Honor Magic V5's Record Thinness Undermined by Massive Camera Bump

Honor's latest foldable phone arrives with a claim that sounds almost too good to be true: at 8.8 millimeters thick when folded, the Magic V5 is among the slimmest foldables ever made. But the fine print matters. That record-breaking measurement applies only to the Ivory White variant. Every other color—Reddish Brown, and the rest—measures 9 millimeters, which puts them at parity with Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7, a phone that launched just weeks earlier. It's a difference measured in fractions of a millimeter, the kind of gap you'd need calipers to detect. Yet it's the sort of technicality that reveals how the smartphone industry markets thinness: with precision that obscures rather than clarifies.

Honor has been chasing this particular dream longer than most. The Magic V3, released two years ago, proved that foldables didn't have to feel like bricks. At 9.3 millimeters, it reset expectations for what the form factor could be. Phones that were cutting-edge then look dated now. The V5 builds on that momentum with a new silicon-carbon battery—15 percent silicon-carbon material, up from 10 percent the year before—that charges to full capacity in roughly 45 minutes. A quick 16-minute top-up reaches 50 percent. In practice, the phone easily lasts a full day of moderate use, with enough charge remaining to push into the next day without reaching for a charger. For a device this thin, the engineering is genuinely impressive.

The hardware itself is handsome. The Reddish Brown model tested here pairs a gradient rear panel with gold-accented metal framing and a redesigned hinge that Honor calls "Super Steel." The hinge is etched with a pattern that evokes the Legend of Zelda—a small flourish that suggests someone at Honor was having fun with the design. The outer edges are subtly rounded, a trick that makes the phone appear even thinner than it actually is. Both the outer and inner OLED displays run at 120 hertz with peak brightness reaching 5,000 nits. Using the phone open feels natural, like reading from a nearly depleted notepad. The experience is fluid, the screens responsive, the overall build quality solid.

Then there is the camera system, and here the engineering compromises become visible. Honor equipped the Magic V5 with a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 64-megapixel periscope telephoto, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide. The resulting camera bump adds roughly 60 percent of the phone's entire folded depth to the back of the device. When you account for that protrusion, the Magic V5 becomes considerably thicker than Google's Pixel 9 Pro Fold. The difference is not subtle. It fails what might be called the eye test—the moment when you hold two phones side by side and the marketing claim collides with physical reality.

The camera itself performs well. The main sensor captures detail and color convincingly in varied lighting. Telephoto shots hold up across most distances. Honor's AI Falcon processing system produces images that rival Google's computational photography. The bump, however, becomes impossible to ignore. It serves as a natural resting point for your finger when holding the phone open or closed, which is practical. But it also negates the entire premise of the thinness achievement. You cannot have a record-thin foldable and a substantial camera array without accepting that one of those claims will be compromised in real-world use.

The Magic V5 is, by any reasonable measure, a well-engineered phone. It takes an already thin predecessor and shaves away a few more millimeters while improving battery efficiency and materials durability. The problem is not the phone itself. The problem is the gap between what the specification sheet promises and what your hands experience when you hold it. Honor has pushed the boundaries of foldable design in ways competitors have been unwilling to attempt. But in doing so, it has also exposed the limits of thinness as a meaningful measure of progress. The phone launches in European markets later this month, unavailable in the United States—a market where such nuances might matter less to consumers who cannot buy it anyway.