There is a spec war going on among companies to claim the crown of thinnest foldable. Phone manufacturers are playing with fractions of millimeters to boast about their phone’s thickness.
Honor is winning this race on a theoretical basis with its 8.8 mm (when folded) thick Magic V5 foldable. I’m saying theoretical because there is a huge, camera-bump-sized caveat to this.
The device’s thin frame looks and feels great as long as you hold it with your fingers wrapped around the bottom half of the phone. If your fingers brush against the massive bump, you might feel uncomfortable holding the phone. This adjustment took me a few days to get used to.
When you lay the phone on a table, it creates a slant (like in the photo above). This is fine when the phone is folded, but when you unfold the phone, it creates a wobble, and it is not pleasant.
In the unfolded state, the frame is just 4.1 mm thick, 1 mm less than the Oppo’s Find N5, but 0.5 mm more than Huawei’s triple-folding phone.
Apart from that, the phone is a solid piece of hardware.
It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is a top-tier processor. The front display is a 6.43-inch screen with 2376 x 1060 resolution, and the main (unfolded) display is a 7.95-inch screen with 2172 x 2352 pixels. The company said it’s using a carbon fiber reinforced inner panel for better fall protection. Plus, Honor has applied an antiscratch material to the display. So far, I haven’t seen notable scratches on either screen.
The screen is very bright with a peak brightness of 5,000 nits. I enjoyed reading articles, PDFs, and long emails on the unfolded screen. Playing The New York Times’ puzzles on the unfolded screen was one of my favorite things to do on the device.
Both displays support LTPO, which means the refresh rate can dynamically switch to any value from 1Hz to 120Hz, and that makes navigation and scrolling a breeze. Most apps adjusted well to both the cover and main screen, though I noticed that the resolution became distorted when I tried playing “Diablo Immortal” on the unfolded screen, so I had to stick to the front screen for gaming.
The build of the device is sturdy, and it has IP58 and IP59 ratings for dust and water resistance. The folding hinge, which uses the second-gen Honor Super Steel mechanism, felt solid during my weeklong use of the Magic V5.
The foldable has a massive 5,820 mAh silicone carbon battery. With this capacity, you can get through a full day of usage with a bit of gaming easily. The device supports 66W wired charging and 50W wireless charging, but you need to buy Honor’s proprietary chargers to support that. Honor does include its 66W charger in the box. The company claims that you can charge the device from 0% to 50% in just 16 minutes with the wired charger and reach 100% charge in 43 minutes. Even if the phone doesn’t hit those theoretical limits, you can quickly add enough power to last you a few hours.
Camera and AI
The Honor Magic V5’s camera casing hosts three sensors: a 50-megapixel main camera with f/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 64-megapixel telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom. The phone also has two 20-megapixel selfie cameras — one for each of the inner and outer screens.
The phone takes good photos in all conditions, capturing details well with generally good color accuracy. However, I felt that in some conditions, the phone’s computational algorithm boosted reds. The Magic V5’s camera has a pretty good super macro mode that lets you take close-up photos of certain objects, like flowers, while retaining details.
Since all companies have access to AI image models, many are introducing super-zoom modes to capture a base photo and using generative AI to enhance the details. Honor’s 100x zoom tech is good enough to capture text at a distance and use AI to clear it up. However, when I tried to capture different objects, the AI-processed version looked very much AI generated. This wasn’t the case with the Pixel 10 Pro’s 100x Zoom.
Like most China-made phones, this device also has a ton of AI-powered “beauty” features that let you smooth your skin, adjust your nose size and face size, brighten the picture, and more. You can easily turn these features off with a toggle.
Honor has included a bunch of AI editing tools with the phone. There is an AI eraser that lets you draw on objects to remove them. The tool also has additional options, including removing passersby and removing reflections. The first option doesn’t always work well. Check out this photo I took at Wimbledon. While it removed some people in the background, it also removed the torso of one of the tennis players.
The phone has an AI cutout tool, which allows you to select an object from a photo and move it within the frame. When you move the object, the device uses generative AI to fill in the gap.
This feature is also not perfect and at times leaves artifacts like shadows around the original position of the object, clearly indicating that you moved something in the photo. There are other tools like AI upscaling and AI outpainting as well.
The phone also includes an image-to-video function in the device’s photo app, which allows for three generations per 30 days. It creates videos using Google’s Veo 2 model, but the output is not great and often feels uncanny compared to the original image.
Software and availability
Honor uses its MagicOS 9, based on Android 15 on this device. It is not cluttered, but I found pre-installing Honor apps for smart home devices, and the myHonor app (which is a community app), to be unnecessary. There is also an Honor Health app, which connects to smart health devices from Honor (if you have any), and includes has some pre-loaded exercise content.
MagicOS handles media exchange with both Android and Apple devices well. The company offers a Workstation app for macOS, which makes it easy to send photos, videos, and documents to your Mac.
The company also released a neat new on-device call translation feature, which lets you download a translation model directly to the phone and process the data locally. At the moment, it supports six languages, including Chinese, English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. I tested this feature with a French-speaking friend, and the results were very good. Unlike the Pixel’s translation feature, which retains your voice, you get to choose between a male and a female voice.
Honor is releasing the Magic V5 in Europe, APAC, and the Middle East. In the U.K./Europe, the Magic V5 will start at £1,699.99/€1,999 for the 512GB version. This gives consumers an option to try a foldable at a price £200/€1,999 cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. While this might not challenge Samsung’s top spot in the foldable market, it might help Honor’s market share amid growing interest in foldables.