Honor Magic Vs: what we know so far

The Honor Magic Vs is the successor to the Honor Magic V foldable phone, and it’s landing soon; with leaks suggesting it could give the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 a real run for its money.

Honor itself has revealed some images of the Magic Vs, and beyond that, a few other details have leaked, so we’re starting to build up a picture of the company’s next flagship foldable.

Below you’ll find everything we’ve seen and heard so far, including the confirmed announcement date of the Honor Magic Vs.

Cut to the chase

• What is it? The next foldable phone from Honor
• When is it out? Being unveiled on November 23, then going global in Q1 2023
• How much will it cost? Unsure, but expect a very high price

Honor Magic Vs release date and price

The Honor Magic Vs is being unveiled on November 23 (or even November 22 depending on where in the world you are), so very soon. The event will be streamed live on YouTube, the page for which is already up, so you can tune in. It’s going to be in Chinese, but will have “a simultaneous English interpretation” according to a spokesperson.

The launch event kicks off at 10:30pm PT on November 22, or at 1:30am ET / 6:30am GMT / 5:30pm AEDT on November 23.

That launch is just for China, but speaking to Tech Advisor, an Honor spokesperson confirmed that the Magic Vs would launch globally in Q1 2023 – so sometime between the start of January and the end of March.

That said, while the company has also previously said this phone will land in Europe, they didn’t say exactly which European countries it would be available in – nor whether it would be sold in the US or Australia. Though a US launch is unlikely.

There’s no news on what it might cost, but the original Honor Magic V – which didn’t go global – was sold for ¥9,999 (around $1,380 / £1,210 / AU$2,150), so the Honor Magic Vs might have a similar price – though conversions are unlikely to be accurate in any case.

Honor Magic Vs news and leaks

While we don’t know much for sure about the Honor Magic Vs yet, we do have an idea of how it looks, as Honor has shared the image above, which shows the Honor Magic Vs’s main screen and top edge.

You can see from this that it looks a lot like the Honor Magic V or the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4, with a large foldable display that opens out into a tablet-like expanse, or can be folded shut, leaving you with a more smartphone-sized device.

You can see is that there’s a punch-hole camera on the foldable display, and a gold-colored frame, likely made of metal. There will probably other colors offered too though.

Since then, shots of the back of the phone have been shared by an Honor employee, one of which you can see in the Tweet above. There’s a large secondary screen that you can use when the phone is folded shut, and what looks to be a triple-lens camera.

The phone looks very thin in these images, and indeed according to a sketch shared by leaker @UniverseIce, which you can see below, the Honor Magic Vs is ‘ultra-thin’. The source also suggests that it will be the lightest foldable phone with this sort of design.

Beyond that, we can see in the sketch that there’s what looks to be a triple-lens camera on the back, and a secondary screen with a punch-hole camera of its own for when the main display is folded shut, just like we’ve seen in the official image further up.

The sketch also mentions a 5,000mAh battery, which is quite a large size for a foldable phone – beating the Galaxy Z Fold 4 by 600mAh, and @UniverseIce claims the Magic Vs will break the battery life record for this kind of foldable.

The same sketch was also shared on Weibo – a Chinese social network – by a leaker known as Panda is bald, and they additionally claim that the Honor Magic Vs offers 66W charging and weighs 261g.

We would, of course, take this sketch and the accompanying information with a pinch of salt, but it comes from sources with a reasonable track record.

That’s all we’ve heard so far, but we can speculate that the Honor Magic Vs will have a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, since the Magic V has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

Given how similar the upcoming phone looks to the old one in the official images above, some of the other specs might be similar too. So we might be getting a roughly 7.9-inch OLED main display with a 90Hz refresh rate, a roughly 6.45-inch OLED secondary display with a 120Hz refresh rate, and a trio of 50MP cameras on the back. However, that’s just speculation for now.

All in all, while it’s too early to say whether the Honor Magic Vs will rank among the best foldable phones, it certainly seems like this might be the most competition Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold line has had in quite some time.