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Honor Magic 2: notch-free slider phone with six cameras and serious power – first impressions

  • Phone’s 6.4-inch OLED screen slides up to reveal a triple selfie camera set-up to go with three strong main shooters on the back
  • 3,799 yuan price tag makes it a good deal right now

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The Honor Magic 2 notchless slider phone with the screen down. The narrow back panel houses an earpiece, a 16-megapixel selfie camera and a pair of 2-megapixel depth sensors. Photo: Ben Sin
Ben Sin

Less than a week after Xiaomi introduced an all-screen slider phone, Huawei has launched one of its own under its sub-brand Honor.

Named the Magic 2, this smartphone is a follow-up in name only to the original Magic, an experimental device with lots of out-of-the-box design and software quirks that wasn’t meant for mainstream use.

The Magic 2, other than the sliding form factor, is a much more mainstream device with plenty in common with Huawei’s recently released top dog phone, the Mate 20 Pro.

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For starters, the Magic 2 uses the same seven-nanometre mobile chipset, the Kirin 980, as the Mate 20 phones. This alone makes the Magic 2 noteworthy, because the Kirin 980 is currently the most powerful SoC (system on a chip) in Android phones right now, besting the 10-nanometre Snapdragon 845 in neural and graphical processing.

That the Magic 2 – true to Honor’s mid-tier roots – starts at 3,799 yuan (US$545) makes it one of the better deals right now.

The phone has an OLED display (6.4 inches, apparently the new size du jour) that comes with an in-display fingerprint reader underneath it.

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