With the sturdiness query roughly answered, foldable telephones have set their sights on a well-known new frontier: thinness. Usually, making a telephone thinner and thinner means much less accessible area for giant batteries, worse thermal efficiency, much less spectacular cameras, and an general flimsier system. With the HONOR Magic V2 Final, HONOR is tackling all of those issues directly.

The HONOR Magic V2 Final is the world’s thinnest foldable telephone. That may not imply a lot in a world the place every part is the “world’s something-est” however once you see a fold-flat foldable thinner than a ballpoint pen, it’s laborious to not be impressed. It really is a feat of engineering.

At simply 9.9mm thick (when folded), the Magic V2 is thinner than some common slab telephones. For comparability, it’s solely a bit over a millimeter thicker than the iPhone 14 Professional Max. Regardless of being foldable, the V2 is definitely lighter than the iPhone.

Add to {that a} 5,000mAh battery, twin 120Hz LTPO OLED panels, and a digicam setup largely ripped from the wonderful HONOR Magic 5 Professional, and the Magic V2 ought to make you sit up and concentrate.

So, what else is cool in regards to the HONOR Magic V2 Final? 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% bigger than on the earlier era and, mixed with graphite and thermal gel, it guarantees to handle thermals in an unfolded telephone that’s lower than a half-centimeter thick. The whole lot right here is powered by the most recent and best Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 cell platform and 16GB of RAM.

I ran a couple of sideloaded benchmarks and was fairly stunned it didn’t warmth up extra (I received’t share screenshots of the outcomes right here because the Magic V2 I’ve is presently operating non-final software program). By comparability, I can barely take a half-hour video name on the Pixel Fold with out it doing its finest impression of the Terminator descending right into a vat of molten metallic.

The split-cell 5,000mAh silicon-carbon battery additionally helps 66W wired charging (however no wi-fi charging). The 66W charging brick comes within the field together with a nifty shell case with a stand attachment.

Talking of the field, the Final version I obtained additionally consists of the HONOR Magic Pencil stylus, though because of the non-final software program limitations I discussed it doesn’t presently work with my overview unit. HONOR tells me the stylus is supported on each the inner and exterior shows and it makes use of a “self-developed stroke prediction algorithm” for higher accuracy and pace, with 0.42ms enter latency.

As for these shows, they give the impression of being nice. HONOR’s default wallpaper is a bit bland and the theme engine and wallpaper gallery usually are not included on this software program construct, however they definitely stack up on paper. Each the inner and exterior screens are 120Hz adaptive refresh price OLED panels, with 3,840Hz PWM dimming, 2,500-nit peak brightness on the smaller display screen, and 1,600-nit peak brightness on the inner show.

The exterior display screen has a 91.2% screen-to-body ratio and follows a 20:9 facet ratio. Honor’s second-generation nanocrystal glass is used on the outside show and guarantees a 30% enchancment in drop resistance. The inner display screen has a squarish 9.78:9 facet ratio and makes use of clear Colorless Polyimide (CPI) movie and never Extremely-Skinny Glass (UTG). How it will fare over time with a stylus in common use we’ll have to attend and see.

One huge upside of the inner display screen is the near-invisible crease. It’s definitely there in the event you go searching for it, nevertheless it’s much less noticeable than on the already-good Magic Vs and appears to be no hindrance in any respect to visibility or utilization.

The hinge mechanism has acquired some upgrades, with HONOR using a titanium alloy for weight and power causes, mixed with HONOR’s proprietary metal. The hinge is rated to 400,000 folds — that’s ten years of opening or closing it 100 instances per day — as had been the unique Magic V and Magic Vs. That’s regardless of the Magic V2 using a 75% thinner hinge assist construction than that discovered on the Magic Vs.

I did some mild bend exams and the construction of the telephone feels sturdy sufficient, much like the Magic Vs, and the hinge held up advantageous. Some folks will naturally handle to interrupt it however that’s true of any system. My first impression, nonetheless, is that the Magic V2’s excessive thinness doesn’t instantly appear to be it’ll be a weak level for mainstream customers. The hinge stops at any angle permitting for flexibility with taking hands-free images, watching movies, or taking video calls.

From my brief time with the Magic V2 Final up to now, I’ve been impressed by its warmth administration, battery capability, and charging pace, general design and thinness, and understated attractiveness. Small accents just like the sample on the hinge or the coloured HONOR emblem and rim of the digicam bump mix properly with the black vegan leather-based again panel. That is the one model that breaks the 1cm barrier by the way in which, the glass-backed variations are 10.1 mm thick and are marginally heavier than the vegan leather-based.

Maybe the largest draw for me although is the one characteristic I couldn’t take a look at in any respect: the digicam. HONOR tells me it used the principle digicam and ultrawide from the Magic 5 Professional. That’s a pair of 50MP shooters we referred to as “actually aggressive with the perfect telephones from Apple, Google, and Samsung” in our overview. The one distinction is the two.5x telephoto digicam’s sensor drops to 20MP and the principle digicam’s aperture is rather less extensive at f/1.9 in comparison with the Magic 5 Professional’s f/1.6. We’ll let you understand how a lot of a distinction that makes to the digicam bundle in our full overview.

The HONOR Magic V2 Final is presently solely accessible in China at a beginning value of 8,999 yuan (~$1,255) for the 16GB/256GB mannequin. Regardless of being proven off at IFA 2023, we’ll have to attend till Q1, 2024 to get pricing and availability data for the worldwide model. However, HONOR has listed the system on its web site in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. These listings don’t embrace a value however we’re guessing that it’ll begin at €1,599 (~$1,735) on the very least, very similar to the Magic Vs.