Honor Magic6 Pro review: good ideas, just not always implemented perfectly

Before testing the Honor Magic6 Pro, I’d hoped for some creative leeway with the camera given it boasts a mechanical aperture. But it just doesn’t give you enough freedom. Similarly, its special battery technology led me to hope for significantly longer battery life. As it turns out, this is prolonged, but to a lesser extent than promised. Instead, what bowls me over is one of the smartphone’s limited AI functions.

Chic design and good display

The Honor Magic6 Pro is a large smartphone that still feels comfortable to hold. My test device in Epi Green has a matt back made of soft faux leather with light hatching. It feels pleasant, although it’s too soon to say how quickly the material will wear out. Meanwhile, for the black version, Honor uses reflective plastic. Regardless of colour and material, the smartphone is waterproof to IP68, meaning it’s survived being submerged 1.5 m in clean fresh water for 30 minutes without any damage during tests.

The front boasts a 6.8-inch OLED display. At 2800 × 1280 pixels, it’s high resolution and bright enough at 1800 nits (5000 nits at peak) to be comfortably viewed even in bright sunlight. Its 120-Hz refresh rate is in line with the current standard.

Honor has developed its own NanoCrystal Shield to protect the display. The cover hardness is reportedly 7 on the Mohs scale, equivalent to quartz. As a result, knives and steel files shouldn’t be able to scratch the material, meaning keys shouldn’t either. It also comes with a protective film, but this can quickly show signs of wear.

Good images despite the squandered mechanical aperture

The Honor Magic6 Pro comes with three high-quality cameras on the back. Its 50-megapixel main camera has a self-adjusting aperture that ranges between f/1.4 and f/2.0. Meanwhile, the front-facing camera boasts a 50-megapixel resolution, and the telephoto camera, a nominal 180 megapixels. Its 2.5× optical zoom sounds disappointingly small given all of those cameras. After all, Samsung offers a 5× optical zoom on the Galaxy S24 Ultra. The Magic6 Pro cameras on the back and the 50-megapixel front camera all use pixel binning. The resolution of the finished photos is reduced in favour of more image information.

The main camera automatically adjusts the aperture in automatic mode. It’s only in Pro mode that I can adjust the aperture manually. However, compared to the Mate 50, it’s got less range. Mind you, Honor’s former parent company Huawei offers f/1.4 to f/4.0. With the Magic6 Pro, it only goes up to f/2.0.

There’s also the aperture mode, which ranges from f/0.95 to f/16, but it works digitally. Nevertheless, it’s still the better option. The difference between f/1.4 and f/2.0 only comes into play for close-up shots, and the focal length of the main camera is too wide-angle for that. Its self-adjusting aperture mainly helps to regulate the shooting parameters but doesn’t make any difference when working with blur.

Colour rendering

The colour reproduction of the Honor Magic6 Pro is good and looks natural, even if a bit pale at times. As you can see, the hues could be more vibrant, especially on the bright wall covered in street art. In other situations, such as a sunny day, the colours don’t appear as washed out. This also shows that strong contrasts aren’t an issue.

Ultra-wide-angle camera

If I take the scene from the last picture with the ultra-wide-angle camera, colour rendering is still good. However, the level of detail decreases somewhat, and the distortions typical for these images appear at the edges. Nonetheless, the level of detail is adequate for viewing on a smartphone or social media posts.

Telephoto camera

When I approach the church tower with my telephoto camera, the optical 2.5× and digital 5× magnification provide a high level of detail. The slightly darker reproductions of the church at 2.5× zoom are due to the automatic settings for this image section.

At 10× zoom, I can spot the first signs of deterioration in the level of detail when I look at the images on my large PC monitor. Having said that, they look good on the smartphone itself. However, this changes with increasing focal length. While I can go as far as 100× zoom, even shooting at 50× magnification makes it clear this is a bit of a gamble. In other words, it doesn’t produce stunning photos with a high level of detail.

Night

When it gets dark, there’s no palpable difference between leaving it up to automatic mode or activating night mode myself when using the main or ultra-wide-angle camera. The shots are identical.

If, on the other hand, I use the telephoto camera, night mode provides a significant increase in detail and image quality as a result. This applies to the 2.5× optical zoom as well as 5× digital zoom, which you can see in the following pictures.

Selfies

When I look at the Magic6 Pro’s selfies on my PC monitor in their original size, I could whinge a bit about the level of detail. But on the smartphone itself, the shots look wonderful. If I leave the beauty filters switched off, you can see every frown line. Colours are rendered in a pleasant, natural way – just with a tendency to be a bit on the bright side. My jacket in particular could be blacker.

