Honor Magic V5 review: a better choice than Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7?

Every year since 2019 – that being the birth of folding phones – there’s been a breakthrough for this format of device. But 2025 has seen a larger shift than we've ever seen before. That shift isn't in the tech that's stuffed into these phones, but in the physical nature of these devices.

That's seen a war of words between Samsung and Honor, trading blows over which brand has the thinnest folding phone. While Samsung will tell you the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is 8.9mm thick, the Honor Magic V5 is 8.8mm. I'm here to tell you that the difference doesn't matter – and trading blows over 0.1mm is a waste of bandwidth.

What's more important is that both phones are crazy thin. They are only a little thicker than a regular handset, removing that barrier to adoption that once jaded folding phones. Add in better displays, more power, more advanced cameras, flagship power and battery life, and you're on something of a winning streak for the format.

I've been using the Honor Magic V5 for a month as my main device – and here's how that experience has panned out.

Price & Availability

Honor decided, somewhat inconveniently, to reserve declaring the price of the Honor Magic V5 until the official launch event on 28 August.

But now we know the answer: with its £300 off pre-order promotion, you'll be able to buy the handset for £1399.99, down from its £1699.99 recommended asking price (which it'll go back to after the promotional period is up).

You'll notice that's in GBP only, as the handset isn't available in the USA or Australia. As the Honor Magic V3 was also £1,699 at launch, I'm not surprised at the Magic V5's position – and with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 being £1,799, Honor has keenly undercut its key competitor.

What's new?

• 8.8mm thickness, IP59 rated
• Peak brightness boost
• Snapdragon 8 Elite processor
• Larger capacity battery
• New camera sensors

Honor's positioning of the Magic V3 was surprisingly similar to the Magic V5, with the focus on slimness, strength and AI skills. That rings true of the new device, but there's more of everything: it’s more svelte, stronger, and there’s more AI.

Shifting from 9.2mm thick when folded to 8.8mm is quite the change. And while the old device weighed 226g, the new phone is 217g. The Magic V5 has a stronger hinge – strong enough to support a fridge and some weights, apparently – while the IP rating jumps to an impressive IP59, over the IPX8 rating of the V3, meaning greater water protection and the addition of dust resistance.

The peak brightness hits 5,000 nits over the 1,800 nits previously, but the displays are much the same in configuration. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is replaced by the Snapdragon 8 Elite for more power, while there's a 5,820mAh battery compared to 5,150mAh previously.

The camera has also been tweaked with a new 64-megapixel telephoto and a new ultrawide camera sensor.

Design & Displays

• Exterior display: 6.43-inch AMOLED
  • Honor Anti-scratch NanoCrystal Shield
  • 1060 x 2376 resolution
  • 21:9 aspect ratio
  • 120Hz refresh
• Interior display: 7.95-inch AMOLED
  • 10:9 aspect ratio (approximate)
  • 5,000 nits peak brightness
  • 2172 x 2352 resolution
  • 120Hz refresh
• Key spec:
  • 4.1mm at thinnest, 217g
  • Honor Super Steel Hinge
  • Carbon fibre reinforced inner display

For all the talk of 4.1mm thickness on the Honor Magic V5, I think that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 looks better. While Samsung has a squared design that's fairly subtle, Honor's design makes greater use of curves – in the corners, into the frame – and I think it's slightly more blingy than Samsung's phone.

It's entirely subjective, of course, but I can't help feeling that these phones are designed for different markets. The camera on the back of the Honor Magic V5 is the biggest element to its design; while Samsung has three lenses sitting on the rear, Honor has a huge camera bump, decorated by an octagonal frame.

I won't say that I don't like the Honor design, as the overall impression this phone leaves is the thinness over everything else – but if anyone is going to point out any part of this design, it's going to be the unnecessarily large camera unit.

The 21:9 exterior display of the Magic V5 is accomplished, offering enough size to basically use this phone like any other smartphone. That display is bright, vibrant and resolute enough, while offering a 120Hz refresh rate.

The interior display unfolds to be almost square, giving loads of space to play, or in my case, look at spreadsheets – which become so much more manageable than on a regular phone. There's still a noticeable crease if you look for it, but in the month using this phone, I've never stopped and considered a crease to be a problem.

