Honor wants to take foldable phones to the next level. At IFA 2023, the company reaffirmed its commitment to making foldable phones mainstream, not only showing off its latest concept foldable device in the Magic V Purse, but also offering more details about the highly-anticipated global model of the super-thin Magic V2.
We reviewed the Magic V2, and found that the phone was indeed incredibly thin — and hailed it for pushing the boundaries of foldable phones.
Of course, perhaps more interesting is the V Purse concept device. The V Purse is really just built to showcase other kinds of foldables that Honor is experimenting with — not as something that would actually be released in the near future. According to Honor, the V Purse is aimed at being a fashion statement, allowing users to customize design elements on the external screen.
But it’s unlikely a concept like this would ever be released in the real world. What’s much more interesting is the fact that Honor is experimenting with external folding screens, and not just internal ones — and that it has seemingly built a device with an external folding screen that’s still incredibly thin. According to Honor, the V Purse is less than 9mm thin when it’s folded up. That’s thinner than many slab phones on the market today.
It remains to be seeing if external folding displays can go mainstream on foldable phones. All of the biggest foldable phones to date have included two displays — one folding internal screen, and one smaller external screen that’s used when the phone is folded.
Because of the thinness, you might assume that the phone sacrifices things like battery life. However in our review of the also super-thin Magic V2, we found that the battery life was still quite good — or at least better than we might have assumed. Of course, in the concept the always-on display is constantly on full color and full brightness, which would, of course, have a much bigger impact on battery life.
We’ll have to wait and see if a concept like this ends up getting release by Honor. Hopefully the company will continue to experiment with foldable form-factors — especially considering the fact that it still has yet to launch a clamshell-style device.
