Honor Magic hands-on experience: What’s more fascinating than the eight-curved screen is artificial intelligence

Honor was definitely a very prolific mobile phone brand in 2016. After the launch of Honor 8, V8 and Note 8, and the regular updates of the Play series, Honor Magic at the end of the year was undoubtedly an extra surprise.

As the grand finale, Honor Magic can almost be understood as a new exploration of smartphones by the Honor brand, which makes it completely different from the past in terms of both appearance and usage.

What is it like to use an octave-curved phone?

The first thing to talk about is naturally the eight-curved design. The Honor Magic does not become a sphere because of so many curves. When placed on the table, it is closer to the shape of a smooth pebble.

At first glance, the visual experience of Honor Magic is similar to that of curved-screen phones such as Samsung edge, but the more curved double-sided glass still causes greater concerns about durability. In actual tests, falling from the ground at a normal height will basically not cause too much damage to the phone, but it is inevitable that curved glass is more prone to scratches.

Due to the narrowed bezel design on all sides, the volume and power buttons on the side are extremely slim. Other necessary side openings are arranged at the bottom of the phone. The 3.5mm headphone jack is not cancelled, and the innovative dual-layer SIM card slot still retains the dual-SIM dual-standby design.

Another difference is the addition of a HOME button with fingerprint recognition on the front. The fingerprint recognition efficiency is quite good, but this long physical button on the front is obviously protruding and has a deep key travel. Honor Magic only retains the HOME button on the front. Single-click the home page, double-click for multitasking, and the return function seems to be changed to sliding left and right on the surface of the HOME button in order to deliberately distinguish it from the light touch design of other manufacturers. The operation logic is slightly complicated.

One of the focuses of the curve is the screen. The Honor Magic's 5.09-inch 2K resolution AMOLED screen has remarkable overall quality, with excellent brightness and color accuracy, especially in application scenarios such as games. You will not feel uncomfortable with the curved design of the phone, because the display area of ​​this screen is not that curved, which seems to be an advantage brought by the not-so-narrow border.

In addition to the eye-catching curved elements, Honor Magic is also impressive for its brutal charging speed. Taking our test machine as an example, the standard 40W charging can charge 40% in 10 minutes and fully charge the entire 2900mAh battery in 45 minutes, which is unprecedented. Even with the common 5V/2A charging head, Honor Magic can guarantee a high level of charging of 1% per minute.

Magic Live: The next step for smartphones?

This Honor Magic is brand new inside and out. Compared with the hardware part, the biggest change is that it is a Honor phone without EMUI. At the press conference, Honor President Zhao Ming spent a lot of time introducing artificial intelligence, which is mainly reflected in Magic Live currently built on Android 6.0.

Scene 1: Intelligent perception, knowing whether it is the owner at a glance

Honor Magic has been a user-friendly phone since the beginning. Just by picking up the phone and lighting up the screen, it can use the sensor on the front to determine whether someone is staring at the screen, and then decide whether it is really necessary to light up the screen. When there is a new message, only the owner who has pre-entered the face information can see the message details. For others, Honor Magic intelligently hides the information. In addition, picking up the phone in ringtone mode will automatically stop the incoming call ringtone, and turning it upside down on the table will turn the incoming call into a flash light indicator, which is much smarter than ordinary smartphones.

As for the artificial intelligence that Magic Live wants to express, in principle, it allows the mobile phone to better connect various information from users and the Internet. However, don't underestimate such a change. After using it several times, it really makes people feel extremely magical and convenient.

Scenario 2: Recommend new blockbusters at any time, a smart assistant in life

When a movie title appears on the screen, Magic Live will immediately pop up a related prompt. With one click, you can not only view the movie details, but also buy tickets and choose seats for blockbusters that are showing in real time.

Scenario 3: Use Magic Secretary to create the same itinerary as Wang Jianlin

Various social apps have become the most frequently opened applications on mobile phones. When iconic words such as time, place, train tickets, and air tickets appear in the chat content, Magic Live supports clicking on keywords to quickly create an itinerary, and can be implemented across applications, almost making users who have no habit of itinerary management have the urge to arrange their own schedule.

Scene 4: With this "cheating software", my girlfriend will never quarrel with the seller again

In addition, for online shopping experts, Magic Live's intelligent price comparison is enough to make you forget all the price comparison software on your computer. When you view products on JD.com and Taobao, the best price link will appear at the top of the mobile phone screen, which looks like a "cheating software" developed for online shopping.

Scene 5: My Pocket, the magic pocket for your smartphone

Of course, Magic Live is not just the icing on the cake based on the existing mobile phone apps. For example, it also adds a My Favorites page on the left side of the phone's main interface, where you can collect almost all the content you browse on your phone every day, such as news, pictures, music, videos, travel information, etc.; and Deep Think activated by long pressing the HOME button helps you make multi-dimensional information recommendations based on the keywords of the current page. It looks more like the combination of Big Bang and keyword search added by Smartisan OS before, but Magic Live's approach is much more straightforward.

Of course, Magic Live's various smart features are not all perfect. For example, it has added a bottom sliding menu similar to Apple's iOS system. The Magic Link, which is intended to facilitate file transfer, is not as easy to use as Airdrop under the Apple ecosystem. When we book a car online, Magic Live can put the vehicle and driver information in a prominent position, which is very convenient, but it is a bit unnecessary to mark the parking location of other people's cars in the notification bar when getting off the car.

In general, Honor Magic's Magic Live still brings quite a lot of new gameplay and creativity at the system level of smartphones, so much so that when we got the Honor Magic review unit, we were told to spend at least a week exploring its new internal features.

However, after a week, we still haven't discovered all the highlights of Magic Live, but Magic Live is using its own routines to quietly change the way we use smartphones.

In today's world where mobile phones are extremely homogenized from the inside out, the appearance of such a product is truly magical. The final price of Honor Magic at 3,699 yuan also represents its different mission. A technological product that can even predict user needs allows us to see some ideas about the future of mobile phones.

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.