I’ve been testing Honor Magic 6 Pro for almost two months. It is the fast-rising brand’s flagship smartphone and offers a strong overall package in terms of blazing fast performance, super bright display, silicon-carbon battery tech and cameras. I love the design too.
I tested this not long after an extensive period reviewing Honor Magic V2 – an outstanding foldable smartphone that made me want to stick with folding phones for good. All of which means Magic 6 Pro needed to be top of the range to make it two hits in a row for Honor.
And let’s not forget it needs to be immense in order to take on the best phone in the world right now – Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Here’s how I got on with my testing…
Honor Magic 6 Pro design, build and display
The phone looks and feels ultra-premium and is robustly made. It weighs 224g and is 9.7mm thick.
I love its green vegan leather back and the way the circular camera mount sits into an almost square frame that blends in seamlessly with the phone.
I’ve been using it without a protective cover as it would be a shame and a waste to hide that gorgeous green frame inside anything less visually appealing.
It dazzles in a similar way to the less expensive orange sibling Honor Magic 6 Lite – let’s face it, matte black everything has become boring. (Magic 6 Pro is also available in a muted black option, incidentally.)
(Image: Mark Kavanagh)
The only thing I dislike on the Magic 6 Pro design is the 100x engraving – this is hardly the phone’s best feature so why highlight it so prominently?
Around the front is a stunning gently curved AMOLED 6.8in screen and on the sides is a beautifully polished frame which is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. The resolution is FHD+ (1280×2800) and the pixel density is 453 pixels per inch. It’s pin sharp for all uses – viewing videos, consuming media, browsing the web, gaming and productivity.
It’s got Dolby Vision and Netflix HDR certification too and it is super bright – technically the brightest smartphone on the market with its 5,000 nits of peak brightness for certain scenarios. In typical use, suffice to say Magic 6 Pro has enough brightness to easily read text on the screen on the sunniest of days. Viewing angles are impressive.
The refresh rate is 120Hz, so everything feels superfast. The device dynamically adjusts the refresh rate between 1 and 120 Hz to optimise both performance and battery efficiency.
The high screen flicker rate of 4320Hz means this is one of the best phones for protecting your eyes. The higher the PWM rate the better, incidentally.
Honor’s NanoCrystal Shield is used to protect the glass. The firm said this delivers 10 times the shatter resistance of conventional glass.
Under the display is a fast and reliable fingerprint sensor, while 3D facial recognition is available thanks to a combination of the front camera and the adjacent time of flight (ToF) sensor. This means that Magic 6 Pro offers the same level of Face ID security as iPhone – and it’s the only Android phone I’ve ever tested with this level of security.
Honor Magic 6 Pro performance
(Image: Mark Kavanagh)
Honor Magic 6 Pro utilises the most powerful Android SoC (system on a chip), Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It comes with 12 GB of the fastest LPDDR5x RAM.
The operating system (OS) is Google Android 14, over which the firm runs its own MagicOS 8.0 user interface (UI). It features large folders for easy app organisation, which I love, and you can enable knuckle gestures, one-hand mode and touchless gestures.
My benchmark tests show only iPhone 15 Pro, ROG Phone 8 Pro and S24 Ultra produced higher scores than Magic 6 Pro in single core tests, while in multicore tests only the S24 Ultra, Xiaomi 14 and Rog Phone 8 Pro were ahead.
In the 3Dmark Wild Life Stress and Extreme Stress tests, which really push a phone to its limits over a 20-minute period, Magic 6 Pro delivered similar results to the S24 Ultra.
The Adreno 750 GPU is currently the fastest smartphone GPU and ensures strong gaming performance with support for all modern graphics APIs, including ray tracing. Ardent gamers will still be able to push the technical capabilities of ROG Phone 8 Pro even further but for most users, Magic 6 Pro will be perfectly fine as a gaming device. During gaming sessions, the rear of the phone gets only slightly warm and never becomes uncomfortably hot. In everyday use, the device breezes through any task you throw at it.
There are some quirks in the MagicOS software, however – the lack of an autocorrect is one. You really miss this often-frustrating function when it’s gone.
Honor AI
(Image: Mark Kavanagh)
The pill-shaped camera cut-out on the front behaves like Apple’s Dynamic Island but is called the Magic Capsule. For example, if running a Timer and you close the app, it continues the countdown at the top of your screen leaving you free to use your phone for something else.
A unique feature is Magic Portal which uses AI to guess your intent so you can skip a few steps to perform an action faster. You can drag photos or text from one app to another and the phone will suggest the apps it thinks you will want to use to speed up the process.
An address from an email or browser can be dragged to Google Maps for immediate navigation. Photos can be dragged directly to suitable social media apps or sales platforms. I love this AI feature and use it regularly in everyday life. It saves time and is practical and helpful.
The eye control shown at the initial MWC launch event is not included yet but should be available on an update soon, as should a local LLM (Large Language Model) which is based on Llama 2 and works similarly to Chat GPT.
