Huawei’s Honor sub-brand showed up at IFA with a surprise this year: an early tease of its new Magic 2 flagship, a follow-up to the company’s original AI-enhanced Magic phone from 2016.
Honor teases new bezel-free Magic 2 smartphone with sliding camera
Following in the Oppo Find X’s footsteps
Following in the Oppo Find X’s footsteps
The big update on the Magic 2 is a new “Magic Slide” feature that hides the camera underneath a slider to enable a full, bezel-free screen without a notch — similar to the sliding Oppo Find X from earlier this year. According to Honor, the new design features a nearly 100 percent screen-to-body ratio, although it has yet to show off the Magic 2 beyond a brief onstage appearance of a prototype at its IFA press conference and a teaser image (seen below), so it’s hard to tell exactly what it looks like.
Image: Honor
A zoomed-in image from Honor’s live stream (via Android Authority) does seem to showcase an intriguing-looking device that lacks any bezels or notches, although we’ll have to wait for Honor to give us a better look to judge for sure.
The Magic 2 will also be powered off of Huawei’s new (and still unannounced) Kirin 980 processor, which is presumably the successor to the current-gen Kirin 970 chip found in phones like the P20 Pro.
Image: Honor (via Android Authority)
According to Forbes, Honor president George Zhao confirmed in an interview that the Magic 2 is at least two months away from release, but the company wanted to unveil it early since “a competitor” had heard about the design and was planning a similar phone. Just hours after the Magic 2 was revealed, Lin Bin, the president of Xiaomi, posted a render of the company’s upcoming Mi Mix 3 flagship (via GSMArena) featuring a similar sliding camera design, so it seems that Zhao was right to be concerned.
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