Honor Magic V5: A Slim and Powerful Foldable Smartphone with Advanced Features

Honor's slim Magic V5 foldable is fun to use, minus the huge camera bump | TechCrunch

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 8.8mm (when folded) thick Magic V5 foldable. I'm saying theoretical because there is a huge, camera-bump-sized caveat to this. The thin frame of the device looks and feels great as long as you hold it in a way that your fingers are wrapped around the bottom half of the phone. If your fingers are brushing against the massive bump, you might feel uncomfortable holding the phone. This rigamrole took me a few days to adjust to. When you lay the phone on the 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 4.1mm thick, one millimeter less than Oppo's Find N5, but 0.5mm more than Huawei's triple-folding phone. Apart from that, the phone is a solid piece of hardware. It is powered by 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 (unfoled) 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 anti-scratch material on the display. So far, I haven't seen notable scratches on either of the screens. 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 NYT 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 blew 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 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 week-long usage of the V5 Magic. The foldable has a massive 5,820mAh silicone carbon battery. Thanks to that, you can get through all 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 pack its 66W charger within the box. The company claims that you can charge the device from 0 to 50% in just 16 minutes with the wired charger and get to 100% charging in 43 minutes. Even if the phone doesn't hit those theoretical limits, you can quickly get enough juice in the phone to last you a few hours. The Honor Magic V5's camera casing hosts three sensors. A 50-megapixel main camera with f/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and a 64-megapixel telephoto camera 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 in all conditions, capturing details well with largely 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, a number of them are introducing a super zoom mode to capture the base photo and use generative AI to fill up the details. Honor's 100x zoom tech is good enough to capture text at a distance and have AI clear it up. However, when I tried to capture different objects, the version with AI processing looked very much AI-generated. This wasn't the case when I tried the Pixel 10 Pro's 100x Zoom. Just like most China-made phones, this device also has a ton of AI-powered "beauty" features that let you smoothen your skin, adjust your nose size and face size, brighten the picture, and more. But you can turn that off quickly through a toggle if you want. There are a bunch of AI editing tools that Honor has included with the phone. There is an AI eraser that lets you draw on objects to remove them. The tool also has options, including removing passerbys and removing reflection. The first option doesn't always work well. Check out this photo I took when I attended Wimbledon. While it removed some people in the background, it 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 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 this photo. There are other tools like AI upscaling and AI outpainting as well. What's more, there's an image-to-video function in the phone's photo app, which allows for three generations per 30 days. It does the job of making the video using Google's Veo2 model, but the output is not great, and often feels uncanny compared to the original image. Honor is using its MagicOS 9, based on Android 15, with this device. It is not cluttered, but I thought pre-installing Honor apps for smart home devices, and the myHonor app, which is a community app, was unnecessary. There is an Honor Health app, which connects smart health devices from Honor (if you have any), and also has some pre-loaded exercise content. MagicOS handles media exchange with both Android and Apple devices well. The company has a Workstation app on 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 on 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 Pixel's translation feature, which also retains your voice, you get to choose between a male and a female voice. The company is releasing the Honor Magic V5 in Europe, APAC, and the Middle East. In the UK/Europe, the Magic V5 will have a starting price of £1,699.99/€1,999 for a 512GB version. This gives consumers an option to try out a foldable at a £200/€1,999 cheaper price than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. While this might not challenge Samsung's top spot in the foldable market, it might help Honor's growth numbers amid foldables.

