Review: Honor Magic Vs and Honor Magic 5 Pro

The first foldable phones as we know them were released four years ago. Four. Foldables are still trying to drag their way toward something approaching mainstream acceptance. They are currently led by Samsung, which has put an obscene amount of effort and money into making the foldable “a thing.” Of course, Google is also about to the join the fray. And now the Honor Magic Vs appears poised to swan in as a newcomer and, in some respects at least, conspicuously beat the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4.

But the reality is more complex. The less attention you pay to foldable phones, the less likely you are to appreciate the little design wins Honor has pulled off in the Magic Vs. You see, these foldables come with a few new headaches. While Honor dulls them, anyone switching from a standard phone will probably still feel nagging discomfort.

The first of these issues concerns the hinge. One of the Honor Magic Vs’ most headline-grabbing features is its zero-gap hinge. Close the clamshell and the little bits of raised border around the 7.9-inch inner screen meet. Most foldables have an open gap, so as not to squish the bent display too severely. The Magic Vs does not.

This may not seem like a big deal unless you have ever taken a foldable phone to the beach and ended up with sand in the gears or the hinge, or wreaking havoc on the soft inner screen. A nice day out can easily ruin a £1,500 (about $1,870) phone—no drops required. Honor has completely ditched gears in the hinge, taking much of the bulk out of the mechanism.

Then there’s the size of the Honor Magic Vs. It’s 12.9-mm thick, much trimmer than the 15.8-mm thickness of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4. But once again, this is something only a foldable veteran could possibly appreciate.

For 90 percent of the year, I use standard phones of one brand or another. Switching to the Honor Magic Vs, the leap in thickness, weight, and heft is still very noticeable. And while people seem to claim the classic crease of the larger inner screen is largely gone, it’s still unavoidably apparent when light catches the display.

If you’ve been waiting for foldables’ kinks to get worked out before trying one, you should hold off a little longer. The Honor Magic Vs also lacks any water-resistance rating, which translates to many ways you can destroy your expensive phone.

So is the sacrifice worth it?

The Honor Magic Vs has a 6.45-inch screen on the outside and a 7.9-inch one inside. The difference in size is much larger than those numbers suggest, owing to the fatter aspect ratio of the inner screen. It does feel huge, but be aware that you’ll mainly use the outer display.

Typing texts on the outer screen initially feels odd. With the narrow virtual keyboard and chunky casing, the first few weeks with the Honor Vs feel like a series of physiotherapy exercises as you retrain your muscle memory for how a phone works. Typing on the inside arguably feels even stranger.

It will probably also take you a while to discover the advantages of having a tablet in your pocket. For me, it wasn’t gaming or movie streaming. For much of my review period, Netflix was listed as unavailable on Google Play, and the aspect ratio of the 10.3:9 inner screen is not something any game developer or film editor makes content for.

However, the Honor Magic Vs is fantastic for YouTube, letting you enjoy the excesses of limitless online content by reading comments or searching for new stuff and watching a video at the same time. It offers much more space for reading articles and is generally an engrossing window, should you find yourself on a 40-minute train ride with little to do.

A few weeks with the Magic Vs will convince you that Honor has spent more time optimizing the hardware than the software, though. Glitches and poor UI interactions are pretty common. You could experience problems when you switch from the outer screen to the inner one. The big-screen keyboard might cover something important, or an app might not scale to the inner display that well.

This is meant to be a luxury phone, but at times it seems like a work in progress.

Honor also offers few special features in this category. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4 has the optional S Pen Fold Edition, a pressure-sensing stylus that can be used for digital painting. Without that sort of creative angle, this phone’s tablet-style screen seems almost made for mucking about.

The core interface is also oddly restrictive. There’s no option to have an app drawer, just a series of home screens whose app icons need to be arranged manually. For those used to living with a dedicated app page, this contributes to the sense that the Honor Magic Vs is a little clunky.

The phone holds up better on the technical side. It uses the Snapdragon 8 Get 1+, a powerful flagship processor. It has since been superseded by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but that processor was only announced around the same time as this phone’s original Chinese launch.

It has a 5,000-mAh battery of far higher capacity than the 4,400-mAh Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4. Battery life is naturally a worry when you’re dealing with a phone-sized battery and an almost tablet-sized display, but the Honor Vs’ stamina is good. It holds up through heavy days of vegging out on those longer train rides mentioned earlier.

The phone doesn’t have wireless charging, but it does charge more quickly than its Samsung rival, thanks to 66W charging.

And the camera? This is typically an area that ends up a little compromised in foldable phones, even though they typically cost a fortune. Honor has tried to avoid this, with a zero-fat triple rear array that includes a powerful 54-MP Sony IMX800 sensor primary camera, a 50-MP ultra-wide and a 3X 8-MP zoom.

This trio can take at least solid photos in virtually all conditions, with no real effort on your part. However, there’s no real acknowledgement of the device’s form here. The camera is one of the obvious ways designers can put that hinge to use, letting the phone act as its own tripod, perfect for group shots with long exposures.

While you can make the camera stand up on its own, and feel clever doing so, this leaves the shutter button in the bent, curved part of the screen. Honor does offer a “moveable shutter” button feature in its camera app, but you sometimes wonder if Honor’s software team paid enough attention to the kind of phone the company was making.

Honor has also released what is effectively the nonfoldable equivalent of the Magic Vs, the Honor Magic 5 Pro. It’s here to test how much you value the fold because it costs hundreds less at £949 and is more advanced in a couple of important ways.

It has swish-curved front glass, which is a benefit to some, a bugbear to others. The Honor Magic 5 Pro’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is a generation ahead of the Magic Vs’ processor. Its 50-MP 3.5X zoom is dramatically better than the foldable’s 8-MP 3X one. At 10X zoom, the disparity between the two is truly stark. The Magic 5 Pro’s super-zoomed images make the Magic Vs’ appear very soft and light on detail.

The Honor Magic Vs puts on a good show of being a compromise-free foldable, but even a few generations into foldables, you pay an early-adopter tax in a number of areas—beyond just the price.

The Honor Magic Vs appears to fix some of the key problems of the foldable phone, at least on paper—but neither this phone nor the Magic 5 Pro will be sold in the US. It’s significantly thinner than others of this style, and getting rid of the hinge gap makes it much less likely you will ruin its inner display within the first few days of ownership.

However, Honor’s software offers precious few optimizations or features that specifically acknowledge the foldable form. And while feature-rich, its Honor Magic 5 Pro sibling proves that sticking with a flat form gives you more advanced functions for less, with fewer obvious compromises.