Honor’s slim Magic V5 foldable is enjoyable to make use of, minus the massive digital camera bump

There is a spec battle occurring amongst corporations to assert the crown of thinnest foldable. Phone producers are taking part in with fractions of millimeters to boast about their cellphone’s thickness.


Honor is successful this race on a theoretical foundation with its 8.8 mm (when folded) thick Magic V5 foldable. I’m saying theoretical as a result of there’s a large, camera-bump-sized caveat to this.

The system’s skinny body appears to be like and feels nice so long as you maintain it along with your fingers wrapped across the backside half of the cellphone. If your fingers brush in opposition to the huge bump, you may really feel uncomfortable holding the cellphone. This adjustment took me just a few days to get used to.

When you lay the cellphone on a desk, it creates a slant (like within the picture above). This is okay when the cellphone is folded, however if you unfold the cellphone, it creates a wobble, and it isn’t nice.

In the unfolded state, the body is simply 4.1 mm thick, 1 mm lower than the Oppo’s Find N5, however 0.5 mm greater than Huawei’s triple-folding phone.

Apart from that, the cellphone is a stable piece of {hardware}.

It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is a top-tier processor. The entrance show is a 6.43-inch display with 2376 x 1060 decision, and the principle (unfolded) show is a 7.95-inch display with 2172 x 2352 pixels. The firm stated it’s utilizing a carbon fiber bolstered inside panel for higher fall safety. Plus, Honor has utilized an antiscratch materials to the show. So far, I haven’t seen notable scratches on both display.

The display could be very brilliant with a peak brightness of 5,000 nits. I loved studying articles, PDFs, and lengthy emails on the unfolded display. Playing The New York Times’ puzzles on the unfolded display was one among my favourite issues to do on the system.

Both shows assist LTPO, which implies the refresh fee can dynamically change to any worth from 1Hz to 120Hz, and that makes navigation and scrolling a breeze. Most apps adjusted properly to each the quilt and foremost display, although I observed that the decision grew to become distorted after I tried taking part in “Diablo Immortal” on the unfolded display, so I needed to keep on with the entrance display for gaming.

The construct of the system is sturdy, and it has IP58 and IP59 scores for mud and water resistance. The folding hinge, which makes use of the second-gen Honor Super Steel mechanism, felt stable throughout my weeklong use of the Magic V5.

The foldable has an enormous 5,820 mAh silicone carbon battery. With this capability, you may get by a full day of utilization with a little bit of gaming simply. The system helps 66W wired charging and 50W wi-fi charging, however it’s essential to purchase Honor’s proprietary chargers to assist that. Honor does embody its 66W charger within the field. The firm claims you can cost the system from 0% to 50% in simply 16 minutes with the wired charger and attain 100% cost in 43 minutes. Even if the cellphone doesn’t hit these theoretical limits, you may shortly add sufficient energy to final you just a few hours.

Camera and AI

The Honor Magic V5’s digital camera casing hosts three sensors: a 50-megapixel foremost digital camera with f/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultrawide digital camera, and a 64-megapixel telephoto digital camera with 3x optical zoom. The cellphone additionally has two 20-megapixel selfie cameras — one for every of the inside and outer screens.

The cellphone takes good pictures in all circumstances, capturing particulars properly with typically good colour accuracy. However, I felt that in some circumstances, the cellphone’s computational algorithm boosted reds. The Magic V5’s digital camera has a reasonably good tremendous macro mode that allows you to take close-up pictures of sure objects, like flowers, whereas retaining particulars.

Since all corporations have entry to AI picture fashions, many are introducing super-zoom modes to seize a base picture and utilizing generative AI to reinforce the small print. Honor’s 100x zoom tech is sweet sufficient to seize textual content at a distance and use AI to clear it up. However, after I tried to seize completely different objects, the AI-processed model appeared very a lot AI generated. This wasn’t the case with the Pixel 10 Pro’s 100x Zoom.

Like most China-made telephones, this system additionally has a ton of AI-powered “beauty” options that allow you to clean your pores and skin, regulate your nostril measurement and face measurement, brighten the image, and extra. You can simply flip these options off with a toggle.

Honor has included a bunch of AI enhancing instruments with the cellphone. There is an AI eraser that allows you to draw on objects to take away them. The device additionally has further choices, together with eradicating passersby and eradicating reflections. The first choice doesn’t at all times work properly. Check out this picture I took at Wimbledon. While it eliminated some folks within the background, it additionally eliminated the torso of one of many tennis gamers.

The cellphone has an AI cutout device, which lets you choose an object from a photograph and transfer it throughout the body. When you progress the thing, the system makes use of generative AI to fill within the hole.

This characteristic can be not good and at instances leaves artifacts like shadows across the authentic place of the thing, clearly indicating that you just moved one thing within the picture. There are different instruments like AI upscaling and AI outpainting as properly.

The cellphone additionally contains an image-to-video perform within the system’s picture app, which permits for 3 generations per 30 days. It creates movies utilizing Google’s Veo 2 mannequin, however the output will not be nice and infrequently feels uncanny in comparison with the unique picture.

Software and availability

Honor makes use of its MagicOS 9, based mostly on Android 15 on this system. It will not be cluttered, however I discovered pre-installing Honor apps for good residence gadgets, and the myHonor app (which is a group app), to be pointless. There can be an Honor Health app, which connects to good well being gadgets from Honor (when you’ve got any), and contains has some pre-loaded train content material.

MagicOS handles media change with each Android and Apple gadgets properly. The firm presents a Workstation app for macOS, which makes it straightforward to ship pictures, movies, and paperwork to your Mac.

The firm additionally launched a neat new on-device name translation characteristic, which helps you to obtain a translation mannequin on to the cellphone and course of the info domestically. At the second, it helps six languages, together with Chinese, English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. I examined this characteristic with a French-speaking buddy, and the outcomes had been superb. Unlike the Pixel’s translation characteristic, which retains your voice, you get to decide on between a male and a feminine voice.

Honor is releasing the Magic V5 in Europe, APAC, and the Middle East. In the U.Ok./Europe, the Magic V5 will begin at £1,699.99/€1,999 for the 512GB model. This provides customers an choice to attempt a foldable at a worth £200/€1,999 cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. While this may not problem Samsung’s prime spot within the foldable market, it’d assist Honor’s market share amid growing interest in foldables.