There’s a spec battle occurring amongst firms to say the crown of thinnest foldable. Cellphone producers are taking part in with fractions of millimeters to boast about their telephone’s thickness.
Honor is successful 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 system seems to be and feels nice so long as you maintain it in a means that your fingers are wrapped across the backside half of the telephone. In case your fingers brush in opposition to the large bump, you may really feel uncomfortable holding the telephone. This adjustment took me a number of days to get used to.
If you lay the telephone on a desk, it creates a slant (like within the photograph above). That is high quality when the telephone is folded, however once you unfold the telephone, it creates a wobble, and it’s not nice.
Within the unfolded state, the body is simply 4.1mm thick, one millimeter lower than the Oppo’s Discover N5, however 0.5mm greater than the Huawei’s triple-folding telephone.
Aside from that, the telephone is a stable piece of {hardware}.
It’s 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 corporate mentioned it’s utilizing a carbon fiber bolstered interior panel for higher fall safety. Plus, Honor has utilized an anti-scratch materials to the show. Up to now, I haven’t seen notable scratches on both display.
The display could be very vibrant with a peak brightness of 5,000 nits. I loved studying articles, PDFs, and lengthy emails on the unfolded display. Enjoying NYT Puzzles on the unfolded display was one among my favourite issues to do on the system.
Each shows help LTPO, which suggests the refresh price can dynamically swap to any worth from 1Hz to 120Hz, and that makes navigation and scrolling a breeze. Most apps adjusted properly to each the quilt and most important display, although I seen that the decision grew to become distorted once I tried taking part in “Diablo Immortal” on the unfolded display, so I needed to persist 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 Tremendous Metal mechanism, felt stable throughout my week-long use of the Magic V5.
The foldable has a large 5,820mAh silicone carbon battery. With this capability, you may get via a full day of utilization with a little bit of gaming simply. The system helps 66W wired charging and 50W wi-fi charging, however you have to purchase Honor’s proprietary chargers to help that. Honor does embody its 66W charger within the field. The corporate claims that you could cost the system from 0 to 50% in simply 16 minutes with the wired charger and attain 100% cost in 43 minutes. Even when the telephone doesn’t hit these theoretical limits, you may rapidly add sufficient energy to final you a number of hours.
Digicam and AI
The Honor Magic V5’s digital camera casing hosts three sensors: a 50-megapixel most important 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 telephone additionally has two 20-megapixel selfie cameras — one for every of the interior and outer screens.
The telephone takes good pictures in all circumstances, capturing particulars properly with typically good coloration accuracy. Nevertheless, I felt that in some circumstances, the telephone’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 firms have entry to AI picture fashions, many are introducing tremendous zoom modes to seize a base photograph and use generative AI to boost 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. Nevertheless, once I tried to seize totally different objects, the AI-processed model seemed very a lot AI-generated. This wasn’t the case with the Pixel 10 Professional’s 100x Zoom.
Like most China-made telephones, this system additionally has a ton of AI-powered “beauty” options that allow you to easy your pores and skin, alter your nostril dimension and face dimension, brighten the image, and extra. You possibly can simply flip these options off with a toggle if you need.
There are a bunch of AI modifying instruments that Honor has included with the telephone. There’s an AI eraser that allows you to draw on objects to take away them. The instrument additionally has further choices, together with eradicating passersby and eradicating reflections. The primary possibility doesn’t at all times work properly. Take a look at this photograph I took at Wimbledon. Whereas it eliminated some folks within the background, it additionally eliminated the torso of one of many tennis gamers.
The telephone has an AI cutout instrument, which lets you choose an object from a photograph and transfer it throughout the body. If you transfer the item, the system makes use of generative AI to fill within the hole.
This characteristic can be not good and at occasions leaves artifacts like shadows across the authentic place of the item, clearly indicating that you just moved one thing within the photograph. There are different instruments like AI upscaling and AI outpainting as properly.
The telephone additionally consists of an image-to-video perform within the system’s photograph app, which permits for 3 generations per 30 days. It creates movies utilizing Google’s Veo2 mannequin, however the output isn’t nice and sometimes feels uncanny in comparison with the unique picture.
Software program and availability
Honor makes use of its MagicOS 9, primarily based on Android 15 on this system. It’s not cluttered, however I discovered pre-installing Honor apps for sensible residence gadgets, and the myHonor app (which is a neighborhood app), to be pointless. There’s additionally an Honor Health app, which connects to sensible well being gadgets from Honor (if in case you have any), and consists of has some pre-loaded train content material.
MagicOS handles media trade with each Android and Apple gadgets properly. The corporate affords a Workstation app for macOS, which makes it straightforward to ship pictures, movies, and paperwork to your Mac.
The corporate additionally launched a neat new on-device name translation characteristic, which helps you to obtain a translation mannequin on to the telephone and course of the information regionally. In the mean time, it helps six languages, together with Chinese language, English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. I examined this characteristic with a French-speaking buddy, and the outcomes had been superb. Not like 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 Center East. Within the UK/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 value £200/€1,999 cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. Whereas this won’t problem Samsung’s prime spot within the foldable market, it would assist Honor’s market share amid rising curiosity in foldables.
