By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 11th, 2024
Chinese mobile smartphone manufacturer, Honor has launched the Magic3 brand, a budget handset built as a Digital Yuan compatible wallet.
As reported by Coindesk, the launch of the Honor Magic3 smartphone is a feather to the People’s Bank of China’s (PBoC) cap and its efforts to debut a mobile phone that has a Digital Yuan wallet which can help promote its adoption campaigns.
The PBOC has entered the advanced stages of its digital yuan development and wants local technology firms to build new software tools that can help in the mainstream acceptance of the new form of money. Honor’s Magic3 is the first Snapdragon product to support the Digital Yuan. The phone is infused with the 888 Plus Chip from American semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm Inc (NASDAQ: QCOM).
Honor Digital Yuan Enabled Phone: Features and Specs
The new Honor’s brand is a Series that includes the Magic3, the Magic3 Pro, and the Honor Magic3 Pro+. The Magic3 series uses an 89° super curved screen on the front, is equipped with a 6.76-inch flexible OLED screen, and supports a 120Hz screen refresh rate.
The new phone brand is available in four distinct colors including bright black, glaze white, Chenhui gold, and dawn blue. The 888 chip is the upgraded version with a 5G SoC feature. The integration of the hard wallet feature for the digital yuan will help provide financial payment-level security protection for all users and their funds.
Honor’s products are largely considered as a budget phone when compared with its top competitors including OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi. For the price range of 2,000 yuan-4,000 yuan ($300-$600), Honor is considered as one of the most dominant competitors for phone quality. The Magic3 is priced at 4599 yuan, the Honor Magic3 Pro starts at 5999 yuan, and Honor Magic3 Pro+ reaches the high-end price of 7,999 yuan.
The Honor’s phones are high-end and support 5G technology. These phone network capabilities also compliments the brand’s earlier released Honor V40, its first product when it split from Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Huawei had to sell off the Honor brand as American regulatory pressures mounted.
Chinese Phone Brands with DCEP Wallet Support
While the Honor Magic3 is the first phone from the Snapdragon 888 chip design to support Digital yuan, other phone brands have been building capabilities for the Chinese Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as far back as October 2020.
Per an earlier Coinspeaker report, Huawei launched its Mate 40 smartphones in the third quarter of last year, and support for the digital yuan was integrated. The Huawei Mate 40 notably became the first phone to provide such support at the time.
The move to secure the right distribution model for the Digital Yuan is a multi-party effort that also involves the major Chinese financial institutions which according to Coinspeaker had started processing applications for the DCEP wallets.