Spec wars are being fought to claim the thinnest folding crown between businesses. Phone makers play with fractions of millimeters to boast about the thickness of their phones.
Honor is a thick magic v5 folding system of 8.8 mm (when folded) that will theoretically win this race. This has a huge warning about camera bump size, so I’m theoretically saying it.
The thin frame of the device will look better as long as you hold your fingers around the bottom half of your phone. When your fingers brush the huge bumps, you may feel uncomfortable holding the phone. This adjustment took me a few days to get used to.
Place the phone on the table and a slope will be created (as shown in the photo above). This is fine when the phone is folded, but when you unfold the phone, it generates wobble and isn’t comfortable.
When unfolded, the frame is only 4.1 mm thick, 1 mm less than the Oppo’s Find N5, but 0.5 mm more than the Huawei’s 3x folding phone.
Apart from that, the phone is solid hardware.
It features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, a top-class processor. The front display is a 6.43-inch screen with a resolution of 2376 x 1060, while the main (expanded) display is a 7.95-inch screen with a resolution of 2172 x 2352 pixels. The company said it uses carbon fiber reinforced inner panels for better fall protection. Additionally, Honor applied anti-fault material to the display. So far, no noticeable scratches have been seen on either screen.
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 the New York Times puzzle on an unfolding screen was one of the things to do on the device.
Both support LTPO. This means that the refresh rate can be dynamically switched to any value from 1Hz to 120Hz, making navigation and scrolling easier. Most apps were properly adjusted to both the cover and main screens, but I noticed that the resolution was distorted when I tried to play “Diablo Imortal” on the expanded screen.
The device build is sturdy and has an IP58 and IP59 rating for dust and water resistance. The folding hinge using the second generation honorary super steel mechanism felt solid during one week of use of the Magic V5.
The folding type has a large amount of 5,820 mAh silicon carbon batteries. With this capacity, you can easily use it for a day with just a few games. The device supports 66W wired and 50W wireless charging, but you will need to buy Honor’s own charger to support it. Honor includes a 66W charger. The company claims that it can charge the device from 0% to 50% in just 16 minutes with a wiring charger, and reach 100% charge in 43 minutes. Even if your phone hasn’t reached these theoretical limits, you can quickly add enough power to last for several hours.
Cameras and AI
The Honor Magic V5’s camera casing hosts three sensors: a 50-megapixel main camera with an F/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultra-wade camera, and a 64-megapixel telephoto camera with a 3x optical zoom. The phone also has two 20 megapixel selfie cameras. One is on the inside and outside screens.
The phone takes good photos in all conditions and generally captures the details well with good color accuracy. However, in some conditions, I felt that the mobile phone calculation algorithms boosted the red. The Magic V5 camera has a very good super macro mode that allows you to take close-up photos of certain objects, such as flowers, while retaining details.
As all companies have access to AI image models, many companies introduce super zoom mode to capture basic photos and use generated AI to enhance the details. Honor’s 100x Zoomtech is enough to capture text in the distance and clear it using AI. However, when I tried to capture different objects, the AI-machined version looked very AI-generated. This was not the case with the 100x zoom on the Pixel 10 Pro.
Like most Chinese-made phones, the device also has plenty of “beauty” features with AI that can smooth your skin, adjust nose and face size, and brighten your pictures. You can easily turn these features off with a toggle.
Honor includes a bunch of AI editing tools using phones. There is an AI eraser that lets you delete and delete objects. The tool also offers additional options, such as removing passersby and removing reflections. The first option doesn’t always work well. Check out this photo from Wimbledon. We deleted some people in the background, but also deleted the torso of one of the tennis players.
Your phone has an AI cutout tool that lets you select objects from your photos and move them within the frame. When you move an object, the device uses the generated AI to fill in the gaps.
This feature is also not perfect, sometimes leaving shadowy artifacts around the object’s original location, clearly indicating that you’ve moved something into the photo. There are other tools like upscaling AI and outpainting AI.
Your phone also includes inter-image functionality in the photo app on your device. This allows for 3 generations per 30 days. I use Google’s VEO 2 model to create videos, but the output is not large and often feels creepy compared to the original image.
Software and availability
Honor uses Magicos 9 based on Android 15 on this device. It’s not messy, but I’ve found that you don’t need to install the Smart Home Device and the Honor app for the Myhonor app (community app) in advance. There is also the Honor Health app. This connects to Honor’s Smart Health Devices (if any) and contains preloaded exercise content.
Magicos handles media exchanges on both Android and Apple devices. The company offers workstation apps for MacOS, allowing you to easily send photos, videos and documents to your Mac.
The company has also released a neat new on-device call translation feature. This allows you to download the translation model directly to your phone and process the data locally. Currently, we support 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 the Pixel’s translation feature, you can choose between male and female voices.
Honor has released Magic V5s in Europe, APAC and the Middle East. In the UK/Europe, the Magic V5 starts at £1,699.99/€1,999 for the 512GB version. This gives consumers the option to try to fold it at a price of £200/€1,999 cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. This may not challenge Samsung’s top spot in the foldable market, but it may help an honorable market share amid growing interest in folding.
Source link
