Honor is promising all sorts of tricks with its Magic 2, which will be unveiled at 7pm (11am GMT) in China. Here’s all you need to know about the upcoming phone, including how to watch the Magic 2 launch live stream.
Having teased the Magic 2 at its Play global launch event back in August, Honor will finally unveil the fancy new phone that has an awful lot to live up to at an event in Beijing, China, today. The event starts at 7pm in China, which is 11am here in the UK.
Headlining features include a new sliding-screen mechanism that allows for a full-view experience, an in-display fingerprint sensor, the 7nm Kirin 980 processor and six cameras with three each front and back.
You can watch the Honor Magic 2 launch video on Honor’s website – click here to view. The stream starts at 7pm in China, or 11am here in the UK.
Honor has confirmed that it will announce the Magic 2 during an event in Beijing, China, on 31 October. It will launch alongside the Waterplay 8 tablet, FlyPods and Honor Watch.
Various teaser posters have been pushed on social media for the event, including one that includes an image of a DJI drone flying overhead. It’s clear that Honor must have partnered with DJI in some way for the event, but we can’t guess the link.
We won’t know for sure until tomorrow, but the Magic 2 is said to cost between $700- and $900, which is about £550-£700.
According to the company, the Magic 2 will be available from VMall, TMall, JD.com, Suning.com and Gome.com.cn .
An update to the original Honor Magic, which launched in December 2016 with the Magic Live AI system, an eight-side curved display and 40W Magic Charge, Magic 2 was confirmed in the final 10 minutes of the Honor Play launch event on 30 August.
Honor didn’t give away too much detail about the upcoming phone at the time, but confirmed it would feature the Kirin 980 chip, 40W Magic Charge v2, plus a fullview display with sliding-screen mechanism that “opens a new world” and reveals the selfie camera. It’s a design we’ve since seen in last week’s unveiling of the Mi Mix 3 from Xiaomi.
Where it differs from Mi Mix 3, however, is in its inclusion of the Yoyo AI assistant that was shown on video speaking in English – Xiaomi’s Xiao AI is limited to Chinese only.
You can relive the initial announcement in the video below at around 1 hour 20 mins in:
Since the August teaser, Honor has revealed more details about the Magic 2, including official press renders that show the available iridescent colour options and confirm a triple-lens (16Mp + 24Mp + 16Mp) rear camera and an in-display fingerprint sensor.
With three cameras also expected to feature at the front in a 16Mp + 2Mp + 2Mp configuration, this takes the total camera count for the Honor Magic 2 up to six.
From leaked benchmarks and a TENAA listing we also know that Magic 2 has a 6.39in Full-HD+ (2340×1080) 19.5:9 AMOLED display, Mali-G76 MP10 GPU, up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB storage. It runs Android 9.0 Pie with EMUI 9.0.
The Kirin 980 is the same 7nm chip found inside Huawei’s Mate 20 line, and incorporates two Cortex-A76 cores running at 2.6GHz, two at 1.92GHz, and four Cortex-A55s at 1.8GHz. Paired with 8GB of RAM the Magic 2 has been seen to record 9534 points in Geekbench 4 (3316 points single-core), and 248,368 in AnTuTu.
Honor has released a batch of press renders for the Magic 2 via Weibo, and others have appeared on VMall. We’ve displayed some of the best below.
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