Honor’s latest foldable phone whirlwind tries to usurp Samsung as a peloton leader with a super thin body, a massive battery and a ginormous camera bump on the back.
The Magic V5 is an impressive piece of engineering, brought about 8.9 mm thick when closed, with each half of the same thickness as a USB-C port. It looks a lot like a standard slab phone in hand, but you can open like a book for a mini-tablet on the go.
The foldable costs £ 1,699.99 (€ 1,999.99), undercoating the competition from Samsung and Google up to £ 100, but still a lot at the expense of the costly eyes of the smartphones market.
The Magic V5 is available in different colors with different materials at the rear which make the phone varying thicknesses and weights. At 222 g or under, it is slightly heavier than the last fold 7 of Samsung, but much lighter than the rest of the folding phone competition, and almost the same weight as a large slab phone.
The 6.43 -inch outdoor OLED screen is great and acts as an ordinary phone while the 7.95 inch inner folding screen is one of the best, with impressive brightness. It still has a fold in the middle, but you do not notice it in use. The interior screen is necessarily softer than traditional phone screens to allow it to fold, so you must treat it with care; And it’s a fingerprint magnet.
Honor is one of the first folding phones to withstand water and dust with standards similar to an ordinary phone. This means that fine particles should not be able to get behind the mobile and flexible screen and the metal hinge, which was sustainability for all foldables.
Features
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Main screen: 7.95 inches (403ppi) Flexible OLED 120 Hz display
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Cover screen: 6.43 inches (405ppi) 120 Hz OLED
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Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite
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RAM: 16 GB
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Storage: 512 GB
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Operating system: Magicos 9.0.1 (Android 15)
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Camera: 50MP + 50MP Ultrawide + 64MP 3X TELE; 2x 20mp selfie
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Connectivity: 5G, double sim + esim, USB-C, WiFi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, GNSS
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Water resistance: IP58 and IP59 (immersion and high pressure jets)
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Folded dimensions: 156.8 x 74.3 x 8.88-9 mm
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Unbacked dimensions: 156.8 x 145.9 x 4.1-4.2 mm
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Weight: 217-222g
Upper snapdragon chip and high capacity battery
The Magic V5 has the first Qualcomm’s current Android chip, the Snapdragon 8 elite, the matching rivals and the flagship phones. It seems reactive in daily activities, plays games very well and is not too hot when it is pushed hard.
But this power is better used when the multitasking, as you can run up to four applications on the screen both – half of half that Samsung’s Fold 7 but more than sufficient to be able to really use.
The most impressive is the most impressive the honor of the high -capacity battery has managed to sneak in the Svelte setting, which is larger than most slab phones, not to mention the files. This means that the battery life is excellent, but as with other folding phones, it varies a lot depending on the screen you use the most. Used mainly as a tablet to navigate and watch the video with four hours of use of 5G, the Magic V5 lasts 37 hours between the loads. With a more balanced use on the two screens, it lasts a third day before missing juice.
Magicos software still needs work
The Magic V5 directs Magicos 9 of Honor, which is based on Android 15 of last year rather than on the last Android 16. But Honor will provide seven years of Android version and security updates for devices sold in Europe, which is a spectacular improvement compared to previous efforts, and in a similar way to its main competitors.
The software has good ideas, but as for previous versions, it still has rough areas and irritating behaviors. The outdoor screen works mainly like any other Android phone with Gemini and various other AI tools. But it is on the interior screen where the software shines and irritates. You can place three applications in a slit screen at a time, one of them partially pushed on the side of the screen to provide more space to the other two without leaving it. Tap it brings it back to the screen to use it. It is an intelligent idea seen for the first time on the Open Open. A button on the taskbar facilitates the organization of your multiple windows.
But press an application notification on the interior screen and the system insists on opening the application in a mini-window, even if you wanted it to be full screen. This could be good for small messaging applications such as WhatsApp, but I never want to open Gmail applications or more format in tiny windows which must then be used a few more to fill the full screen.
The software does not make good use of partially folded modes either that the interior screen can adopt, without equivalent of the Good Flex mode from Samsung, which seems to be a waste. Another bug in the honor police makes it very difficult to see which emails are not read in fat in Gmail, which is extremely irritating.
A large part of these little troubles would be acceptable on cheaper smartphones, but not on an ultra-premium device of £ 1,700. Honor still has work to do.
Camera
The Magic V5 has a decent set of cameras housed in a huge piece of round camera that is protruding from the back of the phone. The 50 megapixel main camera takes beautiful images in a range of lighting conditions, although it can become a little soft with lower interior lighting.
The 50MP ultra-large camera is solid, but displays a little deformation around the edges of the stage and lacks a little details. The 64MP 3x optical telephoto lens is the best in the group, with good details and good colors, even in the interior lighting. It can manage a zoom in the 6x sensor, which is a little softer on the details when seen in full size but works well in bright light, the more the digital zoom up to 100x which remains quite decent up to about 20x.
The two 20MP selfie cameras are quite good, but you get much better results using the main camera and the outdoor screen for a viewfinder.
The camera has many different modes to play with the inclusion of an intelligent motion capture system that manages action photography and solid video capture. It also has a lot of AI and improvement features which are common to Chinese smartphones modifying the appearance of faces and in the same way as you wish.
Overall, the camera is one of the best on a foldable, although it cannot correspond to the best cameras on the market.
Sustainability
The battery has an expected lifespan of at least 1,200 full load cycles With at least 80% of its original capacity. The Magic V5 is generally repairable by honor, with internal screens costing about £ 700 or external screens of around £ 200 to replace the warranty. Honor offers free screen repair for 12 months if purchased in the first month of release.
The device contains recycled plastic. Honor publishes limited environmental reports and offers renovated exchange and products.
Price
The Honor Magic V5 costs £ 1,699.99 (€ 1,999.99).
For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 costs £ 1,799, the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold costs £ 1,749The Galaxy S25 Ultra costs £ 1,249 and the Honor Magic 7 Pro costs £ 1,099.
Verdict
Again, Honor has produced exquisite folding phone equipment that is disappointed with its software. Magicos has improved in recent years, but there is a lot of personalization and possible capacity on competitors.
The biggest problem is that it lacks varnish, with raw patches or irritating behaviors through the system. None of them is a break, but they accumulate and cannot be overlooked on a phone of £ 1,700.
It’s a shame because the phone is fast, the battery life is great, the camera is very capable and it looks fabulous. It is good to see Samsung and Google get significant competition in book style folders. But almost at the same price as the market leader, Samsung, there are few reasons to choose the Magic V5 on it.
Benefits: Super-Slim phone and tablet in one, light, just like a normal phone when closed, great performance, a very long battery life, a good internal screen, a decent camera, a good fingerprint scanner, a water and dust resistance rating.
Disadvantages: Very expensive software, not as refined as it is necessary with irritating behaviors, more fragile than an ordinary device, expensive to repair, limited folding modes.
