Folding phone is expensive to produce. That plus the fact that not everyone wants one, are reasons why most brands have just one folding phone model a year and it usually is, if not always, a flagship. Not Honor, though. It has two folding phones this year. The second folding phone was revealed recently at the IFA 2023 with a very interesting pitch.
Called Honor V Purse [CH], this folding device blends tech and fashion and wants to masquerade as a, well, purse. It has to be the most bizarre marketing pitch for a phone ever. Oddball pitch aside, this is the folding device to watch out for because it is by far the thinnest folding phone yet. It measures just 4.3 mm (0.17 inches) thin when open and 8.6 mm (0.34 inches) when closed – beating its own Magic V2 which was the thinnest yet when it was revealed a couple of months ago.
If that’s not enough to blow your mind, this new folding screen device is lighter than the new iPhone 15 Pro Max, tipping the scales at 214g (0.47 lbs). The device further boasts the brand’s butterfly wing hinge, featuring a supple damping technology that allows for a silky smooth opening and closing, supports multiple angles of viewing, and opens completely with minimal to almost no crease.
Well, about the latter, the new Honor V Purse actually adopted what Huawei used on its earlier fold devices, namely, the Mate X, Xs, and Xs 2. This means it has no secondary screen because it has an outward-folding design. It has a 7.71” flexible OLED display that folds to a 6.45”. When opened, the resolution is 2,348 by 2,016 pixels and when closed, it’s 2,348 x 1,088 pixels.
The obvious boon of an outward folding phone is minimal to no crease. The con is both sides of the device when folded are screens which can be quite precarious to handle. Another interesting fact about this device is that it is by no means a flagship. At least not the chip that powers it which is a Snapdragon 778G, which is a mid-range silicon. The device is offered with 16 GB RAM and a choice of 256 or 512 GB storage.
Other notables include a dual camera setup (a 50 MP main camera + a 12 MP super wide-angle camera) with LED flash, of course, an 8 MP selfie camera, a 4,500 mAh battery with 35W fast charging, 2G/3G/4G/5G radios, dual SIM, dual-band frequency Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 (support BLW, SBC, AAC, LDAC, aptX, aptX HD), positioning (GPS/AGPS/GLONASS/Galileo/Beidou), NFC, side-mounted fingerprint sensor, USB Type C interface (USB 2.0), and the usual suspects of sensors.
The new Honor V Purse Folding Smartphone is now on sale in China with a starting price of 5,999 yuan [CH] (around US$822 today).
Images: Honor [CH].
