iPhone 17 Air and Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge could get yet another ultra-thin rival

Three months in, and it’s clear that 2025 is going to be the year of the ultra-thin phone.

Rumors of the iPhone 17 Air have been kicking around since last year with a release expected in September, and Samsung used its January Unpacked event to tease its own take on the format with the Galaxy S25 Edge. The trend has even tempted lesser-known brands, with the Tecno Spark Slim turning heads at last week’s MWC in Barcelona.

Now, according to the well-established leaker Digital Chat Station, it seems we have another manufacturer to add to the list: Honor.

In a post on Weibo, the leaker writes that the company is creating a “slim ultra-thin new machine.” It’s in a “newly created folder,” which as well as highlighting the limitations of machine translation, seems to suggest that this is in the early stages of development.

A bit at the start of the text, which mentions a 6.3-inch small screen flagship, could refer to a different device or be the same one. Here’s the full machine-translated text in all its glory so you can make up your own mind:

“Yaozi 6.3-inch small screen flagship machine polishing, Slim ultra-thin new machine has been newly created folder”

Technically even Honor isn’t mentioned directly, but 9to5Google points out that “Yaozi” seems to date back to the Chinese word for “glory” suggesting we are talking about the same company.

It’s exciting to think about what Honor’s contribution might look like to the ultra-thin race. The company has some experience making impossibly thin devices with its excellent foldable, the Honor Magic V3, which is just 4.35mm thick when unfolded.

It’s a great product too — in fact, it was our Assistant Phones Editor’s favorite handset of 2024.

But a bigger question remains unanswered. Does anybody actually want the style over substance that ultra-thin phones seem to provide?

Where’s the demand for ultra-thin phones?

The race to make ultra-thin phones has seemingly come from nowhere, and it’s not clear yet whether consumer demand will match the industry’s sudden desire to build them en masse.

The assumption seems to be that aesthetics will appeal to consumers in a world of lookalike smartphones, but it’s not yet clear whether consumers will enjoy the sacrifices required to make the design change. The iPhone 17 Air will reportedly only have one rear camera lens, and it seems likely that all ultra-thin phones will suffer in terms of battery life compared to their thicker rivals even with plans to mitigate the worst of it.

Although it’s extremely unscientific, when revealing key specifications of the Galaxy S25 Edge yesterday, the leaker Ice Universe posted a poll asking whether his followers would opt for the ultra-thin over the existing Galaxy S25 Plus assuming a similar price. By 52.5% to 47.5%, they chose the S25 Plus, unwilling to sacrifice battery life and a camera lens for a thinner frame.

Only 4,822 people voted, and an X audience of those who follow a smartphone leaker isn’t exactly a representative sample of the world at large. Nonetheless, it does suggest that just making phones thinner may not be the thing to kickstart slowing global smartphone sales, no matter how much companies might wish it were.