Among the many folding mobile phones, female users particularly favor the vertical folding design due to its lightness, compactness, and versatility.
Since China introduced the first vertically folding screen mobile phone, manufacturers have usually equipped it with a secondary screen or external screen on the back. This feature primarily enables female users to use the rear camera for selfies.
As a result, this design not only meets female users’ beauty-shooting needs but also inspires many innovative uses for the rear secondary screen and user interaction methods, making the device easier for female friends to use.
Although Honor entered the foldable-screen mobile phone market relatively late, the brand has leveraged its hard-core strength to create each generation of foldable-screen phones that address users’ pain points. For example, the Honor Magic V2 brought the thickness of foldable screens into the “millimeter era” for the first time. The Honor Magic Vs2 broke the 7,000 yuan price barrier, pushing foldable screen mobile phones from “pioneer to main force.” The Honor V Purse transforms a mobile phone into a “wallet” in seconds.
This year, Honor seized the opportunity and launched its first vertical folding phone, the Honor Magic V Flip. With the industry’s largest 4.0-inch external screen, flagship-level screen quality, and full-scene intelligent interaction capabilities, it has created a small giant screen that young people dream of.
Honor’s First Small Folding Phone! Honor Magic V Flip Review: Play All Day with Its 4-Inch Large External Screen
Before starting the review, let’s first examine the highlights of the Honor Magic V Flip:
- Honor’s First Vertical Folding Phone with Flagship Luban HingeAs Honor’s first vertical folding phone, the Honor Magic V Flip features a Luban hinge, ensuring folding comfort and durability comparable to the horizontal folding flagship phone. By using self-developed shield steel, the folding hinge is strong and durable. Additionally, super-strong screen support steel foil makes the screen creases shallower and enhances impact resistance.
- The Industry’s Largest 4-Inch Vertical Folding External ScreenThe Honor Magic V Flip boasts the industry’s largest 4-inch vertical folding external screen. This full-area low-power LTPO external screen achieves a 0.1Hz~120Hz adaptive high refresh rate, supports 2160Hz high-frequency PWM dimming, and features an industry-leading 2500 nit local peak brightness. The display quality of this external screen rivals that of the internal screen.
- Flagship Qinghai Lake BatteryEquipped with the flagship Qinghai Lake battery, the Magic V Flip uses the latest silicon-carbon negative electrode technology to reach a battery capacity of 4800mAh. The main battery energy density is 762Wh/L, and the secondary battery energy density is 700Wh/L, leading the vertical folding category. Despite the large battery, the phone maintains a thin design at 7.15mm.
- First Generation Snapdragon 8+ Mobile PlatformThe phone also features the first-generation Snapdragon 8+ flagship mobile platform, which uses a 4nm process. This configuration provides a smooth and efficient experience for daily tasks and playing various 3A mobile games.
Below are the detailed parameters of the Honor Magic V Flip phone:
Design
The Honor Magic V Flip features a 6.8-inch inner screen with an LTPO substrate, supporting a 1-120Hz adaptive high refresh rate, a global peak brightness of 1500 nits, and a local peak brightness of 3000 nits. This hardware ensures clear visibility of screen content in sunlight, leading its category.
Additionally, the internal screen of the Honor Mini Fold, the first in the industry to have a color gamut coverage of more than 90% BT.2020, boasts a resolution of 2520×1080 and a static contrast ratio of up to 5000000:1. This superiority in clarity, brightness, and contrast sets it apart from similar products.
A 50-megapixel Sony IMX816 large-bottom front lens sits at the top center of the inner screen, with a light distance sensor on the left. The inner screen of the Honor Magic V Flip features a design with equal width on all four sides, providing a visually balanced and symmetrical aesthetic.
At Kuai Technology, we received the Honor Magic V Flip in Iris Black. The back of the phone, crafted through a unique space light and shadow process, presents a flowing light and shadow texture with a delicate touch, as smooth as silk.
The simple black color of the surrounding area highlights the mysterious light and shadow effects in the central area, creating a deep and unique texture. This design enhances visual impact and gives the product a high-end and mysterious artistic atmosphere.
The rear dual-camera module, located in the upper left corner of the back panel, features a main camera surrounded by a metal ring. This detail enhances the phone’s overall aesthetics and texture. The large and small double circular lenses add personality to the phone.
