Honor Magic 2 review: Launching a dimensional attack in the name of "full-screen magic"

The last release of the Honor Magic series was at the end of 2016. As far as I can remember, there is rarely such a long gap between two products in a series. When Honor Magic2 shone at the Beijing Diamond Stadium, it was already the end of 2018.

After a span of 700 days, Honor once again launched the Honor Magic 2 in the name of magic. Why? When Zhao Ming announced its ultra-high configuration and extremely affordable price, the answer was clear: when the old rival was weak and took the initiative to explore the price of 1,000 yuan, Honor, known for its volume sales, made a sudden attack on the high-end market. Honor Magic 2 was like a fully armed special forces soldier, raiding the stronghold of its competitors - the 3,000 yuan mobile phone market.

This is a typical case of dimensionality-upgrade attack, which refers to using technology or model innovation that is superior to that of peers in the same field to launch an asymmetric attack on them, thereby occupying the market faster.

That's right, Honor Magic2 is a sliding screen phone with a starting price of 3799 yuan, and the direction of the artillery fire is self-evident. In addition, Honor Magic2 is equipped with Kirin 980, butterfly-style five-track sliding screen design, in-screen optical fingerprint, graphene heat dissipation technology, 40W Rhine certified safe super fast charging, 3D bionic photosensitivity technology, 24 million ultra-wide-angle AI triple camera, intelligent life form YOYO, Magic Slide magic full-view screen, etc.

Honor Magic2 is a long-planned surprise attack launched by Honor with a serious dimensional attack nature. The battlefield was chosen in the opponent's base camp.

Obviously, the product itself is the whole confidence of Honor Magic2 in launching this war. So, what are its chances of winning?

Butterfly-style five-track sliding screen, slide out of the magic world

Sliding screens are not exclusive to Honor. Before this, there were already several sliding screen phones on the market, which naturally won praise in the days when notch screens were rampant.

There are many good examples before. There is not much room for Honor to make a fuss about the sliding screen. In Honor Magic2, Honor did not adopt an electronic sliding screen structure, but adopted a sophisticated butterfly-style five-track mechanical mechanism. Compared with the electronic structure with uniform motion, the mechanical structure sliding screen that can be fast or slow is more ceremonial, and everything is under control between pushing and pulling. Just like lighters, the electronic lighter Dupont is more expensive, but the purely mechanical structure Zippo is undoubtedly easier to penetrate into people's hearts with the classic "ding" sound. The same is true for Honor Magic2. When it slides down with a "click", the front camera function is automatically turned on, and after closing, it can instantly switch to the rear camera function.

The so-called grand opening and closing is probably just like this. In this slightly chic and flirtatious "slide", you can not only see the sky and the earth, but also see people and yourself. Upon careful consideration, it is full of Zen flavor - if you don't move, how can you really know yourself, all living beings and the world?

In addition to the structural innovation, Honor Magic 2 also adds more AI intelligence elements to the action of "sliding". As the world's first AI sliding full-screen mobile phone, sliding down the screen can activate 3D structured light for face unlocking. At the same time, this action can also be used as the entrance to AI interaction. One slide can wake up YOYO, an intelligent life form with an IQ of up to 4556 points.

It is reported that YOYO is an intelligent life form that is constantly growing and learning. It is not a simple voice assistant, but a brand-new intelligent life form that originates from technology and is higher than technology. It is a personalized life form that distinguishes Honor mobile phones from other mobile phones. From the first second after you turn on the phone, it begins to recognize your biological characteristics, including appearance, voice, fingerprints, etc. When you use the phone, it will provide you with just the right help from time to time, and when you don’t like it, it will not appear for fun. Everything is so natural, just like it is an elf that understands your mind, omnipresent, but not seen every second.

Of course, if you don’t like these thoughtful features, you can also customize the sliding screen function and slide it however you want, even if Guo Degang said “slide carefully,” it’s not a bad idea.

Almost crazy 100% screen-to-body ratio

The A-side of Honor Magic2 is very impactful. There are no holes on the 6.39-inch full-view immersive screen, let alone bangs. Under the misty rendering of the dynamic desktop, the whole phone looks boundless, with a breathtaking charm and an irresistible urge to touch.

Honor calls the screen of Honor Magic 2 a "full-view screen." There is no doubt that its nearly 100% screen-to-body ratio does leave no visual regrets, and with the left and right borders of only 1.8mm, the vast screen is visible wherever you look.

Although the resolution of 2340*1080 does not reach the level of 2K screen, it has reached the FHD+ level that is comfortable for the naked eye. The screen ratio of 19.5:9 makes the picture more open, and the AMOLED screen with a color saturation of up to 112, a higher color gamut, and better contrast, especially when reviewing photos and watching movies, this experience will be more obvious.

