HONOR Magic 2 teardown shows how the phone's slider mechanism works

At the end of October, HONOR announced the Magic 2, the successor to its AI-focused smartphone. While the handset is impressive from a specs and camera perspective, the phone features a nearly bezel-less display thanks to a sliding mechanism that hides the front-facing sensors.

Unlike phones like the vivo Nex that feature a pop-up camera module, HONOR separated the Magic 2’s display and fingerprint sensor from the body of the handset. When the user wants to take a selfie, they have to slide the front portion of the device down.

As you can see from the above GIF, all that connects the screen section of the phone to the rest of the HONOR Magic 2 is a set of slide rails and a ribbon cable. It’s a simplistic design, but if the slider section gunks up or breaks, you immediately lose access to your three front-facing cameras and other sensors.

And while this also might seem like it would make replacing a broken display easier, you have to disassemble the entire phone to get to the front panel. Seen in the second photo below, the HONOR Magic 2 comes apart just like any other smartphone, with the battery, motherboard, and other pieces stacked on top of each other.

Surprisingly, as we discovered with this week’s poll, more people would rather have phone manufacturers leave bigger bezels to house the front-facing sensors instead of introducing these types of sliding apprentices. We’ll have to wait and see if other companies decide to follow suit or if they will continue to use screens with notches until under-display tech advances.

What do you think about the HONOR Magic 2’s sliding mechanism? Should more phones implement this type of design to get around having a notch? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!