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IFA 2018 | Honor teases the upcoming Magic 2 smartphone powered by the 7nm Kirin 980 SoC

The Honor Magic 2 will be powered by the Kirin 980 SoC.
The Honor Magic 2 will be powered by the Kirin 980 SoC.
At IFA 2018, Honor took to stage to give us a glimpse of the Honor Magic 2 smartphone. The Magic 2 sports an all-screen design with slide out cameras and is powered by HiSilicon's 7nm Kirin 980 SoC. Not many details were divulged by Honor apart from the fact that the smartphone comes with a 40W charging mode.

At Honor's IFA 2018 briefing, CEO George Zhao, took to the stage to give a glimpse of the company's upcoming smartphone, the Magic 2. The Magic 2 is the successor to the original Magic phone that launched in the Chinese market in December 2016. The Magic was one of the first Honor phones to incorporate AI and the company hopes to repeat the 'magic' with the Magic 2. While Honor did not reveal much information about the Magic 2 — not even a probable release date — it did offer a sneak peak at two key aspects of the phone — the SoC and the slide out camera system.

The Honor Magic 2 will be one of the first phones (depending on when it releases) to feature the HiSilicon Kirin 980 SoC. The Kirin 980 is being fabbed on the 7nm process and from what we know so far, it will most likely feature a quad-core Cortex-A77 cluster clocked at 2.8 GHz alongside a quad-core Cortex-A55 cluster (frequency not yet known). HiSilicon is also said to be working on the GPU side of the things that is said to be 50% faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845's Adreno 630. Also on the anvil is improved AI functionality expected at around 5 trillion calculations per watt.

The other major aspect of the Magic 2 is the slide out camera. Honor has opted to go for the all-screen design route, which meant relegating the camera components to a slide out mechanism similar to the one in the Oppo Find X. However, Honor said that the motor mechanism here is manual and can be activated as per need. We have no idea whether the slide out houses the rear camera as well as Honor did not show the back of the device. The Magic 2 will also come with a 40W Magic Charge feature, which is apparently faster, safer, and presumably intelligent. 

Unfortunately, that's all we got to know about the Honor Magic 2. What we've seen so far definitely seems to hold promise and more information can be expected to trickle down in the days to come. We just hope Honor doesn't restrict the Magic 2 to the Chinese market like its predecessor.

Source(s)

Honor Press Meet at IFA 2018

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2018 08 > Honor teases the upcoming Magic 2 smartphone powered by the 7nm Kirin 980 SoC
Vaidyanathan Subramaniam, 2018-08-30 (Update: 2018-08-30)