I Tested Honor's Rival to Samsung's Z Fold 7 and It's a Skinny Powerhouse

At only 4.1mm thick at its thinnest unfolded point, the Honor Magic V5 is incredibly skinny. In fact, the company has said it's the world's thinnest foldable measuring in just 0.1mm skinnier than Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7. That claim is debated -- it depends whether you include the built-in screen protector or not -- but we're almost literally splitting hairs at this point. World's thinnest or not, it's mind-blowingly svelte. Well, it blew my mind, anyway. The other foldables I've been using recently include Google's Pixel 9 Pro Fold and the OnePlus Open, both of which feel positively bloated when held against the Magic V5. Getting my hands on Honor's latest foldable made me realise just how far the technology has come in a few short years. Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source on Chrome. But you'll pay for that skinny design. Starting at £1,700, the Magic V5 is hardly what you'd consider cheap, although it's around £100 cheaper than Samsung's equivalent. Honor doesn't sell its phones officially in the US, so for reference that UK price converts to $2,299. I've spent the last couple of weeks with the phone and here's what I Iike about it. It's an obvious start, really. That thin body addresses my main concern about book-style foldables. It's barely thicker than a regular phone when folded up, so it's much easier to hold and easier to slide into a jeans pocket. Well, most of it is. While the phone's body is only 8.8mm thick when shut, the camera unit protrudes an additional 7mm -- almost doubling the overall thickness of the phone. As a photographer I've never said this about a phone before but it's almost a shame Honor didn't really cut back on the cameras. I'd have loved to see what a foldable phone felt like that was so slender the whole way across. While you'd probably imagine such a thin phone would be incredibly delicate, Honor actually boasted that it holds a Guinness World Record for the heaviest weight (104 kilograms) lifted by a foldable phone. How that actually translates to real-world durability over time remains to be seen, but the phone certainly felt sturdy in my hands-on time. Its IP59 dust and water resistance will also help keep it safe from spilled drinks and other debris, but Google's latest Pixel 10 Pro Fold takes the crown as the first foldable to offer IP68 resistance, giving it greater protection against dust or other particles getting inside and potentially harming the hinge. The inner screen measures 7.95 inches and provides loads of room for videos or games. Like most book foldables, it has an almost square aspect ratio, so widescreen movies will still play as a strip through the middle. The crease isn't especially noticeable under mixed lighting conditions. The outer 6.43-inch display fills the front of the phone and it's bright and vibrant. The Magic V5 runs on the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and it put in some great results on our suite of benchmark tests. Navigating around the interface is swift and games like Genshin Impact and PUBG play well, even at max settings. They also look great when played on the massive inner display. It runs Android 15 at launch although an update to Android 16 is expected later in the year. Honor has customized the interface with its own UI which makes various changes to the layout, apps and text, although it's still easy to get to grips with. It comes with various Honor AI tools built in, including an image editor that does things like object removal or expanding the canvas -- the latter giving me the infinitely long arms I always dreamed of. It also includes the image-to-video generative AI tool that rocked my world previously by bringing my dad back to life. It works just the same here. You'll also find the usual array of Google AI tools including Gemini Live and Circle to Search. Honor says the phone will receive a total of seven years of software and security updates. The phone has a 5,820-mAh battery, which should be good for at least a full day of mixed use, depending on what you get up to with it. Spend the whole morning streaming video on the massive inner screen and you'll probably need to give it a top up later in the day. Doing so is quick, though: It supports 66W wired charging, as long as you have a compatible charger. That massive rear bump houses three cameras: a 50-megapixel wide camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide and a 64-megapixel telephoto camera providing 3x optical zoom. I've not spent much time testing the cameras, but from my early use I'd say they're decent. But they can't quite challenge today's top camera phones like the iPhone 16 Pro or Galaxy S25 Ultra. This is pretty much par for the course for foldable phones. Most companies tend to outfit their foldables with more midrange camera hardware in order to try and keep the already high price from going any higher. While the cameras on the V5 are certainly decent (especially for a foldable), if photography is your main consideration when buying a phone then it may not be the handset for you. Its slim design alone makes it one of the more impressive foldable phones I've held. It feels like a totally different level of device from earlier book-folding foldables like the OnePlus Open and it's absolutely worth taking a look for that reason alone. Add in the powerful Qualcomm processor, the promised durability and the solid camera performance and the Honor Magic V5 has a lot to offer. And it does it at a price that slightly undercuts Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7. Sadly, I haven't had my hands on the Z Fold 7 so I can't say how the two phones compare, but on paper it seems like it's a close battle. The main reason for those of you in the US to buy the Samsung over the Honor is simple; You can't buy the Honor in the US. Everyone else, you'll have a tougher time deciding.

