The Honor Magic V5 is thinner and lighter, but do you need a foldable phone?

Phone makers are running scared. People are upgrading their phones far less often than they have done since the advent of the smartphone, supposedly because the devices have got so good, the annual upgrades to handsets so incremental, that it's not worth spending another £800 or so every year. Might as well stick with what you've got, right?

In an attempt to break this cycle, several Android manufacturers have decided that folding phones are the next big thing. These gadgets use bending screen technology to either have a smaller footprint and open up into a regular size phone (see the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 or Motorola Razr 60 Ultra) or to be regular phone size and optionally fold open like a book into a small tablet.

This exciting new form factor might have picked up quicker if the things didn't cost so much. I've been testing the Honor Magic V5, a seriously impressive new foldable with thin design, great battery life, two excellent screens and superlative cameras - but it costs £1,699 and might break if you get dust or sand in the hinge.

The big question is whether you want to spend this much on a phone the next time you upgrade, even if it does do new and exciting things.

Samsung released the first foldable in 2019 and has spent years trying to perfect the design. It may have done so with the Galaxy Z Fold 7, the recent book-style device that finally feels like a large smartphone in your hand that happens to fold open, rather than previous models that felt big, bulky and compromised whichever way you used them.

Honor says it has made the thinnest book-style folding phone in the Magic V5. The white one I'm testing is just 8.8mm thick when opened up, beating Samsung's Z Fold 7 by 0.1mm. A lot of marketing for both phones highlights this thinness, rather than the fact these pocket computers have wonderful large folding screens. It makes me wonder if foldables really offer that much more than regular slab phones.

For the V5, the thinness is somewhat marred by the enormous camera module on its back that practically doubles the phone's thickness at that point. What you get in return is truly stunning photos, some of the best I've seen on any phone I've tested, not just foldables. The images are better than the Z Fold 7 hands down, with better sharpness and colour reproduction, with a 50MP main, 50MP ultrawide and 64MP 3x optical periscope telephoto allowing for superb depth of field. The software also lets you select traditional photography focal lengths to better compose shots that feel closer to a standalone digital camera compared to Samsung.

If you want all the bells and whistles for the money you're spending, this is one of the best cameras on a folding phone you can get in the UK.

But if you don't see the attraction in carrying around a mini tablet, a foldable is not for you in the first place. Otherwise, the Honor's 7.95-inch inner screen is a delight, with excellent brightness and a barely noticeable crease, the blight of many older foldables where it looked like a plasticy ravine in the middle of your incredibly expensive purchase. It even has stylus support for Honor's Magic Pen, but it's not included in the box, and I was not offered one to test out. For what it's worth. the Z Fold 7 does not support pen input, unlike older versions.

Video playback on the V5's inner display looks great as long as there are no reflections on the plastic-covered screen, but the almost-square design means you'll get black bars at the top and bottom of the display whichever way you hold it. Ironically, a large, normal smartphone might suit better if you want to watch lots of shows or movies on a phone (though might I remind you about TVs?).

Honor says this phone is great to multitask on, as do all its rival bendy phone makers. I'm not sure multitasking on a phone is really a thing - especially when you can load up Instagram on one half of the screen and TikTok on another to truly melt your mind.

I found these capabilities better suited to work apps, so I could have Slack up on one side and a Chrome tab on the other, and when I tuned into a video call I could also have Google Docs open to take notes. You could even connect a Bluetooth keyboard for this - the V5 is a great phone to travel with and could conceivably replace a laptop for light tasks as long as you chuck that keyboard in your bag. The power of the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset certainly helps with that, as the phone did not lag at all in my testing, and was very responsive.

The outer screen is a tall 6.43-inch OLED that, like the larger one, has a smooth 120Hz refresh rate that makes Honor's Magic OS 9 Android 15 software and all apps slide by very smoothly. I went whole days using only this screen and not unfolding the V5, as it is light enough at 217g for me to forget it can unfold in the first place.

One thing you won't want to forget is this phone is not fully dust resistant. It has an IP58/59 rating, which means Honor reckons it can survive an accidental dunk, but it might come a cropper if it gets dust, sand or other grit stuck in its hinge, which necessarily needs to have gaps and moving parts. That said, Google's announced but as yet unreleased Pixel 10 Pro Fold claims to have a fully dust-tight IP68 rating.

If you're still intrigued, there are several reasons to opt for the Honor instead of Samsung's go-to Z Fold 7. The Magic V5 is £100 cheaper for a start (though not 'cheap'), and has undeniably superior cameras. Charging is faster at 66W wired and 50W wireless, though there's no charger included in the box, galling at this price. Battery life is thankfully phenomenally good thanks to the 5,820,mAh cell that uses silicon-carbon tech instead of traditional lithium ion.

It results in more efficient power use, and I was able to eke two full days out of the device when using it as my main phone. That's very impressive and not something I can say of many other phones at all, let alone power-hungry foldables. You will of course get less time out of it if you are always using the big bright inner screen.

Like with every phone I review these days, I could personally do without the AI. Honor's software is not too in your face with this, and you can opt in to crazy things such as AI Deepfake Detection just in case someone pretends to be your mum on a video call.

There's also AI translate, which works well, and other tools that use Google AI such as Circle to Search to perform a web search by circling something on any screen.

With seven years of Android and security updates (an industry-best alongside Samsung and Google), this could be a phone to hold onto for several years if you keep it safe when you head to the beach. Dust and sand aversion aside, the Magic V5 is an accomplished folding phone that does everything the rival Z Fold 7 can, and even betters it when it comes to battery life and camera quality.

And don't forget, it's 0.1mm thinner, too.

You can order the Honor Magic V5 from Honor