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Introduction
This is the Honor Magic 6 Pro, and it could be the least iPhone like phone out right now for a few reasons. First off, there is nothing iPhone about this design, it looks very unique and on top of that the quad curved screen moving away from the trend to flatten the front and back of phones.
Xiaomi, Google, Samsung with the S24 and S24 Ultra, all flattening things out. Honor holding steady and I really do like a lot about this phone especially with regards to the camera. I’m going to dive into all the reasons I love this phone and the things I don’t like so much in a second.
Design
First let’s talk about the design of this phone. Honor Magic 6 Pro comes in two colours, epic green which I’ve got and all black. Get the green one and you’ve got this vegan leather back as well as polished sides. They’ve got a gold tint to them which looks really premium, and feeling won’t be to everybody’s taste, but the black one is much more accessible. It has a satiny finish around the back, a matte frame around the sides, but they all curve into a quad curved front display.
Now on the front you might think, hang on, a second a pill-shaped front camera? surely that’s fairy Apple. Well actually the Honor Magic 4 Pro and Magic 5 Pro all had a pill-shaped camera. It’s a throwback to the Huawei day the mates of old. All that’s happened here is Honor moved it to the centre of the screen, so I wouldn’t quite call it an apple rip-off. Because Apple actually copied the pill shaped camera from Honor and Huawei if you’re going to go down that route.
What you do have is a stunning 6.8-inch display which is huge and in fact, this whole phone is very big. It’s very heavy at around 229 grams and 8.9 mm thick. It’s definitely one of the chunkiest phones out right now. So, you have to be okay with that before you pick one up.
But there is a very good reason for the size and that is the battery which is one of the largest on any mainstream Flagship. I’ll come on to battery performance in a bit. But you’ve got a bottom and top firing speaker on this thing. At the base you’ve also got a USB Type-C and a Sim slot, mine is a dual SIM slot version and there’s also an e-SIM inside here too, so you can have two Sims, one e-sim or two physical Sims.
It has IR Blaster at the top, so this thing can work as the TV remote control as well and on the right side everything tapers in nicely to make it feel just a little bit thinner and you’ve got volume and power buttons as well. Around the back the camera bump is kind of housed within this squarely type shape and in the green version the one I’ve got you can see a kind of flowy Jade kind of colouring around the camera as well.
I like the look, I don’t love the look, I personally actually prefer the black one though a lot of reviewers that I spoke to prefer the green one, so it really is going to come down to Personal Taste. But I will say whichever option you go for both look and feel very premium and well weighted.
Display
Now onto that display, it’s a quad curved display like I said. So, whether you swipe in from the sides top, bottom it feels very nice and smooth. What’s also nice is the size, it’s 6.8 inches a roughly 20:9 aspect ratio, so it’s big it’s expansive, your content looks great on here. Having that cutout pill shaped camera is going to bit cutting into your content so it does take a little bit of getting used to.
But fundamentally I really like the screen for the most part. The peak HDR brightness of 5,000 nits and that might sound like a good thing, but actually when I’m playing back HDR content in low light that high HDR brightness, it supports Netflix which is great, but I was watching Avatar and I felt like it was just uncomfortable, because the highlights were too bright, even though I had the screen brightness down.
So, I would urge Honor to maybe look at that and dial things down a little bit. 5,000 nits is too bright for pretty much anything in my opinion. What you do get is 1600 nits Peak brightness when you’re outdoors, so I had no issue seeing it even in direct sunlight and there’s plenty of I care stuff on here customizations in the settings to make the display look right for you.
Rear Camera
Moving on to the cameras and you’ve got two 50-megapixel cameras the wide and the ultra-wide and you have a 180-megapixel telephoto camera. Now another reason this phone isn’t very iPhone is because of the camera mix while iPhones have around 25 mm wide angle of view for the main camera, this phone has a 27 mm, so it goes in a little bit tighter.
While the new iPhone 15 Pro Max has a five times Periscope, this phone has a 2.5 times Periscope, so it isn’t actually as far reaching as you’d expect from a flagship. Having said that because that’s 2.5 time the 27 mm which is a little bit less wide it actually works out to roughly a three time zoom on a lot of other phones, so that equates to 68 mm. If all of that went over your head, what I’m trying to say is looking at the specs, the zoom shouldn’t be a big concern unless you really love far reaching stuff.
You also have that 50 megapixel Ultra-wide which has autofocus as well and another highlight of the main camera, its aperture switches from f/1.6 to f/2.0 in automatic mode whether photo or video and you can control that manually in pro mode across both. it’s a shame Honor didn’t gave a 1-inch sensor in here, because that would have really taken it over the edge with that 27 mm wide angle beautiful depth, you’d have been able to get from it.
But you still have a very nice optical quality from the lens on here and what’s also great is the telephoto camera can capture relatively closeup shots at around 30 cm, so it’s also good for macro photography or at least product photography. So, I really do like the camera mix on here making it much more versatile for a shooter like me than the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Generally speaking, I really like Honor processing it’s very balanced, it tends to lean towards overexposure a little bit, so it pulls loads of details out of Shadow elements much more, so than Xiaomi phones for example. But it does tend to clip in the highlights a little bit and also brighten up dark sky a little bit artificially, but I do still like it.
You get a very pleasing and relatively balanced looking result, you won’t always get colour consistency across all the cameras, specifically I found the wide and Ultra-wide does a good job of being matched up, but the telephoto camera could warm things up a little bit in certain scenes, but still detail is very solid.