Honor's Magic V5 foldable almost feels too thin

As soon as I picked up Honor's Magic V5, I was a little concerned about its durability. The fourth generation of Honor's Android foldable may not be massively thinner than its predecessor, but it sure feels like it. Yes, it's built with aerospace-grade materials to make it sturdy despite its svelteness, but it's also the first foldable I'd insist on buying a case for because goodness me, it's thin. If you recall, the last handset in this series was the Magic V3 and no, you haven't fallen asleep and missed a year. The number four can represent bad luck in Chinese culture as its Cantonese form (sei) sounds almost identical to the word for death (séi). Consequently, we've skipped a model number. The V5 is so svelte it'll barely make an impression on your pants pocket, measuring 8.8mm folded and 4.1mm open. That's not a big difference to the V3's 9.2mm / 4.35mm, but it certainly feels like a rubicon has been crossed. It's worth noting Honor is marking its own homework with one eye closed here, since it can only reach that thickness with the white V5. The other colorways (black, red and gold) stack up at 9mm / 4.2mm, which is almost the same as Samsung's Z Fold 7. Naturally, a premium foldable deserves premium internals, and the V5 packs a Snapdragon 8 Elite with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage. There's a 5,820mAh silicon carbon battery that, when paired with the company's usual AI power-management tools, promises nearly 50 hours of life on a charge. I won't comment on that claim but I can say this is the snappiest and fastest Honor foldable I've laid my eyes and hands on. There's no lag or delay when switching displays, and everything feels like it's already served up seconds before you've even asked for it. But in the same way no modern smartphone is a dramatic departure from what went before, the rest of the story here is nips and tucks. The Magic V5 has the same 6.43-inch cover display as the V3, and the main screen has grown only slightly, from 7.92 inches to 7.95 inches. The only useful tweak is support for Honor's MagicPen stylus on both screens, but it's the same size as an Apple Pencil, so you'll need to find a place to store it. It's a similar story of modest changes on the imaging front as the V5 is equipped with a 50-megapixel f/1.6 primary camera with OIS. That's paired with a 64-megapixel, f/2.5 periscope telephoto (also with OIS) and a 50-megapixel f/2.0 ultra-wide. Overall, that's an improvement on the previous model, but both selfie cameras (in the cover and primary display) are the same 20-megapixel shooter found in the V3. Of course, performance is bolstered by the usual AI features that may or may not be useful. Honor has announced European pricing for the V5, with it costing €1,999 (around $2,317) in the EU and £1,699 (around $2,283) in the UK. That puts it in the same rough bracket as the Z Fold 7, although there's so many deals and discounts these days you can always save money if you look. I'm still not sure if Honor isn't selling itself short by not undercutting its rivals more aggressively, but it must feel it can compete, and win, against Samsung and the like on an even playing field.

Honor Magic V5 review: thinner, faster, stronger - but expensive

Honor's foldable phone gets some worthwhile upgrades, despite software limitations. Last year Honor's Magic V3 foldable phone impressed, offering mature software, a thin and robust design and more powerful hardware. This year, thanks to the unlucky reputation of the number four in China, we've gone up two to the Magic V5. The new phone follows industry trends in offering a slimmer design, a bigger battery, improved cameras, a larger internal screen and more powerful internals - including Snapdragon's 8 Elite processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. But do these upgrades offer a meaningful upgrade over the 2024 model, given that the price has climbed to a massive £1699, a big ask even for this ultra-premium category? Or are you better off sticking with something a few generations older at something like half the price? The Magic V5 is a tad more reserved in its colour selection than its reddish brown or green predecessors. Instead, it's black, ivory white and the stylish dawn gold - the pick I'd personally go with. Our sample came in black. Putting it against my Magic V3, the new model's camera bump protrudes a bit more due to some internal upgrades I'll discuss later. However, the overall profile of the phone, both unfolded and folded, is even slimmer than its predecessor. Interestingly, it's the ivory white version that's technically the slimmest, at just 4.1mm unfolded and 8.8mm when folded; the black and dawn gold models sit at 4.2mm and 9mm respectively. Nonetheless, that's still 0.2-0.3mm less than the Magic V3, and virtually identical to the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7's 8.9mm total thickness. The Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold, at 10.8mm, is a positive porker by comparison. As much as the thickness and weight (of 217g) aren't massive departures from the V3, it feels good to know that we've gotten to the stage where foldable phones aren't cumbersome to use. The Magic V5 fits into a regular-sized pocket and into adult hands without issues, whether folded or unfolded. As with