Honor Magic V5 review: Even thinner, even lighter, even more powerful

Note: This review was first published on 18 July 2025.

We’ve covered foldable smartphones extensively over the years, but Honor’s offerings have always been incredibly impressive thanks to the Chinese company’s ability to consistently slim down the phones while offering excellent battery life and flagship hardware. The new Honor Magic V5 is no exception.

Unveiled in China earlier this month, Honor claims that the Magic V5 takes back the title of the world’s thinnest foldable smartphone (specifically, the Ivory White edition) with a thickness of just 8.8mm when folded and 4.1mm when unfolded. This is certainly thinner than other recent foldable smartphones like the newly announced Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 and OPPO Find N5.

With the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite flagship processor, a large 5,820mAh silicon-carbon battery, a new IP58 and IP59 dust and water resistance rating and an even larger 7.95-inch internal screen, the Magic V5 looks to be an upgrade across all fronts.

However, the phone does come at a slightly higher starting price of S$2,199. Are all these changes enough to justify the price increase? Let’s find out.

Jump to:

• Hardware and design
• Software and AI
• Camera and imaging
• Benchmarks and performance
• Battery Life
• Conclusion

Shaving off even more thickness

The Magic V5 is a gorgeous phone, one that could easily be mistaken for a normal device when folded up, quite like what we mentioned when the Magic V3 arrived on the scene last year. The time and effort that Honor has put into trying to make the phone even thinner hasn’t gone to waste and bodes well if you get a proper phone case for added protection and still have the phone feel no different than any other bar-type phone with a case in your pocket.

Each side of the foldable is now so thin that there’s barely any space left to fit the USB-C port. We reckon that it will be near impossible for the next generation to get even thinner unless the port is removed.

8.8mm ‘thin’ might be thicker than normal phones such as the iPhone 16 Pro Max (8.25mm), Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (8.2mm) or the OPPO Find X8 Pro (8.24mm), but let’s not forget you’re getting a foldable phone with a massive screen inside and is hardly any thicker than normal premium phones. Honor’s ingenuity really shines when you unfold the phone, because it’s only 4.1mm thin, which is absolutely incredible.

At just 217g, this phone is easily on par with or even lighter than the above-mentioned smartphones. This means the Magic V5 slips easily into any pocket and isn’t a bother to carry around. The camera bump on the rear retains most of the design from the previous Magic V3, and while it does protrude from the back, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff, as you’ll see later.

Thanks to a redesigned hinge, Honor claims that the crease is 30% smaller than that of the Honor Magic V3. While the crease can still be felt running your finger over it, it’s invisible when looking at the phone straight on during normal use. You’d have to be looking at the phone from a rather extreme angle to notice the crease visually.

The internal screen is largely the same, measuring 7.95 inches across (compared to 7.92 inches in the previous version), although it remains an LTPO OLED display with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. It can now reach up to 5,000 nits of peak brightness and features the same impact-resistant silicone gel layer as the Magic V3, which protects against scratches. The outer screen remains the same (6.43 inches, up to 120Hz refresh rate, and 5,000-nits peak brightness).

Both screens are bright enough for use under harsh afternoon sunlight, and colours offer plenty of vibrance and pop.

The phone also gets a major upgrade to IP58 and IP59 dust and water resistance, compared to only providing IPX8 water resistance in the Magic V3. (Read what this means here.)

Making the most out of the hardware with software

As Honor’s newest flagship device running MagicOS 9.0, it stands to reason that all the AI-powered features we’ve seen in previous phones are present. Therefore, we won’t delve into those already covered in our Honor 400 review.

The AI Image to Video feature is just as impressive, and Honor’s Magic Portal gets the same Circle to Search feature using a knuckle gesture, AI deepfake detection for calls and upgraded features like AI Eraser 2.0. Magic Portal still only supports limited apps, and while it works fine for getting directions to a place and the like, it still doesn’t quite live up to what we want from a sidebar.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem like Honor is making its phones all about AI, which is a refreshing change when every other brand has been intent on force feeding AI features that might not be useful to everybody.

One of the more interesting new features is Triple Split Screen, which allows for three apps to be opened and switched between on the inner screen. While it’s more likely that most people will only ever require two apps at most, having the ability to open three can be handy in heavy multitasking situations. For example, let’s say you’re booking a concert and you’ve a discount code supplied that you need to refer to, as well as figuring out which date and timings work best for you -- you’ll need your email app, calendar app and the concert booking page all easily available at your fingertips. Usually, you would have to switch between all these open apps, but on the Honor Magic V5 with Triple Split Screen enabled, you could just view all of them side by side.

For those unfamiliar with Honor’s user interface, MagicOS 9.0 runs smoothly on the Magic V5, and Honor offers four years of major OS updates with five years of security updates.

