This is impressive – a flagship smartphone with 5000 nits of peak brightness, an incredible camera setup including a variable aperture and a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto with a beefy battery. This sounds like magic; Honor’s latest flagship is the Honor Magic 6 Pro.
First, Honor includes a fair bit inside the box for this region. So you get this practical see-through plastic case and the charging cable, and check this out in this region – we get a hundred-watt on a supercharge right in the box.
When it comes to design, the Honor Magic 6 Pro looks and feels like a refinement from the brand, and you can see in the hand here in this particular colour that I have; it’s this green pastel colour with this faux leather on the back. It also looks incredibly premium and feels premium in the hand. You’ve got excellent build quality with the USB-C, the speakers down at the bottom, and the curvature throughout both on the back and on the front display. I’ll talk more about that display, but on the other hand, it looks and feels very lovely, and I love how they finished this off on the camera bump at the back.
For such a premium-looking device, you might assume that this is quite fragile, but that is different because Honor has added an IP68 water and dust rating to this. They’ve also added something called Nano Crystal Shield on the front. And that helps reduce the impact from shocks, drops, and scratches. And they had an MWC on their booth. An extensive demo of this, the Nano Crystal Shield held up against another flagship device display well.
Now, talking of the display, this is one of the best displays that I’ve handled in 2024 so far. It is punchy and vibrant and sounds at an overall display experience. You’ve got thin bezels throughout. It does curve over, which I would have liked to see a flat display, but despite that, it does an excellent job in day-to-day handling.
One of the other things about this is that it is one of the highest peak brightness displays you can currently get out there, which is great for us here in the Middle East. This display, having everything packed into it, also has a bunch of eye-specific software tweaks that can help prevent some of the eye strain that comes from a display as vibrant as this.
The exciting thing about this display is that it is at the top; see that kind of cut-out capsule? I’m calling it the magic capsule. What is interesting here is inside it contains a TOF or time of flight camera. This gives you another layer of security regarding facial recognition. Another beneficial feature is that it is incorporated into the software with Magic OS, essentially eye tracking. So the ability, if you’ve got your hands busy, to interact with certain notifications that come up there. Again, this was demoed at MWC. It’s going to be rolled out on Magic OS.
I am now coming back to software. So, a prominent feature of the Honor Magic 6 Pro is right out of the box; you get Android 14. It also runs Magic OS 8.0, and there was a big focus on AI in the announcement in Barcelona. One of the prominent features I like about this is the Honor Magic Portal. And the way it works is using AI to make things easier regarding day-to-day tasks.
So, as you can see here on both sides, you have this kind of portal area, which Honour calls Honor Magic Portal. I can select this image and decide what to do with it with one swipe. For example, add it to a note, so send it to WhatsApp or Instagram.
Before discussing the all-important new camera system on the back, let me address performance. Snapdragon 8th Gen 3 processor powers this. So, compared to last year, Honor says it’s about a 35% improvement in CPU and 25% in GPU. You’re going to get nice and smooth experiences throughout. I haven’t noticed any issues with multitasking or video editing. I was using a lot of CapCut here to test the camera and video. It performed very, very well throughout. Also, with gameplay and the coding system here, you can expect excellent quality gameplay and higher refresh rates without impeding the overall performance and battery life. I’ll talk about battery life in a moment.
But yeah, this new Falcon camera system on the back is exciting. The Falcon camera system comprises three excellent cameras on the back. To begin with, you get a 50-megapixel for the main. Now, what’s interesting here is that you have a variable aperture. So it goes from f1.4 to give you that nice bokeh-ish effect to the F 2.0. So, the second camera also has 50 megapixels for ultra-wide use, and the third camera is interesting. It’s a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto, and what that means is you also get 2.5x optical zoom.
