After announcing the Honor Play for the global
market, the company's president surprised us all by teasing the successor to
the original Honor Magic. The latter was released back in December 2016 and
never got a follow-up until now, of course.
The successor is called Magic 2 and the device
didn't get a proper announcement - George Zhao just teased some of the key
features. The most noticeable one is the so-called FullView display - no
notches, no big ugly chins - just display. And as you may have figured out by
yourselves, the device will have slide-out cameras as there's no room for one
on the front. And yes, it looks a lot like Oppo's Find X.
However, we don't know if the back cameras -
assuming they are at least two - will be attached to the slider or will be
placed on the back like most smartphones. But by looking at the size of the
slider, it's probably safe to assume that all cameras will go in there. Another
interesting thing we've noticed - George Zhao opened the slider with his hand -
it didn't pop up like the Find X's automatically. It could be due to the early
engineering sample or Honor has something in mind?
In addition, the Magic 2 will come with upgraded
Magic Charge supporting up to a whopping 40W charging speeds. The presenter
also outlined that it's safe to use thanks to the 15-layer safety protection
system and auto identification of three critical parts in the charging system.
And last, but not least, the handset will come
equipped with the still unannounced HiSilicon Kirin 980 chipset boasting great
performance gains over its predecessor and enhanced AI capabilities making it
"the smartest AI device there is." He was probably talking about the
next-generation NPU that the Kirin 980 is rumored to have.
In any case, it didn't look like a complete device
and the teaser video on stage implied that exactly two years have passed since
the launch of the original Honor Magic, so we can expect December release
maybe? It's definitely happening before the end of 2018, though.