its predecessor, you'll have to keep a good grip on it when using it in tablet mode one-handed. Weirdly, this new model doesn't have the same textured finish on the rear as the Magic V3 did, making it a bit more slippery. The Magic V5 also runs with the typical modern design that Honor has typified these Magic foldables with, with a slender feel and super-thin bezels around the cover screen and main display to maximise screen real estate. I still think there's some potential for dust and dirt ingress around the main screen, though I didn't spot anything too egregious on my review unit. There is a similar Honor "super steel" hinge involved with this phone, which has seen some upgrades to withstand even more pressure. Honor advertising includes some big claims, including the ability to suspend 30kg of stuff from the hinge - though they obviously don't recommend it for normal use - and the durability rating sits at 500,000 cycles. One of the biggest upgrades with the Magic V5 is to its water and dust resistance rating, as the phone now has full-fat IP58/IP59 dust and water resistance. Its predecessor was only IPX8. By comparison, the ZFold 7 has an IP48 water resistance rating, and the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is the first IP68-rated foldable. Honor has maximised screen real estate and brightness with the Magic V5 in a move that sees the main display get a slight boost to 7.95 inches in size, while the cover display remains at 6.43 inches. Both panels can get up to 5000 nits of peak brightness with HDR in supported content for an eyeball-searing experience; these screens aren't half short of punch, and are both OLEDs for immense depth and lovely colours. Owing to it being slightly larger, the main display has also seen a push up to 2352x2172 resolution - about the same number of pixels as a 2560x1440 ("1440p") display - which makes it a fantastic choice for everything from general productivity to gaming and binging content on Plex, YouTube or Prime Video. The pixel density is virtually unchanged at 403ppi, while a 120Hz refresh rate keeps things responsive. The smaller cover display impresses too, with the same 2376x1060 resolution as its predecessor, plus a 120Hz refresh rate for added zippiness. When opening the main display feels a little cumbersome, or you just want to quickly check notifications, this is a more than suitable deputy. Both screens support stylus input, though you will need to buy Honor's stylus separately and there's no place to store the stylus in the phone. Certain apps and content will have a letterbox effect, not filling the screen entirely, but you can force apps and games on an individual basis to fill the screen so you can take advantage of the full 7.95 inches of real estate. Perhaps the biggest upgrade with the Magic V5 is with what Honor has termed its new 'AI Falcon' camera setup, which they say gives a conventional flagship experience in a foldable form factor. It's typically with their camera setup that foldables have made some compromises, but Honor has attempted to change that. We've got a 50MP main camera, plus a boosted 64MP periscope-lens telephoto with 3x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom, and a 50MP ultrawide sensor. General detail and colours are pleasant across the board in my testing on a few walkabouts in London, although I still think the Magic foldable cameras tend to favour over-saturated colours for as much pop as possible; the shot of the back of the Routemaster bus proves this. Cropping into shots reveals a strong maintenance of detail from the main and ultrawide sensors, while the 3x optical zoom provides some good quality when punching in on a subject a tad. Going into the digital zoom range requires some AI help to maintain a semblance of proper quality, especially at the full 100x you're likely to only use for a laugh. As for low-light performance, images are smoothed out a little so they lack some detail, but there isn't much in the way of noise to make for a generally clean image. As with its predecessor, the fuzziness is virtually gone, and there's enough light compensation without things getting overblown. The front cameras remain unchanged to my knowledge, with the same 20-megapixel selfie options that provide neutral colours and decent detail retained. Of course, as this is a foldable phone, it's worth noting that you can prop the phone up and use the much more competent rear lenses for taking vain photos of yourself. Internally, the Magic V5 gets the proper flagship treatment for 2025, as you'd expect for a phone at its high price tag, benefitting from the new Snapdragon 8 Elite processor plus 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage for good measure. In the GFXBench gaming tests, we're seeing a bigger boost in the Aztec Ruins High Tier test at 60fps against its predecessor's 46fps, while Car Chase also sits at 60fps against 57fps from the Magic V3. It's worth bearing in mind that the higher-res internal screen makes this a slightly sterner test for the V5 than last year's V3. The scores in Geekbench 6 aren't demonstrably stronger than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip inside the Magic V3, although we are seeing healthy boosts in both the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and PCMark Work 3.0 tests, proving the Magic V5 is better at both