Back at IFA 2018 in Berlin, right at the end of its presentation for the launch of the Honor Play, the Huawei sub-brand teased a follow up to the Honor Magic from 2016. The second generation Magic is now official, and it's an impressive looking device with minimal screen bezels thanks to a slide-up front camera mechanism.

On the back, the Honor Magic 2 clearly takes design inspiration from its bigger brother, the Huawei P20 Pro, with a very similar triple rear camera arrangement and vibrant gradient colors. On the front, well there's not much to see really. There's no notch and very little chin bezel. To make this possible, much like the Xiaomi'sMi Mix 3 and Oppo Find X, the front camera module (in this case, a 16MP selfie cam with two depth sensors and an IR scanner for face unlock) is hidden until you slide the screen down to reveal it. It's a neat trick, and might just be my favorite anti-notch alternative so far.

Being an Honor device, you might expect the rest of the specs to be rather pedestrian, but that's not the case. Its features are much the same as Huawei's Mate 20 Pro flagship, including the top-of-the-line Kirin 980 SoC, an in-display fingerprint sensor, and crazy-fast 40W charging for the 3,400mAh battery. The FHD+ OLED display is 6.4 inches diagonally with a 19:9 ratio and the three rear cameras consist of a 16MP RGB sensor, 24MP monochrome, and 16MP ultra wide angle. Sadly, there's no headphone jack in sight.

So the specs are pretty hard to beat, but what about the price? The base model, with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, costs 3,799 CNY (~$545), 8/128GB goes for 4,299 CNY (~$615), and the 8/256GB variant will set you back 4,799 CNY (~$690). Although straight conversions don't tell the whole story, it sounds like it might be relatively reasonably priced for what you get. It's currently possible to pre-order the phone in China, but there's no word yet on international availability.

Source: Honor, Vmall