The foldable thinner than a ballpoint pen

With the durability question more or less answered, foldable phones have set their sights on a familiar new frontier: thinness. Normally, making a phone thinner and thinner means less available space for big batteries, worse thermal performance, less impressive cameras, and an overall flimsier device. With the HONOR Magic V2 Ultimate, HONOR is tackling all of these problems at once.

The HONOR Magic V2 Ultimate is the world’s thinnest foldable phone. That might not mean much in a world where everything is the “world’s something-est” but when you see a fold-flat foldable thinner than a ballpoint pen, it’s hard not to be impressed. It truly is a feat of engineering.

At just 9.9mm thick (when folded), the Magic V2 is thinner than some regular slab phones. For comparison, it’s only a bit over a millimeter thicker than the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Despite being foldable, the V2 is actually lighter than the iPhone. Add to that a 5,000mAh battery, dual 120Hz LTPO OLED panels, and a camera setup mostly ripped from the excellent HONOR Magic 5 Pro, and the Magic V2 should make you sit up and pay attention.

That is, of course, if you’re living in China. The V2 is, unfortunately, a China exclusive for now. However, it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to see the blueprint for a global version under the HONOR Magic Vs2 or Magic V2s moniker later this year.

So, what else is cool about the HONOR Magic V2 Ultimate? For starters, it’s cool. It has a 0.22mm-thick Bionic Cooling System, which is what HONOR calls its vapor chamber. The chamber is 12.5% larger than on the previous generation and, combined with graphite and thermal gel, it promises to address thermals in an unfolded phone that is less than a half-centimeter thick. Everything here is powered by the latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform and 16GB of RAM.

I ran a few sideloaded benchmarks and was quite surprised it didn’t heat up more (I won’t share screenshots of the results here as the Magic V2 I have is currently running non-final software). By comparison, I can barely take a half-hour video call on the Pixel Fold without it doing its best impression of the Terminator sinking into a vat of molten metal.

The split-cell 5,000mAh silicon-carbon battery also supports 66W wired charging (but no wireless charging). The 66W charging brick comes in the box along with a nifty shell case with a stand attachment.

Speaking of the box, the Ultimate edition I got also includes the HONOR Magic Pencil stylus, although due to the software limitations I mentioned it doesn’t currently work with my review unit. HONOR tells me the stylus is supported on both the internal and external displays and it utilizes a “self-developed stroke prediction algorithm” for better accuracy and speed, with 0.42ms input latency.

As for those displays, they look great. HONOR’s default wallpaper is a bit bland and the theme engine and wallpaper gallery are not included in this software build, but they certainly stack up on paper. Both the internal and external screens are 120Hz adaptive refresh rate OLED panels, with 3,840Hz PWM dimming, 2,500-nit peak brightness on the smaller screen, and 1,600-nit peak brightness on the internal display.

The external screen has a 91.2% screen-to-body ratio and follows a 20:9 aspect ratio. Honor’s second-generation nanocrystal glass is used on the exterior display and promises a 30% improvement in drop resistance. The internal screen has a squarish 9.78:9 aspect ratio and uses transparent Colorless Polyimide (CPI) film and not Ultra-Thin Glass (UTG). How this will fare over time with a stylus in regular use we’ll have to wait and see.

One big upside of the internal screen is the near-invisible crease. It’s certainly there if you go looking for it, but it’s less noticeable than on the already-good Magic Vs and looks to be no hindrance at all to visibility or usage.

The hinge mechanism has received some upgrades, with HONOR employing a titanium alloy for weight and strength reasons, combined with HONOR’s proprietary steel. As with the original Magic V and Magic Vs, the hinge is rated to 400,000 folds — that’s ten years of opening or closing it 100 times per day. That’s despite the Magic V2 employing a 75% thinner hinge support structure than that found on the Magic Vs.

I did some light bend tests and the structure of the phone feels sturdy enough, similar to the Magic Vs, and the hinge held up fine. Some people will naturally manage to break it but that is true of any device. My first impression, however, is that the Magic V2’s extreme thinness doesn’t immediately look like it’ll be a weak point for mainstream users. The hinge stops at any angle allowing for flexibility with taking hands-free photos, watching videos, or taking video calls.

From my short time with the Magic V2 Ultimate so far, I’ve been impressed by its heat management, battery capacity and charging speed, overall design and thinness, and understated good looks. Small accents like the pattern on the hinge or the colored HONOR logo and rim of the camera bump combine well with the black vegan leather back panel. This is the only version that breaks the 1cm barrier by the way, the glass-backed versions are 10.1 mm thick and are marginally heavier than the vegan leather.

Perhaps the biggest draw for me though is the one feature I could not test at all: the camera. HONOR tells me it used the main camera and ultrawide from the Magic 5 Pro. That’s a pair of 50MP shooters we called “really competitive with the best phones from Apple, Google, and Samsung” in our review. The only difference is the 2.5x telephoto camera’s sensor drops to 20MP and the main camera’s aperture is a little less wide at f/1.9 compared to the Magic 5 Pro’s f/1.6. We’ll let you know how much of a difference that makes to the camera package in our full review.

I’ll spend some more time with the HONOR Magic V2 Ultimate in the weeks to come and let you know how I go once I’ve got the final software and full support for the stylus and camera. It’s always too early to pick a winner after a couple of days with a device, but so far so good. The HONOR Magic V2 Ultimate is available in China for 8,999 yuan (~$1,255) for 16GB/256GB, 9,999 yuan (~$1,395) for 16GB/512GB, and 11,999 yuan (~$1,675) for 16GB/1TB.