Imaging Performance

The camera bump on the back of the Magic V5 is a little large, but Honor has packed some very impressive tech into this foldable, improving both the telephoto and ultrawide cameras notably over the Magic V3:

• A 50MP main camera with f/1.6 aperture, 1/1.56-inch sensor, optical image stabilisation (OIS) and EIS (same as Magic V3)
• A 64MP periscope telephoto camera with f/2.5 aperture, OIS and EIS
• A 50MP ultrawide camera with f/2.0 aperture

The main camera offers sharp photos with accurate colours when the scene is well-lit. There’s a good amount of depth of field when required, although details do tend to get a bit blurry and smudged closer to the edges of the frame.

Looking at shots from the ultrawide camera, there’s a touch of distortion, but it does offer a relatively wide field of view to capture more in the image.

Low light shots taken with the main camera mode are perfectly serviceable, and even if you switch to the dedicated Night mode, all it offers is a touch more brightening in the shadows.

The telephoto camera offers 3.5x optical zoom and up to 100x hybrid zoom. Shots taken at the 3.5x option are crisp and clear, with accurate colours. While 100x zoom photos are typically terrible, we can certainly see an improvement over its predecessors. Still, don’t expect 100x magic.

Benchmark Performance

There’s only a single configuration available in Singapore, but the Honor Magic V5 is packed with flagship hardware using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB UFS 4.1 storage. The improved hardware specs, most notably the increase in RAM packed into the SKU brought into Singapore, are one of the key reasons for the higher price tag.

We’ll be comparing the Magic V5 to other foldable flagship devices as well as normal flagship phones.

Before we delve into the graphs and breakdown, we must disclose that in the phone’s battery settings, there is a performance mode option that we have enabled for these benchmarking tests. This was highly recommended for testing the phone to showcase its full capabilities, as we were told that the current non-performance mode overthrottles the phone. For fairness and to test the impact, we have also conducted our battery test in both modes as you’ll see later.

To find out more about the tests we conduct and what they relate to, we’ve jotted them down here.

The Magic V5 performs incredibly well in synthetic benchmark tests. While it’s unfortunate that the default settings throttle the phone’s performance, it’s good to see that there is an option to turn it off for power users.

It’s clear that the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip provides a massive boost across the board, and when compared with the Magic V3, the performance gains are even more noticeable. The phone has good thermal management as well, with temperatures only hitting a maximum of 42°C when fast charging and never exceeding 39°C when benchmarking.

Battery life

Our battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone’s battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more.

As previously pointed out, we conducted our battery test with and without Performance Mode enabled to see the impact on battery life in sustaining the positive performance numbers. In Performance Mode to ensure that there was no throttling, battery life took a hit compared to the other devices, but the Magic V5 still managed to stay up for just under nine hours. Without Performance Mode enabled, battery uptime wasn’t too bad, lasting around 100 minutes more on the benchmark.

Even so, you’ll note that the battery life uptime is less than the Magic V3 and most of other foldable phones compared for the same controlled test run. In fact, if you refer to the battery testing done on Magic V3, you’ll also note that it fared much lower than the Magic V2. The common trait to explain the reduced battery life results with the release of every new model year-on-year is that in each iteration, there is a combination of upgrades that sap more power. For the V5, it features a more powerful chipset, faster storage, more RAM and a much brighter main screen.

In actual day-to-day usage scenarios, thankfully, it easily lasted a full day for me with moderate usage and some light gaming and still retained around 17% battery left over at the end of the day.

Charging speeds are fantastic, with support for 66W wired charging and 50W wireless charging. A full charge from 0% for the 5,820mAh battery took just 53 minutes, although you’ll need to keep the phone unfolded for the fastest charging speeds.

Improvements galore

Honor somehow manages to improve on its flagship foldable year-on-year. From the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip to the new dust resistance rating, or a bigger battery with further reduced thickness and weight, the Magic V5 is an upgrade across the board.

While it also comes with a slightly higher price tag of S$2,199, we feel that the Magic V5 still offers excellent value compared to other pricey book-style foldables such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 or OPPO Find N5, even if its battery uptime in controlled testing isn’t as high as its predecessor. Not to mention, the higher price tag is also due to the additional RAM and faster storage offered on the Magic V5 compared to the V3, and we haven’t yet even accounted for other tangible improvements that the phone boasts.

The ability to have three apps running at the same time is a boon for productivity, and there’s a decent suite of AI tools that work well enough without becoming too gimmicky. The cameras are fantastic, and the upgraded 64MP telephoto lens with 3.5x optical zoom offers more flexibility when shooting far-away subjects.

Even though other foldables are catching up in terms of slim-factor marketing game, the Honor Magic V5 retains the overall edge over its competitors. As such, we continue to rate this phone a 9/10 and award it an Editor’s Choice Award just like we did with the Honor Magic V3.

The Honor Magic V5 retails for S$2,199 at the following locations:

• Honor official website
• Honor Experience Stores (Causeway Point, NEX, Tiong Bahru Plaza, Plaza Singapura)
• Lazada (Honor official store)
• Shopee (Honor official store)
• TikTok Shop (Honor official store)
• Harvey Norman
• Gain City
• Best Denki
• Courts
• Challenger
• KrisShop
• Popular