Exclusive first look: Honor’s Magic Portal 2.0 brings game-changing updates to one of the best Android software features
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Honor’s unique AI shortcut tool gets slicker, smarter, and (lots) more compatible apps. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. 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.
![[Portal to Anywhere in Magic Portal 2.0]](https://vanilla.futurecdn.net/cyclingnews/media/img/missing-image.svg)
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.
![[Honor Magic OS 8 interface]](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/XjJ3Thn6Y7LzogzspVpqJH-320-80.jpg)
