Honor’s latest foldable phone-tablet attempts to usurp Samsung as the leader of the pack with a super-thin body, massive battery and a ginormous camera lump on the back.
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The Magic V5 is an impressively thin piece of engineering, slimmed down to about 8.9mm thick when shut, with each half about the same thickness as a USB-C port. It feels very similar to a standard slab phone in the hand, but one you can open up like a book for a mini-tablet on the go.
The foldable costs £1,699.99 (€1,999.99), undercutting the competition from Samsung and Google by up to £100, but still very much at the eye-wateringly expensive end of the smartphone market.
The Magic V5 comes in various colours with different materials on the back that make the phone varying thicknesses and weights. At 222g or under it is slightly heavier than Samsung’s latest Fold 7, but far lighter than the rest of the folding phone competition, and about the same weight as a large slab phone.
When closed the Magic V5 is about the same weight, thickness and width as a large regular phone. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The outside 6.43in OLED screen is great and acts just like a regular phone while the inside 7.95in folding screen is one of the best, with an impressive brightness. It still has a crease down the middle but you don’t notice it in use. The inside screen is necessarily softer than traditional phone screens to allow it to bend, so you have to treat it with care; and it is a fingerprint magnet.
The Honor is one of the first folding phones to be water- and dust-resistant to similar standards as a regular phone. That means fine particles shouldn’t be able to get behind the moving, flexible screen and metal hinge, which has been a durability concern for all foldables.
Specifications
Main screen: 7.95in (403ppi) 120Hz OLED flexible display
Cover screen: 6.43in (405ppi) 120Hz OLED
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 512GB
Operating system: MagicOS 9.0.1 (Android 15)
Camera: 50MP + 50MP ultrawide + 64MP 3x tele; 2x 20MP selfie
Connectivity: 5G, dual sim + esim, USB-C, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, GNSS
Water resistance: IP58 and IP59 (immersion and high pressure jets)
Dimensions folded: 156.8 x 74.3 x 8.88-9mm
Dimensions unfolded: 156.8 x 145.9 x 4.1-4.2mm
Weight: 217-222g
Top Snapdragon chip and a high-capacity battery
A full charge takes 55 minutes using a standard 100W USB-C power adaptor (not included), hitting 70% in under half an hour. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Magic V5 has Qualcomm’s current top Android chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, matching rivals and flagship phones. It feels responsive in day-to-day activities, plays games very well and doesn’t get too hot when pushed hard.
But that power is best used when multitasking, as you can run up to four apps on screen at once – half as many as Samsung’s Fold 7 but more than enough to actually be able to use.
More impressive is the high-capacity battery Honor has managed to squeeze into the svelte frame, which is larger than most big slab phones, let alone folders. That means the battery life is great, but as with other folding phones it varies a lot depending on which screen you use most. Used primarily as a tablet for browsing and watching video with four hours of 5G usage, the Magic V5 lasts a good 37 hours between charges. With more balanced usage across the two screens it lasts into a third day before running out of juice.
MagicOS software still needs work
Multitasking on the large internal display is great, with up to three apps in split-screen. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Magic V5 runs Honor’s MagicOS 9, which is based on last year’s Android 15 rather than the latest Android 16. But Honor will provide seven years of Android version and security updates for devices sold within Europe, which is a dramatic improvement over previous efforts, and similar in length to its main rivals.
The software has some good ideas, but as with previous versions it still has some rough areas and irritating behaviours. The outside screen works mostly like any other Android phone with Gemini and various other AI tools. But it is on the inside screen where the software shines and irritates. You can place three apps in a splitscreen at once, with one of them pushed partially off the side of the screen to provide more space for the other two without quitting it. Tapping it brings it back on to the screen to use it. It’s a smart idea first seen on the OnePlus Open. A button on the taskbar makes arranging your multiple windows easy.
Mini floating windows allow desktop-like multitasking. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
But tap on an app notification on the inside screen and the system insists on opening the app in a mini-window, even if you wanted it to be full screen. That might be fine for smaller messaging apps such as WhatsApp, but I never want to open Gmail or larger-format apps in tiny windows that then need to be tapped a couple more times to fill the full screen.
The software also doesn’t make good use of the partially folded modes that the inside screen can adopt, lacking an equivalent to Samsung’s good Flex mode, which seems like a wasted opportunity. Another bug in the typeface on the Honor makes it very difficult to see which emails are unread in bold in Gmail, which is extremely irritating.
Much of these little annoyances would be acceptable on cheaper smartphones, but not on a £1,700, ultra-premium device. Honor still has work to do.
Camera
The camera app has multiple modes to shoot closed, half open, fully open or using the main cameras for selfies. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Magic V5 has a decent set of cameras housed in an enormous round camera lump that protrudes from the rear of the phone. The main 50-megapixel camera shoots good-looking images across a range of lighting conditions, though it can become a bit soft with weaker indoor lighting.
The 50MP ultra-wide camera is solid, but displays a bit of warping around the edges of the scene and lacks a bit of fine detail. The 64MP 3x optical telephoto camera is the best of the bunch, with good detail and colour, even in indoor lighting. It can manage a 6x in-sensor zoom, which is a bit softer on detail when viewed at full size but works well in bright light, plus digital zoom up to 100x that remains fairly decent up to about 20x magnification.
The two 20MP selfie cameras are good enough, but you get much better results using the main camera and the outside screen for a viewfinder.
The camera has many different modes to play around with including a smart motion capture system that handles action photography and solid video capture. It also has a lot of AI and enhancement features that are common to Chinese smartphones modifying the appearance of faces and the alike should you wish.
Overall the camera is one of the better ones on a foldable, though it can’t match the best cameraphones on the market.
Sustainability
The capacitive fingerprint scanner in the power button works well in the thin frame. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The battery has an expected lifespan of at least 1,200 full-charge 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 about £200 to replace out of warranty. Honor offers a free screen repair for 12 months if bought within the first month of release.
The device contains some recycled plastic. Honor publishes limited environmental reports and offers trade-in and refurbished products.
Price
The Honor Magic V5 costs £1,699.99 (€1,999.99).
For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 costs from £1,799, the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold costs £1,749, the Galaxy S25 Ultra costs £1,249 and the Honor Magic 7 Pro costs £1,099.
Verdict
Yet again Honor has produced some exquisite folding phone hardware that is let down by its software. MagicOS has improved over the last few years, but it lacks much of the customisation and capabilities possible on rivals.
The biggest problem is that it lacks polish, with rough patches or irritating behaviours across the system. None of them is a deal-breaker, but they build up and can’t be overlooked on a £1,700 phone.
It’s a shame as the phone is fast, the battery life is great, the camera is highly capable and it looks fabulous. It’s good to see Samsung and Google get some meaningful competition in book-style foldables. But at about the same price as the market leader, Samsung, there’s little reason to pick the Magic V5 over it.
Pros: super-slim phone and tablet in one, light, just like a normal phone when closed, great performance, very long battery life, good internal screen, decent camera, good fingerprint scanner, water and dust resistance rating.
Cons: very expensive, software not as refined as needed with irritating behaviours, more fragile than a regular device, costly to repair, limited folding modes.
The Magic V5 is an attractive and well-made device. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
