OPINION: Five years have passed since the release of the first foldables on the market in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the original (well, not quite the original) Motorola Razr – but there’s still a big problem with foldables. Yep, you guessed it, durability.
I’ve used almost every foldable phone that’s appeared over the past couple of years, and I often get to show them to friends and family. They know what I do for a living, and they know I’ve always got a different phone, so it’s a good opportunity to see how the non-techy public perceives the latest smartphone tech.
And, whenever I whip out a foldable, whether it’s a clamshell-style like the Razr 50 Ultra or a book-style like the OnePlus Open, I always get met with the same comment: “It looks amazing, I’d love to have one but I’d definitely break it”.
And, well, let’s be honest here, they have a point. As far as foldable tech has come in the 2020s, they’re still not quite as durable as their candybar brethren.
Take water and dust resistance for example; while foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6 offer IP48 dust and water resistance, the former only protects from debris larger than 1mm, so dust, sand and the like are very much still a problem, compared to the IP68 you’ll find on most top-end candybar phones.
This means that you’ll be particularly weary when using a foldable at the beach, or near a pool.
And then there’s the hinge; a crucial part of the foldable design that’s particularly susceptible to damage with a lot of tiny moving parts ready to be knocked out of place. If that hinge gets damaged during a drop, that could well be the end of your foldable journey.
Finally, you’ve got the inner foldable screen to consider. Unlike candybar phones with real glass protection, foldables use plastic screens to facilitate the folding of the device. It makes sense from a usability perspective, but as you might imagine, flexible plastic is much weaker than glass when it comes to withstanding impacts.
These are all issues that are prevalent in some form or another in most foldables. Sure, manufacturers have made great strides in toughening up foldables, and I have yet to damage any that I’ve used, but they still don’t come close to matching regular phones – well, until now.
Enter the Honor Magic V3, Honor’s latest foldable that’s expected to make its international debut at IFA 2024 in September after its Chinese launch earlier this summer.
This book-style foldable looks to push foldable tech to the absolute limit, and it sounds like it’ll be the thinnest, lightest foldable of its kind around. Honor has already confirmed that it measures in at just 9.2mm thick when folded and weighs just 226g – that’s thinner than some regular smartphones and definitely in the same weight territory.
That alone would be enough to win some foldable fans over, especially when you consider that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold measure in at 12.1mm thick, and the OnePlus Open, our current favourite book-style foldable, clocks in at 11.7mm.
However, it seems that Honor has done a lot of work specifically on the durability of the foldable, and if early tests ring true, it could be the most durable to date.
That testing comes from (sponsored, admittedly) YouTube Shorts posted by popular YouTubers HydraulicPressChannel and PhoneBuff earlier this week that put the Magic V3 through some pretty intense testing. Like, using a hydraulic press and a washing machine–level of durability testing. I must admit, I scoffed at the idea. There’s no way a foldable phone could survive a stint in a washing machine, right?
Well, you can see for yourself right here:
Now I’ve got to say, there isn’t a lot of information about the setting of the washing machine, leading me to believe it’s on the lightest cycle available, but still, there’s very real footage of a very real Magic V3 being sloshed around a washing machine full of water, getting flipped, dropped and spun, for just shy of 24 minutes. At the end of the test, the phone is taken out and, somehow, it works just fine.
However, there’s a bunch of underlying Honor-exclusive tech that makes this possible.
That starts with the Honor Super Steel Hinge, using proprietary steel with an impressive tensile strength of 2100MPa – something that was showcased in the hydraulic press video, with a part of the hinge able to make a dent in granite while still fully retaining its shape.
That, combined with the industry’s first dual-swing arm design, Honor claims that the hinge is 1250% more resilient to damage than last year’s Magic V2.
The phone is also made from what Honor calls “the super fibre of the 21st century” with a tensile strength of 5800MPa that beats the likes of Kevlar and carbon fibre.
That’s pretty amazing, but the most interesting of the durability-focused tech, in my opinion, is found within the foldable display. Honor calls it the Super Armored Inner Screen, and it makes use of a silicone gel material within the display that works as a non-Newtonian fluid.
I’m sure most of us have played with this material at some point in our lives; it can be made from a combination of corn starch and water, and it has interesting properties that allow it to be gel-like in its normal state, but applying pressure – like hitting the material – causes it to solidify.
That’s essentially what happens with the inner foldable screen; when impacted, it solidifies within milliseconds to provide massively boosted impact resistance.
Combined with other elements like IPX8 water resistance that works down to 2.5m instead of 1.5m, and a new NanoCrystal shield external screen cover that boosts shock absorption capabilities by up to 10x compared to regular smartphone glass, the Magic V3 could solve one of the biggest challenges of foldables to date – and I can’t wait to experience it for myself at IFA in a few weeks’ time.
