Huawei Honor Magic Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Honor Magic can do cool things thanks to artificial intelligence.

Huawei

What does it take for a phone to be “magic”? According to Huawei, maker of the brand-new Honor Magic, it’s a whole lot of built-in AI that makes the phone know who you are, what you’re doing now, and what you might want to do next.

A few examples of the Magic’s powers:

You pick it up and its infrared sensors scan not just your face, but also your hands to verify that you’re really you (there’s a fingerprint scanner built into the home button as well).

The Honor Magic only surfaces notification messages when the phone has verified it’s you, so that nosy neighbors don’t get to see who’s pinging you or why.

GPS meets your calendar and other apps to pull up stuff you need to reference at the exact time you need it, like: Your tracking number surfaces on-screen when you get to the post office, or perhaps your boarding pass pops into view when you arrive at the airport.

If it’s dark, the phone can surface a flashlight option. You still decide if you want to turn it on or off, but having the flashlight at your fingertips will theoretically make it faster and easier to find and use.

Huawei also points out some capabilities that seem like rebranded features from Google Now on Android, like pressing and holding the home screen button to find out more information about a topic or place (Huawei calls this “deep think”). On the whole, though, we haven’t seen sensors used to quite this extent, and it sounds like it makes a lot of useful sense. I definitely want to try out this “magic” for myself.

Honor Magic specs

• 5-inch screen with 2,560×1,440-pixel resolution
• 12-megapixel dual-lens camera
• 8-megapixel front-facing camera
• Android 6.0 with Magic Live software layer
• 2.3GHz octa-core Huawei Kirin processor
• 2,900mAh battery with quick charge: 70 percent charge in 20 minutes
• 64GB internal storage/4GB RAM
• Colors: Golden black, porcelain white

Huawei has announced the phone for China right now, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled for other global launches in the coming weeks.