Even after 12 months of unprecedented innovation, you’d be forgiven for thinking that smartphone AI is still a superfluous gimmick. The biggest industry players seem intent on spending their entire marketing budgets on showing off their silliest software – how many ads for Google’s Best Take feature or Apple’s Genmoji tool did you see last year? – but the wider toolsets in which these features sit are (I promise you!) becoming increasingly more useful.
Honor, for its part, has always maintained that AI should provide human-centric solutions to human-centric problems (read: make our everyday lives easier), and with MagicOS 8.0, the brand launched its intent-based user interface (IUI), which aimed to reduce the number of steps needed to move between apps by predicting (and responding to) your intentions.
A key feature of this interface was Magic Portal – a shortcut tool that lets you switch between apps and services with a single swipe – and in MagicOS 9.0 for the upcoming Honor Magic 7 Pro, Magic Portal gets a serious facelift.
Let’s start with the big functionality upgrade. In its current state, Magic Portal lets you select and drag blocks of text, images, and files into a contextually aware sidebar for interaction with relevant apps. That alone has been enough to make the best Honor phones stand out among Android competitors – indeed, we described Magic Portal as a “standout feature” in our Honor Magic V3 review – but in MagicOS 9.0, the tool gets upgraded with a neat new feature called Portal to Anywhere.
With Portal to Anywhere, you can use your knuckle (yes, your knuckle) to draw around anything of interest on-screen – be it an address, image, or product – and Honor’s AI brain will serve up apps (in the Magic Portal sidebar) that it deems most relevant to that piece of content. For instance, if you circle the front cover of a book with your knuckle, Magic Portal 2.0 will let you drag that book straight into relevant e-commerce apps to buy it. Or, if your friend mentions the name of a must-visit café in a text message, you can circle and drag the name of that café into Google Maps or another compatible navigation app.
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Especially for images, knuckle-circling is a much more effective method of highlighting content than the pressing, holding, and dragging required in Magic Portal 1.0. But I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t Portal to Anywhere just Circle to Search with a different name?”
Well, not really. For starters, Circle to Search is already available on select Honor phones, but crucially, that feature is a Google Search shortcut, rather than a shortcut to multiple apps. You can, of course, still use Portal to Anywhere to access Google Search if you wish, but you can also pull your chosen content into any number of different apps. It’s Honor’s intent-based UI in action.
Honor says Magic Portal 2.0 boasts an improved semantic understanding of landmarks and movie IPs too, so, in theory, it shouldn’t have trouble identifying everything from the Sagrada Familia to Timothée Chalamet in full Dune gear.
The apps are coming
The second big news for Magic Portal 2.0 concerns its level of app support. Since its launch early last year, Honor has steadily increased the number of Magic Portal-compatible apps available outside of China – the software now supports the likes of WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Maps – but Magic Portal has remained a much more useful tool for users on the other side of the world, not least because the pool of compatible ride-hailing apps available to Westerners is still disappointingly small.
Mercifully, that changes with Magic Portal 2.0, which introduces – in Honor’s own words – support for “a wider array of applications encompassing entertainment, transportation, productivity, and shopping needs.”
That’s not just marketing speak, either. Uber, YouTube, TikTok, Outlook, Google Translate, X, and Dropbox are among the new apps now attachable to the Magic Portal sidebar, making what was already one of the best Android software features in China now one of the best Android software features, well, everywhere else.
Back when Honor announced Magic Portal, I wrote that Honor’s new ‘intent-based UI’ could let you order food and taxis with just one swipe. Now, a year later, that utopian vision will become a reality for a lot more people.
Magic Portal 2.0 will launch with MagicOS 9.0 on the Honor Magic 7 Pro, which is expected to debut in European markets soon.
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axel.metz@futurenet.com (Axel Metz)