Fingerprint smears are a problem because of the flexible screen protection that's on the surface, but that's common to folding phones. Of course, for all the robustness of modern devices, phones like this still can't stand up to repeated pressure of the sort that a regular glass-topped display will happily withstand: repeated pressure can cause deformation of the flexible OLED layer under the surface, so best avoided if you're a serious gamer.

There's also support for Dolby Vision and, much to my delight, I found support in Netflix, so you can actually watch such HDR content. But it goes without saying that folding phones aren't great for watching movies and TV because of the screen aspect: it's heavily letterboxed and because the streaming content is usually 16:9 or 21:9, it's no larger than on a regular phone. Still, I found The Gentlemen to look great.

The external display also has a factory-fitted screen protector, which is a little soft. Within a month it's well marked, including a noticeable arc where I swiped though Instagram on repeat. Yes, doomscrolling has a physical as well as a mental impact.

Performance & Battery

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite
• 16GB RAM, 512GB storage
• 5,820mAh battery
• 66W wired, 50W wireless charging

Premium folding phones like the Honor Magic V5 come with premium hardware, in this case the Snapdragon 8 Elite. That means the phone can compete with flagship-grade devices and, given the price premium for these phones, that's no surprise.

Honor isn't messing around with spec either, delivering 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage, so we're talking flagship-grade hardware all round. In execution, I've found the Honor V5 to behave like a flagship device: quick to launch apps, offering a mostly stutter-free experience. Of course, much of the visual performance that you see is governed by software, which I’ll talk about later.

But it's the battery life that’s really pleasing. That 5,820mAh battery really delivers and in all the time I've been using the Magic V5 I haven’t found myself short of charge – and that includes long hotspot use, sharing 5G data across numerous devices while travelling.

The 66W wired charging is the icing on the cake, and while this doesn't match the performance of Honor's flagship Magic 7 Pro, it's the same as Honor's lower-tier Honor 400 Pro. For long-term battery health you might want to use this with some guard rails, but for a quick recharge it's great to have these speeds – and note that Samsung's latest still only offers 25W, so is much slower at charging.

Honor advises that you charge the Magic V5 unfolded for optimal performance, presumably as a heat-dissipation measure. When the phone does get hot, one of the immediate measures I noticed was screen dimming – and using the phone on the beach I found this to be a problem, as I could barely see the screen in bright sunshine, despite the high cited brightness of this display.

Software

• MagicOS 9 based on Android 15
• 7 years of software updates
• Honor AI

For anyone familiar with Honor's phones, software is usually the biggest point of contention: the hardware is great, but the software might not suit everyone. At testing, this phone is running MagicOS 9, based on Google's Android 15. Compare that to the Galaxy Z Fold 7 or the Pixel 10 Pro Fold – both on Android 16 – and it's a generation behind.

Honor introduced a 6-year update promise at the launch of the Magic 7 Pro earlier in 2025, but it has now increased that to 7 years for the Magic V5, matching the best out there.

MagicOS layers functions over the top of Android, adding the scope for a lot of personalisation and customisation, but it's jaded by the constant presence of paid-for services. You'll quickly find a price on things as you start changing wallpapers or icons.

There's heavy duplication, too, and I found that everything was smoother as I disabled parts of MagicOS. The AI suggestion widget, for example, made interaction with the homepage slower, while Honor's tinkering with Do Not Disturb and Android's 'bedtime mode' created a situation where, despite having it set to a schedule, it never actually turned on.

How irritating you find this will depend on how you use your phone, but where Samsung the Google's rivals will just work, Honor's phones aren't so smooth, the V5 included.

Returning to duplication, one pet peeve is Honor's App Market offering updates for apps sourced from Google's Play Store, in one instance offering an update to Netflix which had already been delivered through Google's official channel.

At the time of writing Google Pay isn't available, with Honor telling me that there should be support soon after launch. With this phone launching in China in early July, was there not enough time to get support for a fundamental feature like Google Pay?

The split-screen offering is easy to use, making it simple to get apps open side by side, while many apps cope with these larger displays very nicely now. Sometimes I found slightly confused zooming on some apps when moving from exterior to interior display, but overall, I didn't find it to be a major problem.

