There’s a spec struggle happening amongst firms to assert the crown of thinnest foldable. Cellphone producers are enjoying with fractions of millimeters to boast about their cellphone’s thickness.
Honor is profitable this race on a theoretical foundation with its 8.8mm (when folded) thick Magic V5 foldable. I’m saying theoretical as a result of there’s a enormous, camera-bump-sized caveat to this.
The skinny body of the machine seems and feels nice so long as you maintain it in a means that your fingers are wrapped across the backside half of the cellphone. In case your fingers are brushing in opposition to the large bump, you would possibly really feel uncomfortable holding the cellphone. This rigamrole took me a number of days to regulate to.
Once you lay the cellphone on the desk, it creates a slant (like within the photograph above). That is tremendous when the cellphone is folded, however once you unfold the cellphone, it creates a wobble, and it isn’t nice.
Within the unfolded state, the body is simply 4.1mm thick, one millimeter lower than Oppo’s Discover N5, however 0.5mm greater than Huawei’s triple-folding phone.
Other than that, the cellphone is a strong piece of {hardware}.
It’s powered by 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 primary (unfoled) show is a 7.95-inch display with 2172 x 2352 pixels. The corporate mentioned it’s utilizing a carbon fiber strengthened internal panel for higher fall safety. Plus, Honor has utilized an anti-scratch materials on the show. To this point, I haven’t seen notable scratches on both of the screens.
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. Taking part in NYT Puzzles on the unfolded display was one among my favourite issues to do on the machine.
Each shows assist LTPO, which suggests the refresh fee can dynamically change to any worth from 1Hz to 120Hz, and that makes navigation and scrolling a breeze. Most apps adjusted effectively to each the duvet and fundamental display. Although I observed that the decision blew up once I was making an attempt to play “Diablo Immortal” on the unfolded display, so I needed to keep on with the entrance display whereas enjoying the sport.
The construct of the machine 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 Tremendous Metal mechanism, felt strong throughout my week-long utilization of the V5 Magic.
The foldable has an enormous 5,820mAh silicone carbon battery. Due to that, you will get via all day of utilization with a little bit of gaming simply. The machine helps 66W wired charging and 50W wi-fi charging, however you want to purchase Honor’s proprietary chargers to assist that. Honor does pack its 66W charger inside the field. The corporate claims that you may cost the machine from 0 to 50% in simply 16 minutes with the wired charger and get to 100% charging in 43 minutes. Even when the cellphone doesn’t hit these theoretical limits, you’ll be able to shortly get sufficient juice within the cellphone to final you a number of hours.
Digital camera and AI
The Honor Magic V5’s digital camera casing hosts three sensors. A 50-megapixel fundamental digital camera with f/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide digital camera, and a 64-megapixel telephoto digital camera with 3x optical zoom. The cellphone additionally has a pair of 20-megapixel selfie cameras for each the internal and outer screens.
The cellphone takes good images in all situations, capturing particulars effectively with largely good colour accuracy. Nonetheless, I felt that in some situations, 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 images of sure objects, like flowers, whereas retaining particulars.
Since all firms have entry to AI picture fashions, quite a lot of them are introducing an excellent zoom mode to seize the bottom photograph and use generative AI to replenish the small print. Honor’s 100x zoom tech is nice sufficient to seize textual content at a distance and have AI clear it up. Nonetheless, once I tried to seize totally different objects, the model with AI processing seemed very a lot AI-generated. This wasn’t the case once I tried the Pixel 10 Professional’s 100x Zoom.
Identical to most China-made telephones, this machine additionally has a ton of AI-powered “magnificence” options that allow you to smoothen your pores and skin, alter your nostril measurement and face measurement, brighten the image, and extra. However you’ll be able to flip that off shortly via a toggle in order for you.
There are a bunch of AI enhancing instruments that Honor has included with the cellphone. There’s an AI eraser that allows you to draw on objects to take away them. The device additionally has choices, together with eradicating passerbys and eradicating reflection. The primary choice doesn’t at all times work effectively. Try this photograph I took once I attended Wimbledon. Whereas it eliminated some individuals within the background, it 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 inside the body. Once you transfer the thing, the machine makes use of generative AI to fill within the hole.
That is additionally not good and, at occasions, leaves artifacts like shadows across the authentic place of the thing, clearly indicating that you simply moved one thing on this photograph. There are different instruments like AI upscaling and AI outpainting as effectively.
What’s extra, there’s an image-to-video perform within the cellphone’s photograph app, which permits for 3 generations per 30 days. It does the job of constructing the video utilizing Google’s Veo2 mannequin, however the output isn’t nice, and infrequently feels uncanny in comparison with the unique picture.
Software program and availability
Honor is utilizing its MagicOS 9, based mostly on Android 15, with this machine. It isn’t cluttered, however I believed pre-installing Honor apps for sensible house gadgets, and the myHonor app, which is a neighborhood app, was pointless. There’s an Honor Well being app, which connects sensible well being gadgets from Honor (if in case you have any), and in addition has some pre-loaded train content material.
MagicOS handles media trade with each Android and Apple gadgets effectively. The corporate has a Workstation app on macOS, which makes it straightforward to ship images, movies, and paperwork to your Mac.
The corporate additionally launched a neat new on-device name translation function, which helps you to obtain a translation mannequin on the cellphone and course of the info domestically. In the meanwhile, it helps six languages, together with Chinese language, English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. I examined this function with a French-speaking good friend, and the outcomes have been excellent. In contrast to Pixel’s translation function, which additionally retains your voice, you get to decide on between a male and a feminine voice.
The corporate is releasing the Honor Magic V5 in Europe, APAC, and the Center East. Within the UK/Europe, the Magic V5 could have a beginning worth of £1,699.99/€1,999 for a 512GB model. This provides customers an choice to check out a foldable at a £200/€1,999 cheaper worth than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. Whereas this may not problem Samsung’s prime spot within the foldable market, it would assist Honor’s growth numbers amid foldables.