There’s a spec struggle occurring amongst corporations to assert the crown of thinnest foldable. Cellphone producers are enjoying 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 big, camera-bump-sized caveat to this.
Picture Credit: Ivan Mehta
The skinny body of the machine seems and feels nice so long as you maintain it in a approach that your fingers are wrapped across the backside half of the telephone. In case your fingers are brushing in opposition to the large bump, you may really feel uncomfortable holding the telephone. This rigamrole took me a couple of days to regulate to.
Picture Credit: Ivan Mehta
If you lay the telephone on the desk, it creates a slant (like within the picture above). That is effective when the telephone is folded, however if you unfold the telephone, it creates a wobble, and it isn’t nice.
Picture Credit: Ivan mehta
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 telephone.
The Cellphone’s thickness in comparison with the Pixel 10 Professional. Picture Credit: Ivan Mehta
Other than that, the telephone is a stable 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 screen with 2376 x 1060 decision, and the primary (unfoled) show is a 7.95-inch display screen with 2172 x 2352 pixels. The corporate mentioned it’s utilizing a carbon fiber strengthened interior panel for higher fall safety. Plus, Honor has utilized an anti-scratch materials on the show. Thus far, I haven’t seen notable scratches on both of the screens.
iMage Credit: Ivan Mehta
The display screen could be very vivid with a peak brightness of 5,000 nits. I loved studying articles, PDFs, and lengthy emails on the unfolded display screen. Enjoying NYT Puzzles on the unfolded display screen was considered one of my favourite issues to do on the machine.
Each shows assist LTPO, which suggests the refresh charge 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 quilt and predominant display screen. Although I observed that the decision blew up once I was making an attempt to play “Diablo Immortal” on the unfolded display screen, so I needed to keep on with the entrance display screen whereas enjoying the sport.
The construct of the machine is sturdy, and it has IP58 and IP59 rankings 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 utilization of the V5 Magic.
The foldable has an enormous 5,820mAh silicone carbon battery. Due to that, you may get by way of all day of utilization with a little bit of gaming simply. The machine helps 66W wired charging and 50W wi-fi charging, however you’ll want to purchase Honor’s proprietary chargers to assist that. Honor does pack its 66W charger inside the field. The corporate claims which you could 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 telephone doesn’t hit these theoretical limits, you’ll be able to rapidly get sufficient juice within the telephone to final you a couple of hours.
Digital camera and AI
The Honor Magic V5’s digicam casing hosts three sensors. A 50-megapixel predominant digicam with f/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide digicam, and a 64-megapixel telephoto digicam with 3x optical zoom. The telephone additionally has a pair of 20-megapixel selfie cameras for each the interior and outer screens.
The telephone takes good pictures in all situations, capturing particulars effectively with largely good colour accuracy. Nonetheless, I felt that in some situations, the telephone’s computational algorithm boosted reds. The Magic V5’s digicam has a fairly good tremendous macro mode that permits you to take close-up pictures of sure objects, like flowers, whereas retaining particulars.
Since all corporations have entry to AI picture fashions, a variety of them are introducing an excellent zoom mode to seize the bottom picture 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.
Honor 100x ZoomImage Credit:Ivan Mehta
Pixel 100x Zoom
Similar 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, modify your nostril measurement and face measurement, brighten the image, and extra. However you’ll be able to flip that off rapidly by way of a toggle if you need.
There are a bunch of AI enhancing instruments that Honor has included with the telephone. There may be an AI eraser that permits you to draw on objects to take away them. The software additionally has choices, together with eradicating passerbys and eradicating reflection. The primary possibility doesn’t at all times work effectively. Take a look at this picture I took once I attended Wimbledon. Whereas it eliminated some individuals within the background, it eliminated the torso of one of many tennis gamers.
Picture Credit: Ivan Mehta
Picture Credit: Ivan Mehta (edited by AI)
The telephone has an AI cutout software, which lets you choose an object from a photograph and transfer it inside the body. If you transfer the item, 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 unique place of the item, clearly indicating that you just moved one thing on this picture. There are different instruments like AI upscaling and AI outpainting as effectively.
Picture Credit: Ivan Mehta (Edited by Honor AI).
What’s extra, there’s an image-to-video perform within the telephone’s picture 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 shouldn’t be nice, and sometimes 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 assumed pre-installing Honor apps for sensible dwelling units, and the myHonor app, which is a neighborhood app, was pointless. There may be an Honor Well being app, which connects sensible well being units from Honor (if in case you have any), and in addition has some pre-loaded train content material.
MagicOS handles media change with each Android and Apple units effectively. The corporate has a Workstation app on 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 function, which helps you to obtain a translation mannequin on the telephone 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 had been superb. Not like 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 can have a beginning worth of £1,699.99/€1,999 for a 512GB model. This offers 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 progress numbers amid foldables.