Honor Magic 6 Pro cameras
(Image: Mark Kavanagh)
All Magic6 Pro’s camera sensors were made by OmniVision and, according to Honor, were developed in an exclusive collaboration.
The independent lab testers at DXOMark do a much more scientific and thorough analysis of the photography capabilities than reviewers like me and they have rated Magic 6 Pro as the best smartphone camera on the market, narrowly ahead of both iPhone 15 Pro and Google 8 Pro.
What really makes this device stand out for me is the main rear camera. It’s a superb shooter that coupled with the computational photography smarts delivers incredibly pleasing and sharp images that are well-exposed, colourful and full of contrast.
The main camera is a 50MP wide angle len with a large 1/1.3in sensor, a variable f/1.4 to f/2.0 aperture and optical image stabilisation (OIS). It uses pixel binning to deliver 12.5MP images but you can use Pro mode to produce 50MP images if you wish.
The variable aperture can automatically switch between f/1.4 and f/2.0 to adapt to the lighting conditions optimally. This means Magic 6 Pro is more adept at handling dark and bright environments, especially in video. You can also manually adjust the aperture in Pro mode.
It’s great at capturing people in motion in decent lighting conditions too. A sports mode works with particularly fast shutter speeds and captures images before the shutter button is pressed to create an image that is as dynamic and sharp as possible using an algorithm.
(Image: Mark Kavanagh)
When taking portrait-style images, you have additional control over the level of background blur, which I love.
You also get a 180MP telephoto lens (with only 2.5x optical zoom) which has a large 1/1.4in sensor and f/2.4 aperture. It also delivers pleasing well-balanced images consistently. It can produce macro images too. The optical zoom is excellent at 2.5x, while the hybrid zoom is super at 5x and even up to 10x. After that the quality falls off considerably and is not as sharp as Samsung’s S24 Ultra or even last year’s S23 Ultra.
Honor also gives you a 50MP, f/2.0 ultrawide with no OIS that adds versatility but produces images that are a little softer.
On the front is an excellent 50MP dual selfie camera system – one of the most impressive selfie cameras I’ve tested (even though it has no autofocus). It uses pixel binning to produce images that are 12.5MP in size.
Both rear and front cameras can capture pleasing video at up to 4K resolution. On the front this is capped at 30 frames per second (fps) but on the rear you can shoot at 60 frames per second (fps) with HDR. The microphones do a decent job too.
Battery experience
(Image: Mark Kavanagh)
The 5,600 mAh battery uses ground-breaking silicon-carbon technology to store more energy in a smaller volume in its cell.
Battery life is superb – the phone lasts all day every day – and you get support for 80w wired charging and 66w wireless.
There is no charging brick in the box – which is the same as flagship devices by Samsung, Apple and Google. All you get in the box is a USB Type-A to Type-C cable (and a SIM tool).
Other Honor Magic 6 Pro features
The phone is IP68 rated for dust and water resistance, and it comes a pre-fitted screen protector. You get an impressive 512GB of fast UFS 4.0 storage as standard. The linear vibration motor provides fantastic haptic feedback. The two speakers deliver relatively decent sound for a smartphone.
Magic6 Pro supports Wi-Fi 7 in dual-band operation at 2.4 and 5.0 GHz but not the faster 6.0 GHz band which has less interference. The USB-C 3.2 port is capable of data transfer speeds up to 10Gbps. Connected storage devices with NTFS, FAT, FAT32 and exFAT file systems are supported too. Both Miracast and Cast+ are supported for wireless image transmission. You get NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 (which is not the most up to date version) and an IR transmitter that can be used to remotely control compatible devices such as televisions.
There’s no ultra-wideband chip which you do get on iPhone 15 Pro, S24+ and S24 Ultra. This enables extremely precise location tracking. The device supports dual messenger apps, VoLTE and Wi-Fi calls and it supports two nanoSIM cards.
Magic 6 Pro will be supplied with security patches for five years and four major OS updates. This brings you up to Android 18.
Honor Magic 6 Pro verdict
(Image: Mark Kavanagh)
Honor Magic 6 Pro ticks plenty of boxes in its bid to woo consumers away from the big two, Apple and Samsung.
It costs €1,319 but you get a top-tier camera system, huge amount of storage, great battery life, superfast charging, clever AI features and a fantastic screen that’s brighter than all the rest. And on top of this, you get that exquisite and unique design. In short, it is one of the best smartphones you can buy.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (priced at €1,469) remains the absolute best handset you can buy, but Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro (priced at €1,274.91) and Honor Magic 6 Pro (priced at €1,319) provide compelling Android alternatives – the former is more suitable for gamers and the latter would be better for photography lovers.
However, both OnePlus 12 (at €999) and last year’s Google Pixel 8 Pro at (€875 currently on Amazon) offer stiff competition thanks to their price point.
Honor Magic 6 Pro pricing and availability
Honor Magic 6 Pro is available in green or black for €1319 at Currys. You can also buy it at Amazon for €1226. And it costs €1,117 on Gomibo.ie (which is a Dutch-based platform).
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