Honor Magic V Is The First Folding Phone To Be Powered By Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Chip

Never mind my skepticism with regards to folding phones becoming mainstream devices because more smartphone makers are jumping into making it. Joining the likes of Samsung, Huawei, Royole, Xiaomi, and more recently, Oppo, is ex-Huawei brand, Honor, very own folding phone.

For those who don’t already know, yes, Huawei has offloaded its “child” last year to save it from the U.S. sanctions. Anywho, what you see here is the Honor Magic V, the brand’s first folding phone that looks suspiciously like any folding candy bar style folding phone except for Oppo’s.

That’s right, it has the awkward 21:9 aspect ratio too. The longish form factor is home to a 120 Hz 6.45-inch flexible OLED FHD+ (2,560 x 1,080 pixels) display that opens up to a big 7.9-inch flexible OLED display with a 90% screen to body ratio and boasting a 2,272 x 1,984 resolution.

Both the main and secondary displays are HDR10+ certified and tout a billion colors. Honor is especially proud of its folding mechanism that promised to leave no gap when closed and is super flat when opened, and it is super thin – at just 14.3 mm – when closed.

All told, the Magic V’s folding mechanism packs no less than 213 individual components and like most such folding devices, has a rated folding of 200,000 times.

The device also has the honor of becoming the first folding phone to be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip. The 4 nm process 5G SoC is paired to OS Turbo X, GPU Turbo X, and LINK Turbo X that promised smooth, stable performances.

Other notables include a unique tri-camera setup (50 MP wide-angle + 50 MP spectrally-enhanced + 50 MP 122-degree super wide-angle), an 8×8 dTOF laser focusing system, a 42 MP hole-punch camera, a 4,750 mAh battery with 66 W super-fast charging, support for Honor 66 W in-car charging, dual SIM support, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.2, IR blaster, GPS (A-GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, OZSS), NFC, electronic compass, and support for DTS:X Ultra.

The Honor Magic V Folding Phone is available to order now in China in choice of 12 GB + 256 GB and 12 GB + 512 GB for a starting price of 9,999 yuan (around US$1,568), with official availability on January 18, 2022.