The Honor Magic V2 is the thinnest foldable smartphone ever

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  The Honor Magic V2. [credit: Honor ]

Honor, the company spun out of some leftover bits of Huawei, is launching what must be the world's thinnest smartphone with a flexible display. The Honor Magic V2 measures an incredible 9.9 mm thick when folded (4.7 mm when open) and weighs 231 g, less than an iPhone 14 Pro Max. The sales pitch for this is a foldable "as slim and lightweight as a typical flagship smartphone," and Honor is pretty close to that.

We were never fans of the slab smartphone thinness wars when devices around 2014 were hitting sub-5 mm thicknesses—that thinness comes at a cost, mainly battery life, and normal-sized devices fit in a pocket just fine. Foldables are not normal-sized, though, and the weight and thickness of these devices is a major downside. You feel every gram of the Pixel Fold's 283 g weight, and the Galaxy Fold 4's 15.8-mm-thick body is a pocket-buster. The thinness wars are back, and they're actually valid this time.

The 4.7 mm thickness might make you immediately question how much battery Honor shaved off to make this thinness happen, but it doesn't look too bad at 5000 mAh. The thing is, at 156.7×145.4×4.7 mm, the Magic V2 has a bigger body area than the Pixel Fold (158.7×139.7×5.8 mm) and Galaxy Z Fold 4 (155.1×130.1×6.3 mm). That also leads to the giant inner screen, a whopping 7.92-inch, 2344×2156, 120 Hz OLED, while the Google and Samsung phones open up to 7.6-inch screens. The extra width also lets the 6.43-inch, 2376×1060, 120 Hz external screen hit a normal aspect ratio: 20:9.