Although Honor did not specify who provided the screen for the Honor Magic2, judging from the selection of its recent brother models, BOE is very likely to be the supplier. Objectively speaking, the display quality of BOE and Honor's own tuning have reached a high level, and the visual experience is no different from the common Samsung\LG screens. This can also be regarded as the pride of domestic production, especially for a brand like Honor, where domestic production from design to chips should be a kind of persistence and bottom line. Koreans can shout out "body and land are one," so why can't we? What's more, our domestic production is already at the world's leading level, and there is no reason not to get close to it.

Strong in shooting, good at shooting

When the trend of bangs fades, mobile phone manufacturers can focus more on purer designs, rather than racking their brains to figure out the tiny differences between water drop screens, small bangs, and widow's peaks, and no longer obsessed with how many components can be crammed in between the subtleties. This is a particularly good thing, at least it can release productivity and creativity in truly useful places. It is believed that thinking about the notch screen is tantamount to seeking fish in a tree, the direction itself is wrong, and no matter how fine it is, it is only a constitutional monarchy-style improvement, not a revolutionary progress in the true sense. Honor Magic2 is different. It has put down all the psychological baggage about bangs and turned to build fantastic ideas into more practical places, such as its front and rear six-camera design.

When we slide down the screen of Honor Magic2, the hidden front camera of the mechanical structure will be revealed. A 16-megapixel main lens and an infrared camera on the left and right. The use of infrared cameras can not only collect and record facial information in more detail, achieve more accurate 3D stereo beauty, but also make the background blur more natural. With the newly designed stereo AI triple camera and deep face data collection, each selfie automatically adapts to the studio-level 3D portrait lighting effect. Based on the powerful AI algorithm, Honor Magic2 can intelligently identify portraits and backgrounds, highlight portraits, blur the background, and perform intelligent facial fill light and natural skin beauty processing while blurring the background, making selfies more three-dimensional and the beauty effect more realistic, making your photos more beautiful whether it is day or night.

The rear Ai triple camera features a 117-degree ultra-wide-angle lens, which is nearly twice as wide as that of ordinary mobile phones. The main camera is a 24-megapixel black-and-white sensor, and the secondary camera is a 16-megapixel RGB color sensor. Both have a large aperture of F1.8. The wide-angle lens is equipped with a 16-megapixel RGB black-and-white image sensor with a focal length of 17um. In actual experience, Honor Magic2 can be said to be a mirror that can travel the world and capture the spring in the mirror. The photos taken are vivid and can highlight the inherent characteristics of the scenery itself in nature.

Life is all about eating, so: delicious food is beautiful scenery. There are two things in life that cannot be missed, one is love, and the other is food. Compared with the indescribable love, food is much more specific. In the lens of Honor Magic2, whether it is the tenderness of vegetables or the claws of crabs, Honor Magic2 can capture them all, without missing a single light or shadow, and without missing any deliciousness.

Honor Magic 2 also easily captures architectural landscapes. Even in a speeding car, the bumps in the road conditions are not reflected in the photos, which shows its stability.

In an environment of almost complete darkness, the Honor Magic 2 can also be flexibly controlled, with every detail clearly visible. Even a twenty-story building hidden in the night can still capture the necessary details.

Photography is one of the performance features of Honor Magic2. In fact, the reason why it can achieve such an effect is closely related to the powerful performance of the machine itself.

Kirin 980 shines

As the world's first commercial 7nm process mobile phone SoC chip, Kirin 980 integrates 6.9 billion transistors and has a maximum main frequency of 2.6GHz, which is 75% higher than Kirin 970. It is equipped with Mali-G76 GPU, which is still the world's first commercial GPU, and combines the innovative GPU optimization technology of the chip system. Compared with Kirin 970, the performance is improved by 46% and the energy efficiency is improved by 178%, allowing mobile phones to easily handle various applications and games. As the industry's first dual-core neural network processing unit (NPU), Kirin 980 easily achieves the industry's highest-end Ai computing power, which is 2.2 times that of Kirin 970.

Of course, words are pale, and the running score is also pale, but it is intuitive and visible. For the sake of easy understanding, the AnTuTu running score of Honor Magic2 is released.

A running score of 300,000 is enough to make the performance of Honor Magic 2 rank among the top in the industry.

In the game "Honor of Kings" with all special effects turned on, the FPS of Honor Magic2 easily reached 60 frames. This is not only due to the Kirin 980, but also the GPU acceleration function of Honor.

Final conclusion: Wait for users to experience it themselves

Chairman Mao said that if you want to know the taste of a pear, you have to taste it yourself. Honor Magic2 naturally cannot escape this definition. From its appearance to its inner qualities, Honor Magic2 is a top-notch performance. As for whether it is compatible with you, you still need to go offline to see it and try it out. Maybe you will fall in love with it in the next second.

As for whether Honor will move towards high-end market with Honor Magic2, to be honest, we are just watching the fun, that is basically Zhao Mingming's business. We are just guessing from the actual performance of the product - those friendly companies that have been entrenched in the high-priced market should really be careful, Honor Magic2 is not a pushover, it is fully armed and well prepared, and it is not a good thing.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.