There is a special war among companies to demand the crown of the thinnest collapse. Telephone manufacturers play with a fraction of millimeters to boast of the thickness of their phone.


The honor wins this race on the theoretical basis with its 8.8 mm (when folded) thick magic V5 foldable. I say theoretically because there is a huge, camera-bump size warning to this.
The thin frame of the device looks and feels big as long as you hold it in a way that your fingers are packed around the lower half of the phone. If your fingers brush against the massive shock, you may feel uncomfortable with holding the phone. This rigamrole took me a few days to adapt.
When you put the phone on the table, it creates an oblique (as in the picture above). This is fine when the phone is folded, but when you unfold the phone, it creates a wing and it is not comfortable.
In the unfolded state, the frame is only 4.1 mm thick, one millimeter less than Oppo’s Find N5, but 0.5 mm more than Huawei’s triple phone.
Apart from that, the phone is a solid piece of hardware.
It is run by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is a top-tier processor. The front screen is a 6.43-inch screen with 2376 x 1060 resolution, and the most important (unclear) display is a 7.95-inch screen with 2172 x 2352 pixels. The company said it uses a carbon fiber reinforced inner panel for better fall protection. Plus, Honor has used an anti-cratch material on the display. So far, I haven’t seen remarkable scratches on any of the screens.
The screen is very light with a maximum brightness of 5,000 nits. I enjoyed reading articles, PDFs and long E emails on the unfolded screen. Playing a new walk on the unfolded screen was one of my favorite things to do on the device.
Both screens support LTPO, which means that the update speed can switch to any value from 1Hz to 120Hz dynamically, making the navigation and rolling a breeze. Most apps adjusted well to both the cover and the main screen. Although I noticed that the resolution sprang up when I was trying to play “Diablo Immortal” on the unfolded screen, so I had to stick to the front screen while playing the game.
The building of the unit is robust and it has IP58 and IP59 rates for dust and water resistance. The folding hinge, which uses the other re-era super steel mechanism, felt solid during my week-long use of the V5 magic.
The foldable has a massive 5,820mAh silicone carbon battery. Thanks to that, you can easily get through the whole day with a little game. The device supports the 66W cable charging and 50W wireless charging, but you have to buy Honor’s proprietary chargers to support it. Honor packs his 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% charging in 43 minutes. Even if the phone does not hit these theoretical boundaries, you can quickly get enough juice on the phone to last you for a few hours.
Camera and AI
Honor Magic V5’s camera body hosts three sensors. A 50-megapixel main camera with f/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultra-camera and a 64-megapixel telelma with 3x optical zoom. The phone also has a pair of 20-megapixel selfie cameras for both the inner and outer screens.
The phone takes good photos under all conditions and collects details well with pretty good color accuracy. However, I felt that the phone’s calculation algorithm under some conditions increased red. The Magic V5’s camera has a pretty good supermacro state that allows you to take close -ups of certain objects, like flowers while retaining details.
Since all companies have access to AI image models, a number of them introduce a super zoom mode to capture the basic photo and use generative AI to fill the details. Honers 100x Zoom Tech is good enough to catch text at a distance and get AI to clean it up. However, when I tried to capture different objects, the version with AI treatment, however, looked very AI-generated. This was not the case when I tried the Pixel 10 Pro’s 100x Zoom.
Like most China-made phones, this device also has a wealth of AI-driven “beauty” features that let you smooth your skin, adjust your nasal size and face size, brighter the image and more. But you can turn it off quickly through a shift if you want.
There are a lot of AI editing tools that honor has included on the phone. There is an AI wiser that allows you to pull on objects to remove them. The tool also has options, including removing passers -by and removing reflection. The first option does not always work well. Check out this photo I took when I attended Wimbledon. While it removed some people in the background, it removed the upper body of one of the tennis players.
The phone has an AI -cutting tool that allows you to select an object from a photo and move it inside the frame. When you move the object, the device uses generative AI to fill the gap.
This is also not perfect, and sometimes artifacts leave like shadows around the object’s original position, which clearly indicates that you were moving something in this photo. There are also other tools such as AI -SCALERING and AI paint.
In addition, there is an image-to-video feature in the phone’s photo app that allows for three generations per day. 30 days. It does the job of making the video using Google’s VEO2 model, but output is not great, and often feels creepy compared to the original image.
Software and availability
Honor uses his Magicos 9, based on Android 15, with this device. It’s not messy, but I thought pre-installation of honorary apps for smart home units, and the Myhonor app, which is a community app, was unnecessary. There is an Honor Health app that connects smart health units from honor (if you have any), and also have some preloaded training content.
Magicos handles media exchange with both Android and Apple devices well. The company has a WorkStation app on MacOS, making it easy to send photos, videos and documents to your Mac.
The company also released a nice new out-unit call translation feature, which allows you to download a translation model on the phone and process the data locally. Currently, 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 Pixel’s translation feature that also preserves your voice, you get to choose between a man and a female voice.
The company releases Honor Magic V5 in Europe, APAC and the Middle East. In the UK/Europe, the Magic V5 has a starting price of £ 1,699.99/€ 1,999 for a 512 GB version. This gives consumers an opportunity to try a foldable at a cheaper price of £ 200/€ 1,999 than Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. While this may not challenge Samsung’s top location in the collapsing market, it may help Honor’s growth numbers in the midst of foldable.