Plenty of power

With its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12 GB RAM, the Honor Magic6 Pro is well equipped. Everyday use won’t push this device to its performance limits. You might only notice subtle differences compared to other smartphones when it comes to things like video editing or gaming on the highest settings.

However, the Magic6 Pro didn’t come out on top of the list of Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 smartphones – at least not in Geekbench and PCMark Work 3.0 benchmark tests.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra’s slightly better results can be put down to the fact that Samsung uses its own version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Its high-performance computing core is clocked slightly higher. On Redmagic’s gaming smartphone, the software is meant to be optimised even more in order to achieve maximum performance. But you needn’t worry about the Honor Magic6 Pro lacking computing power.

Own services, but still not a lot of AI

Honor adds its MagicOS 8.0 user interface to Android 14 on the Magic6 Pro. In addition to some visual adjustments, this interface adds a number of Honor services, including the Honor App Market, another app store, a games centre, and the My Honor app, which bundles the manufacturer’s services. For instance, I can use Honor Connect to log in with my Honor ID on different devices and see calls and notifications across them all or use my smartphone camera as a webcam. It’s pretty easy to delete the six pre-installed third-party apps if you want to.

Honor stores the smartphone’s artificial intelligence (AI) under the Assistant menu heading in the settings. Compared with the offerings from Samsung and Google, this overview of services is still small and not particularly impressive. But it’s certainly practical in some cases.

The AI suggestions put apps that might interest me in a folder on the start page. But these don’t get me excited. The following two features are more practical, but not new. Magic text copies text from images. And with Magic Portal, I can drag text, images and screenshots to the right edge of the display and copy them to one of the apps stored there.

Smart Sensing bundles four features that let the smartphone know whether I’m looking at the screen. It either stays on for longer, or the ringtone volume reduces when the smartphone registers my gaze. What’s more, the always-on display is only switched on when I look at it. But what I like best is that the screen orientation is based on my face. Finally, no more portrait format apps that switch to landscape format because I’m lying down comfortably. This is one of the reasons I usually deactivate automatic alignment on other smartphones. While these are all useful, helpful settings, they’re a far cry from the AI functions that others currently offer.

Honor has promised to provide the Magic6 Pro with Android updates until 2028, with security updates lasting a year longer.

Innovative, long-lasting battery

Honor has built a silicon-carbon battery into the Magic6 Pro. The company presented it for the first time at MWC 2023 and built the second generation into a serial device just under a year later. The power density of the battery is said to be 12.8% higher than that of conventional lithium-ion models, boasting a slightly more compact design. It’s meant to last longer compared to currently used Li-ion batteries, especially when at low charge.

At 5,600 mAh, the Magic6 Pro’s battery has a slightly higher capacity than the average top smartphone. The PCMark Work 3.0 battery test gave a runtime of 8.44 hours at full display brightness. While this device is good, it could be even better considering the high retail price. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra achieved 8.58 hours, and the Galaxy S24 Ultra even managed 10.58 hours in the same test – both with 600 mAh less and darker displays. However, this test can’t be used to determine the supposed advantage of this new silicon-carbon battery. It only empties the battery until it’s at 20%. However, it’s only then that the new technology is supposed to be beneficial.

That’s why I charge both the Magic6 Pro and the Xiaomi 14 Ultra to 20%. I then start a long YouTube video with the display brightness set to maximum. The Xiaomi screen goes dark after 3.23 hours, while the Honor lets me watch for 52 minutes longer, maxing out at 4.15 hours. The last per cent is like the last minute of a washing machine cycle, except that it’s much more positive for smartphones. By that I mean the phone gives you a warning 60 seconds before switching off.

Thanks to its new battery, the Honor Magic6 Pro catches up with the 14 minutes from the other battery test against the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, also lasting over half an hour longer overall.

However, given the different battery capacities, it’s not fair to compare them directly. The Magic6 Pro gets a quarter more runtime out of the last 20% – bear in mind the battery is only 12% larger and the display is 800 nits brighter. That sounds great, but in reality it’s actually less than an hour more. It doesn’t give the smartphone two or more days of runtime that many had hoped for. And the Galaxy S24 Ultra is still better with its smaller battery.

When charging, the device consumes as much as 80 W. In theory, this means it can be charged in less than 30 minutes. The phone also supports wireless charging up to 66 W. Both only work with the SuperCharge fast charging technology that Honor and Huawei use. However, as no power supply is included, the charging time is highly dependent on your power unit. When it comes to wireless charging, you have to bear in mind that very few charging pads deliver this much power. The new and most widespread Qi2 standard transmits a maximum of 15 W.