Honor's Second-Gen Foldable Phone Teased Before November 23 Launch

2022 has been an interesting year for foldable smartphones. While Samsung continued dominating the global foldable smartphone market with its Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Flip 4 devices, this year also witnessed a steady influx of foldable phones from Chinese smartphone brands. Among the most notable non-Samsung foldable phones to debut in 2022 include the Motorola Razr (2022), the Xiaomi Mi Fold 2, the OPPO Find N, and the Honor Magic V. Unfortunately, the majority of Chinese brands decided against bringing their first-generation foldable phones to consumers in the West. It is almost as if these brands want the Western foldable market to mature a bit more before they officially bring these devices to consumers outside of China.

It was in January 2022 that Honor — the former sub-brand of Huawei — joined the select club of smartphone brands with foldable smartphones in their portfolio. Honor's first foldable phone — the Honor Magic V — was a vertically folding smartphone. It shared its basic design principle with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold and the Xiaomi Mix Fold, albeit it was slightly larger than either of its competitors, and featured high-end hardware. Besides using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, it also featured three 50MP rear-facing cameras and a 42MP selfie camera. All variants of the Honor Magic V featured 12GB of RAM, with two storage options to choose from — 256GB and 512GB (per Honor).

Ideally, Honor should be launching a successor to the Honor Magic V in January 2023. However, an impatient Honor is prepping the launch of its next-gen foldable — the Honor Magic Vs — later this month at an event on November 23, 2022. On Tuesday, Honor also showcased the first official images of the Honor Magic Vs via its official Weibo handle.

At least on the looks front, the Honor Magic Vs seems like an incremental update over last year's Magic V. The phone gets a similar-looking rear-facing camera bump that uses three different lenses. One significant feature addition this time seems to be the inclusion of an S Pen-like stylus — which was missing from last year's model. It is unclear at this time if the Honor Magic Vs gets a dedicated slot to store the stylus.

While the overall design language of the Magic Vs remains unchanged, the teaser images do reveal an additional, more premium color option this time around. The phone's camera island also has text that reads "Designed by Magic." Honor also asserts that the 2023 Magic Vs will feature several upgrades to its hinge mechanism, although the company didn't share specific details on what's changed.

While not confirmed yet, the Honor Magic Vs could use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC, although there is the possibility of the phone getting Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 instead. Honor has managed to keep the rest of the details surrounding the Honor Magic Vs under wraps for the time being. In addition to this foldable phone, Honor is also likely to launch its revamped Honor 80 lineup at the November 2022 event.