The phone’s external screen, a 4.0-inch OLED panel, is the industry’s first external screen mobile phone to use an LTPO substrate, achieving a 0.1~120Hz adaptive high refresh rate. Honor combines low power consumption with a large-screen experience.
Moreover, this external screen supports 2160Hz high-frequency PWM dimming and has passed the German Rhine TÜV flicker-free certification. It offers natural light eye protection and AI sleep-aid display, incorporating all the standard eye protection functions of Honor flagship phones. The quality of the external screen of the Honor Magic V Flip rivals the top level in the small folding category and even compares favorably with external screens of some flagship phones.
The folding hinge of the Honor Magic V Flip uses the same Luban water drop hinge structure as the flagship, incorporating the self-developed Honor shield steel material and high-strength aviation-grade ultra-thin steel foil.
With a strength of 1800MPa, this material ensures the durability of the folding part of the phone and significantly enhances the screen’s impact resistance. The hinge’s porous continuous arch structure design improves the rigidity and stability of the entire mobile phone through multi-layer support. The Honor Magic V Flip employs a side fingerprint recognition solution, with the volume button and power button located on the same side of the body.
The phone features independent speakers at the top and bottom, forming a symmetrical stereo field, and includes microphones on the top, bottom, and sides, enhancing call reception. The Honor Magic V Flip supports 66W super fast charging and comes with a 66W super fast charging charger set.
External screen experience
The Honor Magic V Flip’s built-in 4.0-inch magic external screen, the largest in the industry, offers a variety of interactive functions. Users can easily enjoy a full range of life and entertainment experiences with multiple independent applications such as games, videos, music, and WeChat without unfolding the screen. This makes the phone’s secondary screen much more than just a decorative feature.
On the external screen, you can simply swipe left or right to switch to full-screen desktop cards that include convenient functions such as weather, calendar, mini-games, sports, payment, and music.
Moreover, you can add small icon applications to the external screen desktop, including Xiaohongshu, iQiyi, FM, and other applications, enhancing the practicality of the external screen.
When you switch the phone to desk calendar mode or tent mode, the smart desk setting function activates, and the external screen displays full-screen card information such as clock, weather, and music.
Thanks to the magic window partition interaction function, the external screen of the Honor Magic V Flip supports a full-screen display. The ultra-large external screen features a partition function, presenting the application area in a vertical 16:9 ratio. This allows many applications to display directly on the external screen, overcoming the problem of limited application adaptation in vertical folding mobile phones.
You can use the external screen to watch Douyin, read Xiaohongshu, watch movies, shop, and play games.
It not only offers powerful external screen quality and functions but also supports more than 40 applications, with plans to support over 100 apps in future updates.
This wide range of functions and application adaptation covers 80% of user scenarios, truly enabling smooth use without unfolding the phone, creating a dream small giant screen experience.
Additionally, Honor Magic V Flip includes a variety of themes for the phone’s external screen that are stylish and elegant, incorporating healing and cute pet elements to bring more fun and warmth to simple interactions.
In the personalization settings of the external screen, you can set the theme of the external screen. These carefully designed themes not only enhance the phone’s beauty but also interact with users in interesting ways, bringing more convenience and enjoyment to daily life.
Game Performance
The Honor Magic V Flip delivers impressive performance. Equipped with the first-generation Snapdragon 8+ mobile platform, it easily meets users’ daily use and entertainment needs. Playing games on it poses no issues.
Our version, with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage, underwent gaming performance tests.
We conducted the tests in an office environment at a room temperature of 30 degrees Celsius, selecting two games, “Honor of Kings” and “Game for Peace.” We recorded the game frame rate, power consumption, and body temperature performance during the tests.
1. Honor of Kings
The Honor Magic V Flip enables a high frame rate and ultra-high resolution under extreme image quality settings for “Honor of Kings.” The game runs at 60FPS, and after intense team battles, the average frame rate stabilized at 59.8FPS. The frame rate remained steady at 60FPS, providing a stable gaming experience.
In terms of power consumption, it averages 2.16W, with an energy efficiency ratio of 27.7FPS/W.
Regarding temperature, the highest temperature on the back reached 41.1 degrees Celsius. While some heat accumulation occurs during summer, it does not become too hot when holding the phone horizontally.
2. Peace Elite
In “Peace Elite,” with HDR high-definition picture quality and extreme frame rate settings, the average frame rate remained stable at 59.58FPS, nearly achieving full frame operation. Although the frame rate fluctuates slightly, the variations are minimal, ensuring a smooth gaming experience.
