Honor, the Chinese smartphone maker spun off from Huawei Technologies, has unveiled what it touted as the world’s “thinnest and lightest” foldable smartphone, boasting built-in agentic artificial intelligence (AI) as competition heats up among Chinese handset brands.
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The Magic V5 smartphone, with prices starting at 8,999 yuan (US$1,256), measures just 8.8 millimetres thick when folded and weighs 217 grams, the company said during its Wednesday launch event. The device is Honor’s first flagship device since it announced a strategic shift towards becoming an AI hardware company, CEO James Li Jian said.
A key feature of the Magic V5 is Yoyo, an AI agent that Honor said can generate presentation decks from shared articles. It can also coordinate ride-hailing orders across multiple apps, cancelling other orders once a ride is booked, which works by communicating with AI agents in other apps, according to the company. Honor will partner with Alibaba Group Holding on more agentic AI capabilities in areas including productivity, transportation and shopping, Li said. Alibaba owns the Post.
China’s foldable smartphone market has continued to expand despite a lack of significant improvement in consumer demand for such devices, market intelligence firm IDC said in a report in April. Chinese vendors shipped 2.84 million foldable smartphones in the first quarter, up 53.1 per cent year on year, according to the report.
Huawei led the segment in China by a large margin, capturing 76.6 per cent of the domestic foldable smartphone market in the first quarter, according to IDC data. Honor was a distant second with 9.1 per cent of the market. Huawei released its Mate XT, the world’s first “trifold” smartphone with two hinges, in September 2024 for domestic sale before rolling it out globally in February.
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