Honor unveils its first foldable smartphone, the Magic V

Kris Holt

Engadget


Honor unveils its first foldable smartphone, the Magic V

After teasing its first foldable smartphone in December, Honor has unveiled the Magic V. Honor is joining the likes of Huawei, which is its former parent company, and Xiaomi by stepping into the foldable marketplace.

Like Samsung's Z Fold devices, this is a dual-screen smartphone. It has a 6.45-inch, 431 PPI external display with a resolution of 2560 x 1080, 120Hz refresh rate and 21:9 aspect ratio. Open it up, and users can access a 7.9-inch, 381 PPI display, which has a 2272 x 1984 resolution, 90Hz refresh rate and 10:9 aspect ratio. 

Both OLED screens are a little larger than the Galaxy Z Fold 3's respective displays and support a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut. Honor claims the Magic V is the first foldable smartphone with IMAX Enhanced certification.

The company says its water-drop hinge helps make the display appear "creaseless." Oppo uses a similar style of hinge in its recently announced Find N foldable.

The Magic V is 72.7mm wide and 14.3mm thick when folded, and when opened, those dimensions shift to 141.1mm wide and 6.7mm thick. Its 160.4mm tall case houses a 4,750mAh battery that supports 66W charging. Honor says you can fully charge the battery in 40 minutes or to 50 percent of its capacity in just 15 minutes.

The phone has five cameras in total. The rear three-camera array has a wide camera, ultra wide camera and what Honor calls a "spectrum enhanced camera." All three are 50MP sensors. There's a 42MP selfie camera for each screen too.

The Magic V runs on Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, which has a 5G modem and Adreno 730 GPU built in. The Magic V has 12GB of RAM, up to 512GB of storage, dual-SIM support and stereo speakers. It uses Honor’s new Magic UI 6.0, which is based on Android 12. There's also an independent security chip, which stores passwords and biometric data such as fingerprints.

The device has three color options: black, space silver and burnt orange. At 293g, the silver and black models weigh slightly more than the 288g orange variant. The Magic V will only be available in China at the outset. The 256GB model costs ¥9,999 (approximately $1,568) while the 512GB version is ¥10,999 (around $1,725). The Magic V will go on sale on January 18th.

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