Review: Honor Magic 6 Pro

The Honor Magic 6 Pro is a strange phone. It folds innovative new AI features, secure 3D face unlock, cutting-edge battery tech, and a powerful camera into an expensively sleek body. But the MagicOS software is buggy, the camera is inconsistent, and it’s one of the most expensive Android phones on the market. (It’s also not officially available in the US.)

While the Honor Magic 6 Pro has delighted and impressed me over the past couple of weeks, it has also frustrated and confused me. It can be oh-so-slick one minute and trip up the next. So is it smoke and mirrors or innovative magic? The answer seems to be a bit of both. If you crave innovation and don’t mind a few quirks, the Honor Magic 6 Pro delivers.

Now With More AI

At the launch, Honor talked up the AI-powered features in the Magic 6 Pro, a lot. We tried Honor’s eye-tracking at MWC, where my colleague glanced at commands in an Alfa Romeo app to start and stop the car and even have it drive forward and back. When this rolls out, it will let you do slightly more mundane things, like expand a notification with a glance when your hands are full.

While eye-tracking is not available yet, there were a couple of AI features I played with for my review. Magic Text lets you quickly extract text from an image. If there’s a phone number in there, you can tap to dial it. You can also drag and drop extracted text into another app. So far, so handy.

With Magic Portal, you can touch and drag content, such as a passage of text, an image, or a screenshot, over to the right and drop it into another app, like Gmail or Notes. The screen you are in folds away, and a vertical row of possible apps appears on the right as you hover. It can be useful for stuff like addresses, which you can drag into Maps for directions. It looks super slick, but I’m not sure how often you’ll remember to use it.

These new features hint at how much more important AI will become on our phones. It’s worth noting that they are processed on-device using Honor’s MagicLM, its very own large language model. Honor is also working on a new AI-powered tool that can use your photos and text prompts to generate video, which sounds intriguing and leads us neatly to the other headline feature of the Magic 6 Pro: the camera.

Classy Camera

Crazy-big, powerful cameras are all the rage in China’s flagship phones (see the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, Oppo Find X7 Ultra, and Nubia Z60 Ultra). The Honor Magic 6 Pro is no exception. It has a 50-megapixel main lens with a variable aperture (f/1.4 to f/2.0), a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto lens that offers 2.5X optical zoom but goes up to 100X digitally, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide. Around the front is a 50-megapixel camera paired with a 3D depth camera in a central pill-shaped cutout at the top of the screen.

The telephoto lens is easily my favorite thing about the camera. While it technically only supports 2.5X optical zoom, it can achieve 5X lossless zoom by cropping shots from the 180-megapixel lens. The 5X zoom shots I took with the Magic 6 Pro are my favorites, capturing bags of detail and realistic colors. The main camera is also solid, with impressive dynamic range, depth of field, and good low-light performance.

Color inconsistencies and some weird processing mar an otherwise excellent camera. The weakest link is the ultrawide, which lacks the optical image stabilization present in the other lenses, sometimes stretches the edges of shots, goes overboard with smoothening, and dials the color vibrancy way up. The color matching across the trio is generally poor, and the processing is sometimes heavy-handed, ironing out the noise but veering into oil painting territory, particularly if you zoom in beyond 5X.

You can record smooth video in 4K at up to 60 frames per second with any of the main camera lenses. The autofocus is swift, and there’s a Movie mode option for a more cinematic feel. There’s also a Pro mode in the camera if you want to shoot RAW or dig deeper into the settings. Selfies taken with the front-facing camera are above average, and it can also capture 4K video, though it tops out at 30 fps. The Honor Magic 6 Pro can snap lovely photos, but I had to delete misfires a little too often.

The Rest

There are two other innovations I want to highlight: the 3D face unlock and the silicon-carbon battery. The face unlock employs a system similar to Apple’s Face ID, mapping the contours of your mug for greater accuracy and security. It worked flawlessly for me, even in the dark, making this the first Android phone to match the iPhone for face unlocking speed, consistency, and security. Google’s Pixel 8 also has secure face unlock but needs light.

The silicon-carbon battery enables Honor to pack more power into a smaller space. The 5,600-mAh battery sees the Magic 6 Pro through the busiest of days. Playing Asphalt 9: Legends for 20 minutes drained just 3 percent of the available battery life. You can squeeze two days out of this phone when you need to. And when it’s time to charge, it’s relatively speedy at up to 80 watts wired and 66 watts wireless, if you have Honor’s chargers. Sadly, there isn’t one in the box (just a USB-C cable).

The design is a mixed bag. Honor has made a feature of the humongous camera module on the back, and I love the feel of the curved matte glass. (I got the satin black model, but there’s also a leather-effect green.) While the 6.8-inch OLED screen looks lovely, it’s a pronounced curve, and I did have some issues with accidental touches. It gets bright enough to be legible outdoors but can also hit 5,000 nits peak brightness for details in HDR. The pill-shaped Magic Capsule at the top is quite a large cutout, and Honor has added some Apple-style animations that make it a feature when you use certain apps.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Performance is generally slick, as you’d expect from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 12 GB of RAM. There’s also a generous 512 GB of storage. It had no issues running games with all the bells and whistles, and stayed cool while doing it. But when I was testing out some mobile game controllers via Bluetooth, I was surprised when Jydge kept crashing on me.

Sadly, there are other quirks and annoyances. The Magic 6 Pro also crashed more than once during setup, and I had to factory-reset it. I could not register my Mastercard because the security warning suggested the phone was rooted (it isn’t). Weird Chinese language pop-ups or YouTube videos I have no interest in occasionally appear on my lock screen (I can’t figure out why). The Magic Capsule sometimes sticks on something.

Quickly running through the rest of the specs, Honor’s MagicOS 8 is based on Android 14 and comes with some bloatware. Honor promises four Android version updates and five years of security patches for the Magic 6 Pro. My international version came with Google Play Services, the Play Store, and Google Assistant.

Photograph: Simon Hill

The Honor Magic 6 Pro also has an IP68 rating, an optical fingerprint sensor that sometimes needs a couple of tries before it unlocks (use the face unlock instead), support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3, and an IR blaster. The stereo speakers get pretty loud. There’s nothing obvious missing here.

Ultimately, the Honor Magic 6 Pro is never less than interesting, with impressive AI, battery life, face unlock, and photography. It’s also inconsistent and downright quirky at times. You can get some of the best Android phones for a lot less than Honor is asking, most notably the Samsung Galaxy S24+ and the OnePlus 12, but so far, there’s nothing quite like the Magic 6 Pro.