Chinese phone maker Honor is launching its first smartphone with a foldable display. When folded, the Honor Magic V works like a standard smartphone with a 6.45 inch cover display. But open the tablet up like a book and a tablet-sized 7.9 inch OLED display is revealed.

The Honor Magic V goes on sale in China January 18 with prices starting at 9,999 CNY (about $1570). There’s no word on if or when you’ll be able to buy one outside of China.

That said, the phone is the latest indication that companies want to take on Samsung in the foldable space that the South Korean company has dominated up until now, and it looks like a pretty solid alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold series for folks who can actually get their hands on Honor’s new phone.

Under the hood, the phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor and 12GB of RAM, and Honor will offer models with 256GB or 512GB of storage.

The phone has a 4,750 mAh battery and support for 66 watt fast charging, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, a USB-C port, and three rear cameras:

  • 50MP primary
  • 50MP ultrawide
  • 50MP color spectrum

The phone also has two front-facing 42MP cameras, one for each version of “front.” There’s a selfie camera in the cover display for use when the phone is folded and another in the interior display for when it’s unfolded.

And it’s certainly those screens that make this phone stand out. The inside screen is a 7.9 inch, 2272 x 1984 pixel OLED display with a 90 Hz refresh rate, 381 pixels per inch, up to 800 nits brightness, and a roughly 10:9 aspect ratio (or the equivalent of two 20:9 displays side-by-side).

The Honor Magic V cover display is a 6.45 inch, 2560 x 1080 pixel OLED display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, 431 pixels per inch, and a 21:9 aspect ratio and up to 1000 nits brightness.

Honor says it’s also used a “waterdrop” style hinge that allows for a flatter fold than you get on most competing foldables, with les of a gap between the screens when folded.

The Honor Magic V will ship with Android 12 software and Honor’s MagicUI 6 user interface which has been enhanced for foldables with some additional multitasking features. It’ll be interesting to see if and when it receives an update to Android 12L, the upcoming version of Android that Google is designing specifically for foldables, tablets, and other large-screen devices.

via Honor (YouTube), GSM Arena, xda-developers, and The Verge

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5 replies on “Honor Magic V is a foldable phone with three 50MP cameras, 12GB RAM, and 66W fast charging”

  1. It looks good, better than the Samsung in my opinion. But not good enough to justify not the price but to import it to the States.

  2. If you think about it, “foldable phone” is actually devices like Samsing Flip, while these should be called foldable (or unfold-able?) phablets or even tablets.

  3. Isn’t Honor a brand of Huawei, the Chinese
    manufacturer that’s been banned by the US
    governmentZ?

    1. They’ve nominally been spun off, but to this point, their products have overlapped almost 100%. They have about 10,000 of the former Huawei employees.

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