The average power consumption is approximately 3.14W, with an energy efficiency ratio of 18.97FPS/W.
Temperature control is also excellent for a small folding phone, with the highest temperature on the back reaching 42.6 degrees Celsius.
Cameras
The Honor Magic V Flip features a rear dual-camera module. The main camera uses a Sony IMX906 SLR-level photo camera with 50 million pixels, four-in-one equivalent pixels of 2.0um, and a 1/1.56-inch photosensitive unit. It supports optical quality output at 2X focal length and offers both OIS optical image stabilization and EIS electronic image stabilization.
The other lens combines a 12-megapixel ultra-wide-angle and macro capability.
We took some sample photos using the Honor Magic V Flip’s dual-camera module:
Main Camera
In daytime scenes, the main camera captures rich details and full colors, reducing dark components. It presents the most realistic scenes to users, effectively controlling overexposed areas whether in strong backlight conditions or environments with uniform light.
Night View
In night scene mode, the Honor Magic V Flip effectively controls highlights, producing almost noise-free and very clean pictures, which give a comfortable first impression.
Ultra-Wide Angle
The Honor Magic V Flip’s ultra-wide-angle lens excels in group photos and magnificent scenes. It captures ultra-wide images with good anti-distortion ability, making it suitable for daily shooting.
Battery
With the increasing maturity of Honor’s self-developed Qinghai Lake battery technology, Honor seamlessly integrated this technology into its first small folding phone, the Magic V Flip. This vertically folding phone, weighing less than 200g and only 7.15mm thick, houses a large-capacity 4800mAh battery and supports up to 66W super fast charging.
We conducted a series of tests on the charging and battery life of the Honor Magic V Flip.
Charging Test
To conduct the charging test, we long press the fast charging animation in the center of the screen to activate the super fast charging Turbo mode. The phone started charging from 1%, reached 23% in 10 minutes, 47% in 20 minutes, 70% in half an hour, and took 51 minutes to fully charge.
Battery Life Test
We used a professional battery life test tool, Battery Dog by Fast Technology, for the battery life test. The test included a default 20% power test and checked all items like CPU high voltage, CPU multi-threading, AI recognition, image browsing, video playback, and web browsing to simulate real user scenarios and actual power consumption as closely as possible.
To ensure consistent environmental variables for all tested models and accurate results, Battery Dog automatically adjusted the screen brightness to 50%, turned off the automatic brightness, and set the volume to 30%.
After continuous testing by Battery Dog, the Honor Magic V Flip’s battery drained from 100% to 20% in 8 hours, 7 minutes, and 20 seconds. This translates to a full-charge battery life of about 10 hours. The Magic V Flip is the smallest folding phone with the longest battery life we have tested so far, fully meeting our daily intermittent use needs.
Verdict
As Honor’s first vertically folding mobile phone, the Honor Magic V Flip showcases Honor’s innovative thinking. It features the industry’s largest 4.0-inch external screen, deeply integrating more than 40 third-party apps, making the small folding external screen more than just a flashy “little vase.”
In actual use, you can treat this external screen as the main screen, allowing you to watch Douyin, chat on WeChat, and shop on Taobao, performing all the functions of the internal screen.
Honor has also introduced a cute pet desktop theme on this extra-large secondary screen, enabling users to interact with the screen by poking it, which adds a warm touch to the small foldable phone. It integrates quick payment, multi-functional widgets, and interesting mini-games. By embedding these diverse application scenarios into the small foldable phone, Honor has significantly enhanced the value of the secondary screen.
This is the most adaptable and comprehensive small folding secondary screen we have encountered.
In terms of performance, the Honor Magic V Flip excels with the built-in Snapdragon 8+ mobile platform, ensuring smooth and durable system performance, even for gaming.
Thanks to Honor’s Qinghai Lake battery technology, the Magic V Flip includes a 4800mAh large battery, offering a full-charge life of about 10 hours. In our tests of small folding phones, the typical battery life is around 7 to 8 hours.
The Honor Magic V Flip‘s larger battery capacity significantly improves its battery life, making it the smallest foldable phone with the longest battery life we have tested, comparable to straight-screen flagships.
In summary, Honor’s first small folding device is impressive. With its lightweight and portable design, complete hardware and software configuration, innovative folding screen design, and rich functional interactions, the Honor Magic V Flip is an excellent gift for female friends who value quality and experience.