite sensitive, there is no distortion during the conversation, and the voice is transmitted clearly.

Advantages and disadvantages

• Larger and brighter display;
• High-quality speaker and sensitive microphone;
• Powerful hardware and high system performance;
• The presence of a virtual assistant Yoyo;
• Relatively large battery.

• Poorly detailed photographs;
• Bulging of the dorsal chamber;
• Too catchy design of the device.

Conclusion

First of all, it is worth noting the powerful system of the device, which has a Kirin 980 chipset, 6-8 GB of RAM, 128-256 GB of internal memory and a Mali G76 GPU. All this equipment ensures stable operation of the system during everyday tasks and running demanding applications. Good performance is accompanied by a quality visual component, which provides a larger and brighter display. You can also emphasize these advantages with a capacious battery, thanks to which you can enjoy games and other applications throughout the day.

The initial configuration of the device has a cost of $500, while the premium version will cost as much as $900.Yes, in general, this does not inspire confidence and there is an opinion that the price of a smartphone is excessively high. One has only to take into account a weak camera, a strange, bulky design and minor flaws in the form of a lack of a flash drive and a standard audio jack. However, all these shortcomings fade against the backdrop of decent system parameters, this is what plays an important role in a serious smartphone.