(Image credit: Honor)

While Samsung has been teasing the launch of the Z Fold 7 – which it's claiming will be its thinnest folding phone so far – Honor has snuck out rival device and claiming a "world's thinnest" title that'll be hard to beat.

Announced in China – but confirmed to be launching globally later in the year – the Honor Magic V5 is just 8.8mm thin when folded and only 4.1mm thick when open. On top of that, it weighs just 217g, making it thinner and lighter than the Honor Magic V3 that it replaces.

How does that compare to Samsung? It's rumoured that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 will be 8.9mm thick and 215g. Sure, both are in the same ballpark, but Honor is potentially 0.1mm thinner when closed.

Some rumours suggested that Samsung's device might be 3.9mm when unfolded, so perhaps Samsung will have some comeback here – but we won't know for sure until Galaxy Unpacked on 9 July.

That's perhaps not the end of the comparison, because the Honor Magic V5 also packs a 5,820mAh battery into its frame, using silicon-carbon tech, and supports 66W wired charging. Samsung is reported to keep the 4,400mAh battery that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 offered.

Whichever way you look at it, the battle for the best folding phone is back on.

The important Honor Magic V5 specs

Honor hasn't revealed everything about its new folding phone just yet. Currently, there's no price on it, but I expect it will stick to the £1,699.99 ticket of its forebear. And before you baulk and run away, let me explain how it might justify it.

It's a bone fide flagship device, with IP58 and IP59 protection. This means that it will survive exposure to water, but also cope with dust fairly well too. There's a new hinge on the phone boosting the durability credentials, with Honor saying that this handset has 10x the anti-drop protection of the V3, 15x the scratch resistance on the display and 20x the impact resistance.

There's a carbon fibre support layer for the display too, which measures 7.95-inches on the diagonal and offers brightness up to 5,000 nits. The external display is 6.43-inches, again with a 5,000 nit peak brightness.

(Image credit: Honor)

Powering the phone is the Snapdragon 8 Elite, with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage. That's some serious chops for a folding phone.

Then we come to the camera: there's a pair of 50-megapixel cameras on the rear – a f/1.6 main camera and an ultrawide. That's supported by a 64-megapixel periscope camera offering 3x optical zoom. Then there's a 20-megapixel front camera – or rather two of them, one for the external display and one for the internal display.

That's a pretty impressive loadout by any measure, but to have that crammed into a skinny frame, with a battery that's more capacious than most normal phones, Samsung could have something to worry about here.

Honor told me that it has sold over two million devices in the Honor V family so far – and that number could be about to grow.