Huawei’s Honor Magic is slab of rounded glass with a ton of smart features
Huawei has announced the Honor Magic, a concept phone that crams all its hardware and a bunch of intelligent features into a smooth, rounded glass slab. It even comes with Tobii eye-tracking and a FaceCode feature that only displays lock screen notifications when the phone recognizes your face.
Note: This article was first published on 19th December 2016.
The top edge of the Honor Magic is curved as well, a design decision mirrored in the phone's rear. (Image Source: Huawei)
Huawei has announced the Honor Magic, a phone that crams all its hardware and a bunch of intelligent features into a smooth, rounded glass slab. Huawei is better known for its recent Leica-branded smartphones like the P9 and Mate 9, but its Honor phones have also been busy targeting more budget-conscious markets.
Unfortunately, the Honor Magic is slated for a China-only release, not unlike the Xiaomi Mi MIX (also billed as a concept phone).
That said, many of the Magic’s features may eventually debut on Huawei’s other devices, so the phone is potentially a harbinger of things to come.
Here’s a summary of the phone’s key specifications:
- 5.09-inch 2,560 x 1,440-pixel AMOLED display
- Kirin 950 processor
- 4GB of RAM
- 64GB internal storage
- 12-megapixel f/2.2 dual-lens rear camera and 8-megapixel f/2.4 selfie camera
- 2,900mAh battery
The Honor Magic lacks the usual navigation buttons, and everything is done with gestures on the home button. (Image Source: Honor)
This isn’t quite a bleeding-edge device despite its concept phone status, and the Kirin 950 SoC is a little disappointing given that the 960 has already debuted in the recent Mate 9 smartphone. The camera hardware is also the same as that on the Honor 8, so there’s nothing much to shout about there either.
One of the highlights is probably the battery, which despite being smaller than is usual these days, uses a new graphite structure that reportedly gives up to a 70 per cent charge in just 20 minutes.
But the headline feature is probably the use of software smarts to make the phone more intuitive to use. The phone’s Magic Live UI is based on Android 6.0, and it can learn your habits and respond more appropriately as time passes. A lot of this centers around the lock screen, and the phone can learn which apps you use most frequently at certain times of the day, and automatically display the relevant shortcut at the appropriate time.
The lock screen also taps into your location, messages, and purchase history. So if you’re at the airport or cinema, the phone might call up your electronic boarding pass or movie tickets. There’s even a Google Now-esque feature called DeepThink, an on-screen keyword search that is activated by long pressing the home button.
Finally, there’s the FaceCode feature, where lock screen notification content is hidden unless the phone recognizes your face.
The Magic retails at 3,699 yuan in China, slightly more expensive than the 3,499 yuan Xiaomi Mi Mix.
Source: Honor
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