Honor's new foldable brings a powerful battery to rival Z Fold 7

After sticking with minor upgrades for a few years, Samsung surprised many people last year with the launch of the Galaxy Z Fold 7. It is currently the world’s thinnest and lightest book-style foldable phone. While some Chinese brands claimed their foldables were even thinner, our measurements revealed they were lying. Now, unable to compete purely on thinness, Honor has introduced a Galaxy Z Fold 7 rival that focuses heavily on battery capacity.

Honor has announced the Magic V6, a book-style foldable smartphone featuring a 6.52-inch OLED cover display and a 7.95-inch foldable OLED inner display. The cover screen offers Full HD+ resolution and is claimed to reach a peak brightness of 6,000 nits. The foldable QHD resolution display can reportedly reach up to 5,000 nits and includes an anti-reflective coating.

Both its screens use LTPO 2.0 OLED panels with a 1 to 120Hz variable refresh rate, support for a stylus, and 20MP selfie cameras.

The Magic V6 is powered by a 6,660mAh battery, which is 51% larger than the battery inside the Galaxy Z Fold 7. It supports 80W wired fast charging and 66W wireless fast charging. In comparison, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 supports 25W wired charging and 15W wireless charging. It has IP68 and IP69 certifications for dust and water resistance.

In terms of cameras, the Magic V6 features a 50MP primary camera, using a 1/1.56-inch sensor, with OIS. The Galaxy Z Fold 7, on the other hand, has a 200MP primary camera with a larger 1/1.3-inch sensor.

However, the Magic V6 offers stronger secondary cameras. It includes a 50MP ultrawide camera with an F2.2 aperture and fixed focus, along with a 64MP telephoto camera using a 1/2-inch sensor, 3x optical zoom, and OIS. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has a 12MP ultrawide camera with autofocus and a 10MP telephoto camera with OIS and 3x optical zoom.

Honor is also matching Samsung in long-term software support by promising seven years of OS upgrades and security updates. The Magic V6 ships with Android 16 and MagicOS 10. It also supports wireless file sharing with Apple devices via AirDrop and offers two-way notification syncing across platforms.

It is rumored that the Galaxy Z Fold 7 could bring a 5,000mAh battery, but that will still not be able to compete with batteries in foldable phones from Chinese brands. So, the company needs to focus on optimizations to achieve longer battery life from the relatively smaller battery.