Honor has announced the Magic V5, which it claims is the thinnest foldable phone in the world at the moment – though only if you don’t count the raised camera module, and only for its white version. The phone launches today in China, but Honor says an international release will follow “soon.”
At 8.8mm thick when folded, the V5 is impressively thin indeed and beats the Oppo Find N5 (8.9mm). This 0.1 mm difference is imperceptible in practice, although the very slight curvature helps the Honor phone feel a hair thinner than the Oppo. This is only true for the Ivory White version of the phone, the other colors are very slightly thicker at 9mm because their fiber and vegan leather coating is different from the “special fiber” of the white model.
Perhaps more tellingly, you should also completely ignore the camera. The Magic V5’s triple rear camera module rises almost twice as high as Oppo’s, making the phone appear thicker. The improved specs, with higher-resolution sensors and larger apertures almost all around, may justify the extra weight, but it doesn’t make it a “world’s thinnest” phone.
When open, the V5’s frame is 4.1 mm thick, which is again slightly more than Oppo’s (4.2 mm). It’s worth remembering that none of these phones are as thin as Huawei’s triple Mate XT when open, when it drops to 3.6mm at its thinnest point, in a segment that doesn’t have a USB-C port.
This battle of millimeters is not new to Honor. Before Oppo launched the Find N5 earlier this year, Honor’s Magic V3 was the thinnest foldable smartphone on the market. Next week, Samsung is expected to unveil the significantly thinner Galaxy Z Fold 7, although it will likely be only slightly thicker than Honor’s. Honor doesn’t emphasize it, but the Magic V5 could also be the world’s lightest foldable smartphone, or at least share that title with Vivo’s X Fold 5 announced last week – both weighing in at 217g.
If all this sounds like an argument about grams here and fractions of a millimeter there, that’s because it is. Back when I reviewed the Oppo Find N5, I said that it would “mark the beginning of a downward spiral” for foldable phones, and here we are. Without ditching the USB-C port or the asymmetrical design, these phones simply can’t get much thinner, so foldable phone makers will have to come up with a new way to generate hype for future launches.
Luckily for Honor, the Magic V5 has strong enough specs to impress despite this. The phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, up to 16GB of RAM, and a large 5820mAh battery. Both screens use LTPO OLED panels with a refresh rate of 120 Hz, wireless charging, and IP58 and IP59 dust and water protection, which is almost as good as any other non-folding smartphone.
