- Honor is a brand
that you might not be incredibly familiar with.
However, a few months ago when they sent me their Magic Vs,
it was an incredibly impressive device.
So, when Honor offered to sponsor a trip out to Barcelona
to take a look at their latest flagship, it was an easy yes.
And when you think about it, Honor is a brand
which is really trying to focus
on the global market right now.
And to do that, as a sort of newcomer in a lot of ways,
you can't just be okay, you have to be great.
You have to be better than the current options,
'cause otherwise, why would anyone even consider you?
Not only did they announce the final shipping version
of the Magic Vs, which they have in the booth behind me,
but importantly, they've also announced this,
the Magic5 Pro.
Now this is a proper flagship device.
There are a few things that I like about it,
but one of the most important ones
is almost the ambition.
So this is not a budget device.
This is not a weird sidegrade, right,
like this is proper, high-end flagship device.
So I found some random influencers in the wild here
to discuss the Magic5 Pro.
- I think, they're going all out, full on flagship.
We've got three 50-megapixel cameras.
I think that's the first time I've seen
three 50-megapixel cameras, not smartphone
- Not 350, three (bell rings) 50-megapixels
- Three times, no, then we're confusing it with zoom.
Three individual 50-megapixel cameras.
- Now, specs are one thing, and they're important,
don't get me wrong, specs are important,
but a lot of companies
have terrific looking specs on the list.
That doesn't always necessarily translate
into the experience.
- I know you were saying about the specs,
but when you tick off all the boxes,
then you really stand out as flagship, right,
because that's what you're up against,
especially in the Android space.
It's like, okay, does it have this, this, and this?
Especially with the 8 Gen 2, we've seen how efficient it is.
- Look, I've been doing this for a long time,
so I definitely get a little bit pessimistic sometimes.
But so many phones are so similar.
It's little iterative updates over and over and over again,
which is great and it's important, but it's not exciting.
Where as you look at Honor,
they have all the incentive in the world
to be super aggressive,
not only with their marketing and their pricing,
but really, with the features, because let's be real,
if you've got this as an option, it has to stand out.
It can't just be okay, it can't just be decent.
This needs to be better.
This needs to be able to stand out in a real way.
So, I'm partial to this green color, but they've got this,
so they call this the Gaudi Curve.
And essentially, the entire camera bump,
if you can see here, it's very nicely tapered up
into the top of the phone.
If you're gonna go and put a camera bump like that
on the back of your phone,
you better back it up with some good cameras.
(soft gentle music) - I like the design as well.
I mean, some unique treatment, given the camera island,
the way it is, it won't wobble on a flat surface.
So those kind of things, at times, get the interest back.
- Look on top, we've got an IR blaster.
When was the last time you've seen an IR blaster
on a flagship smartphone, it's been years.
On top of that, you've got this speaker,
which actually goes out the top
as well as through the earpiece.
They've got some really cool AI tech
to actually allow you to actually cancel out the audio.
So if you're on a speaker phone call,
and you don't want other people to hear,
you can actually use that to cancel out,
so that no one can hear besides you.
One of the more interesting features
is the AI motion capture.
Essentially what this does is it is constantly taking photos
and the actual AI processing is going to help determine
what the best photo is and give that to you.
So you don't have to,
if you're trying to capture some action,
hit the shutter at the exact right time.
Supposedly, it'll be smart enough to sort it out for itself.
Honor actually used this
to capture a Guinness World Record slam dunk.
Without touching it whatsoever,
it was able to capture the exact right moment
and highlight that still,
so I'm going to emulate that myself.
So we're not gonna touch the phone.
I'm gonna jump, and we're gonna see how well it does.
All right, you ready?
All right, three, two, one.
(camera shoots)
That's pretty much all the way there.
You can see it captured me at the very height of my jump.
- Austin actually got this in one go.
- It's like one of those things
where I feel like sometimes it seems like a gimmick.
Like, oh, it's an actual feature, but you actually use it,
and you don't have to hit the shutter button whatsoever,
and it detects when you do something cool.
It's not always gonna be completely perfect,
but when it captures a shot like that
with the correct timing that I would never be able
to exactly hit on the top of the jump,
it's legitimately really cool.
Now, while this is running incomplete software,
and I, of course, would never make judgements
based on non-final hardware and software,
there are a couple of things
that are actually really cool here.
So if you look inside the camera app,
I'm not showing you this by the way,
you didn't see this for me.
So there are a bunch of features,
but one of the things I like is the actual movie mode,
which actually supports full log.
So you can actually turn on, and it will shoot in log,
just like the camera that we're recording on right now.
If you're not familiar with what log is,
so the A7s3 that we're using
shoots in a very flat picture profile called log,
which is what this looks like right now,
however you use this,
because you can get the absolute maximum dynamic range,
color, and you have the maximum flexibility after the fact,
so when you want to do your color grade,
and now, it looks like this.
Well this phone actually allows you
to do a very similar thing, 10 bit, 4K.
I'd love to show you what it looks like,
unfortunately, I definitely, definitely can't do that,
but it brings me back to when companies were hungry.
It brings me back to when smartphones were fun.
Things can get boring really quick
when everyone has the same specs
and the same battery and blah blah blah.
There's not that much, of course, to differentiate things,
but also it's not that much to be excited about.
- For that, go watch on YouTube MrMobile's,
"When Phones Were Fun."
- (laughing) Yeah, I didn't think
he was gonna plug his own channel there, 'cause for that,
you should watch Technical Guruji. (laughs)
So I think there hasn't been too much competition
in the way of foldables recently, but that's changing now.
And with the Vs, having that flat, gapless design,
I mean that's something that's really good,
'cause it doesn't feel like a foldable all the time.
And you can use the cover display practically.
It's not tiny, it's a very usable cover display.
- This trip has been eye-opening for me.
It's something to see a company like Honor
really trying their best to break into new markets
and to deliver products which are legitimately exciting.
I can't stress that enough.
Being actually good and exciting
is very different than just existing
and delivering devices which are fine and okay.
And I can say that it is only a good thing
to have more competition in this space.
So huge thank you to Honor
for having us out here to Barcelona
and giving us this early sneak peak, so stay tuned.
I'd love to get a deep dive into these things
once they've actually gone on sale,
and I can spend proper time.
But, I'm just gonna use AI
to capture the rest of my video now.
(soft gentle music)