intensive gaming loads and general productivity loads. In use, I found it to be a zippy customer, with no real noticeable slowdowns during daily use, whether I was streaming video content, working in Google Docs or just using the Magic V5 as I normally would. With the benefit of the huge main display, it helps immersion in games such as COD Mobile and EA FC Mobile, the latter I hadn't touched in some time. Under load, the phone also doesn't get too warm, and is comfortable to hold for extended periods. In addition, Honor seems to have managed the Magic V5's performance drop-off in extended stress testing better than the previous two generations. Over the 20 runs during the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test, the phone recorded a 33 percent performance drop-off, where its predecessors had seen drops of over 50 percent. Honor is promising four years of OS updates and five years of security updates, which is perfectly acceptable if not remarkable for a phone of this class. Out of the box, it's running MagicOS 9, Honor's skinned version of Android 15. I've had a bit of a love-hate relationship with MagicOS on Honor handsets, as I've never found it to be as slick or as polished as Samsung's OneUI, for instance. The optimisations with this new variant aren't necessarily as far-reaching as its predecessor, but there is some genuinely useful stuff pertaining to file transfer over the air and device cloning for those switching from iOS devices, as Honor says has been a common trend for their buyers. Where this phone certainly excels is with multitasking, not least with how easy it is to create dual or triple-pane windows for when you want to write while refering to reference material or carrying on a chat, for instance. The new Multi-Flex mode allows for that triple pane, which is very handy for immense power use. There is the usual AI gubbins baked in here too, with Google's Gemini service acting as the backbone for systems such as Honor Notes that use the note app for summarising, formatting and grammar checking, or the Recorder app for real-time note taking. You also get some interesting AI upscaling and cutout methods in the photo app, which work with varying degrees of success in my testing. The Game Manager app makes a return, coming with convenient access at the left hand of the screen for basic features such as a rotation lock and screen recorder, as well as more advanced ones for adding filters to change the look of a game, or a touch enhancer for more responsive inputs. There are also options for changing brightness and 'memory cleanup' on the fly. A lot of these options are either on or off, as opposed to having any granular control. Despite the further optimisation that Honor has attempted with MagicOS 9, I still have the same reservations as before regarding its software. For instance, it comes with Honor's own 'Essentials' folder right on the front screen, but you have to be precise on where you put your finger to open the specific app. Tapping the folder doesn't open it into a larger one where you can see the apps inside. In addition, there is unwanted crud installed by default that you may not want, such as Facebook and Instagram. It's easily removable, but that isn't really the point. For whatever reason, my sample of the Magic V5 didn't ship with a power brick inside, although there is a high-wattage USB-C cable and leather case so you are at least ready to go out of the box. The phone supports up to 66W charging, the same as the Magic V3, and you can purchase the Honor-specific brick from their website, or use a third-party one. While the maximum supported wattage might not have changed, Honor has beefed up the battery capacity to 5820mAh, from the Magic V3's 5150mAh, to make it larger than some typical flagship phone batteries. The cells inside the Magic V5 are also silicon-carbon, as in the Magic V3 and Magic 6 Pro handsets I've looked at. This has a couple of important benefits, such as being able to work in much colder environments and reportedly being better for the planet than standard lithium-ion batteries. In my testing, I managed to comfortably get a couple of days regular use out of the Magic V5, which is excellent. The PCMark V3.0 benchmark served up a result of 11 hours and 25 minutes at 50 percent brightness, which is reasonable screen-on time for a foldable, and around two hours more than the Magic V3. In-keeping with the typically incremental upgrade path I've come to expect from modern flagship phones, the Honor Magic V5 might not be much of an upgrade in elements against its predecessor, but it is a genuinely excellent foldable handset. We've got potent performance, plus a set of two dazzling OLED screens and stronger performance in terms of camera quality and battery life, meaning Honor has hit the right notes when it comes to its targeted areas for upgrade over the Magic V3. By also being even thinner it makes it even more pocketable overall and retains serious points for a modern and stylish foldable phone. It's just the MagicOS Android distro that holds it back a tad. For the £1699.99 asking price, the Honor Magic V5 is an undeniably premium handset that offers some serious competition to both Samsung and Google and continues Honor's upwards trajectory in providing genuinely compelling phones from a brand you may not have considered before.