Honor's AI is layered in, although it's not as intrusive as other services. I wasn't constantly hounded to use AI services and as a result, I rather forgot they were there. Fortunately, with most AI services offering little more than translation and transcription, I didn't feel I'd missed out too much.

One interesting element that Honor pushes is 'Deepfake Detection', the idea being that if someone has used AI to fake a person on a video call, for example, then it can detect that. I wasn't aware of that being a huge problem, but it’s perhaps fortunate I’m not living in the plot of Taken.

Google's Gemini is here as the default voice assistant, as it is on most Android phones today – Samsung included (despite the brand's own Bixby still existing).

Camera Performance

• Main (triple):
  • 50-megapixel, f/1.6 aperture, optical stabilisation (OIS)
  • 64MP 3x optical zoom (70mm equivalent), f/2.5, OIS
  • 50MP ultrawide, f/2.0
• Front:
  • Both: 20MP, f/2.2 punchhole

Honor pushes its cameras to the forefront, offering a set of high-resolution sensors. There's a solid 50-megapixel main camera, supported by a 50-megapixel ultrawide, while the 64-megapixel telephoto brings 3x optical zoom.

I found the main camera to be very competent in daylight conditions, offering great colours and accurate results with plenty of detail. The sensor-crop 2x zoom is also great, as it retains plenty of details and the same colour balance as the full crop – but there's colour and white balance inconsistency once you step over to the other lenses.

Image 1 of 5

That sees the ultrawide a little overexposed compared to the main camera, without the same sort of detail, but results are full of colours. It's actually a great lens in daylight conditions, putting the difference in hue compared to the main camera to one side.

In low-light situations the ultrawide is less effective, so when it's darker I'd stick to the main camera, as it will give you the best results.

The 3x optical zoom is then nice and sharp and colourful in daylight, but the f/2.5 results in cooler photos at night, with colours losing intensity. However, the good news is that the 10x digital zoom offered by this camera as standard is actually very capable.

This is Honor, however, so you can unlock the ability to zoom up to 100x. This isn't on by default, you'll have to enable it, and then there's the option to have AI 'enhance' images over 20x. At that level, AI doesn't really do much, but as you move out to 100x, you'll see the enhancement is more severe to the point that it can look artificial.

Image 1 of 5

In the examples above, the castle in the image doesn't have the textures or colours of the real thing, it's an approximation of what it looks like, but was taken from very long distance away, so AI doesn't have much to work with.

The TV antenna in the same shot is much closer, where AI has put in the texture of the rope and given depth to the background, as you can see in the gallery, but the lettering is a bit of a mess.

Look closer and you'll see that those bamboo leaves are realistic in appearance, but AI-generated and not all attached to stems. Certainly, it's a case of using with caution, rather than it being some magic AI solution. Which is the state of AI today, really.

Image 1 of 8

Portraiture is a strength of the Honor V5, both from the rear and front lenses. Of course, there's the ability to open up the phone to use the main camera for selfies, which gives great results, but can be a little fiddly to actually use. That also gives you access to the Harcourt modes, which can bring variety.

Overall, the Honor Magic V5 delivers a great camera: there's plenty on offer and all three lenses are capable of delivering good results, making this closer to the flagship expectation that you might have of a phone at this level. But it is a big lump on the rear of the phone.

Verdict

The Honor Magic V5 is an impressive folding phone, offering a slim and lightweight design, plenty of power, a great camera experience, and excellent battery life. From a hardware perspective, there's little missing.

The design might be a bit contentious for some – especially the huge camera housing – when compared to Samsung's phone, which I think has a better design. But each to their own.

However, software remains a work in progress: Google Pay is absent, there's bloat and duplication and a reworking of some of Android that doesn't always work in my opinion. That's typical for Honor phones, though, and if you're happy with that, the Magic V5 could indeed be a foldable slice of magic in your pocket.

Also consider

The clear rival to the Honor Magic V5 is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, which we gave top marks. Samsung enjoys wider availability and the software experience is more refined, which makes day-to-day use more enjoyable. Honor offers better battery life and charging, while also offering a higher IP rating.

The Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold is another device that's well protected – offering an IP68 rating – but with the advantage of the latest software from Google. It won't be available until 9 October, and while the software will likely be more refined, Honor’s hardware will likely outclass it.