On main camera you won’t get a huge amount of background blur differentiation when you switch aperture between f/1.6 and f/2.0, but you will definitely be able to handle dark and bright environments when shooting video better as a result of that variable aperture, so I would leave that in automatic mode or manual shooting mainly in video.
What I can also say is you may Grumble about the lack of zoom compared to the 5x zoom on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and iPhone 15 Pro Max, but I really do like the 68-70 mm type focal length, it’s what we saw on the OnePlus Open which I really liked as well and it’s the kind of focal length I tend to shoot at, versatile enough for portrait and product shots alike. Indeed, the Honor magic 6 Pro zoom camera captures a really nice quality to its telephoto shots at up to around 7 to 8 time zoom. In fact, you can comfortably reach to a 10 time zoom and you won’t realize you’re shooting on a 2.5 time zoom camera.
This is partly down to Honor’s smart photo processing that really helps out in extra detail and uses computational photography. I’m not sure how much actual AI it plays, but it definitely feels like it redraws some elements, this is especially true when you go beyond 10 times into the 50 time zoom Etc. It smooths things out and makes everything look a little bit like an oil painting, not super accurate, but very low on noise and to an untrained eye, you just think it’s a good photo.
But it’s only when you look closely, you realize that it’s actually simplified the aesthetic of the photo quite a lot, drilled things down to their base components and almost redrawn them, very reminiscent of the Vivo X100 Pro at really far zooms.
But if you’re going to stay beneath that 10 time zoom, you’ll really enjoy the Honor Magic 6 Pro. It’s even good in low light, because you’ve got that 180 megapixel resolution, because you’ve got that big sensor, it’s roughly a 1 over 1.4 in sensor or there abouts, it’s the largest sensor on a periscope camera. So, it’s able to capture decent low light results with one caveat moving subjects, just forget about it.
In fact, low light shots in general with moving subjects it does struggle with more so than 1 inch sensor phones that maybe can speed up that shutter speed, but if you’re capturing static objects and subjects, it’s a beautiful camera day, night and in good light, the motion sensing time stopping capture can freeze a subject nicely. So, all in all the Honor Magic 6 Pro Camera is very good for Stills and that extends to the front camera as well.
Selfie Camera
The front camera got autofocus. I did find when I was in a rush to take a picture it did struggle a little bit, I got some artificing it couldn’t quite catch up with me, so this is definitely a phone for people who don’t mind holding a shot a little bit. But if you’re okay with that you’re going to get good results.
That autofocus also means you can create nice background depth separation when you go close up to the front camera. Also, so impressive about the front camera which isn’t really about photo quality it’s the biometric security it ads. I could log into banking apps with this thing so in addition to the fingerprint scanner it’s a really powerful front camera with a 3D ToF sensor.
As far as video goes the phone can shoot 4K up to 60 frames per second, no 8K video on here. I don’t mind personally. I found stabilization to be solid all the way to max resolution and frame rates. So, the Honor Magic 6 Pro as a camera phone gets a big thumb up from me. Honor’s processing is generally good, not my absolute favourite. I do prefer Oppo and OnePlus a little bit more, because it balances highlights and shadows a bit better, but I definitely prefer this to what Xiaomi is doing what Samsung and even what Apple’s doing in a lot of aspects.
Magic OS 8 (UI)
Diving inside the phone and Honors customized the Magic OS experience finally differentiating from what we saw on Old Huawei phones. My favourite thing about this is the fact you can change an icon, a shortcut on your home screen into something of a widget to add additional shortcut Elements by simply dragging an expanding it. This is so useful.
I review a lot of phones and usually my home screens all have exactly the same look and feel. But with Honor Magic 6 Pro, I made something really nice and bespoke because I could. Honor actually lifted a dynamic Island style interaction from the iPhone and it’s the only element about this phone that makes me think of an iPhone. It is quite useful to be honest, because you get shortcuts to Media playback and also things like a timer Etc in around the front camera cutout. But no denying it’s a dynamic Island, but it’s a dynamic Island that seems to work well.
Performance
Inside the Magic 6 Pro you’ve got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 matched with 12 GB of RAM and I had no issues with performance. I ran early software, so in early versions of the software I had a few UI glitches, but after a couple of updates they ironed themselves out and everything was smooth.
Multitasking was great, I was able to download Genshin Impact with the app in the background most of the time. I didn’t find it force close and playing back Genshin Impact, it played very well.
With benchmarking, I found throttling kicked in after about 5 to 10 minutes of high intensity gaming, maybe a little bit less. But once it hit, it was able to keep performance solid, frame rates were solid, and also it didn’t get too hot. So, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 generally impressing across the board on this thing.
Battery
What impressed me the most, I have to say is that 5,600 mAh battery. It is one of the few phones out now along with OnePlus 12 that’s able to go into a second day pretty comfortably even if you’re using the phone moderately. So, the Magic 6 Pro and OnePlus 12 are definitely the options if you need long-lasting battery lives.
This phone also charges quickly with 66W Wireless and 80W wired charging, though it doesn’t come with a charger and it doesn’t come with a case either. So, you’ll need to pick those two up separately. It’ll be an Honor specific charger if you want to hit those max speeds not a standard like power delivery. So, I’d urge Honor to maybe move towards that standardized option if it isn’t including a charger in the box.
Verdict
So, all things considered I do really like the magic 6 Pro and one of the things I like most about it is just how different it is than any other phone on the market. The camera is a really unique offering and it’s reliably good, great in certain aspects, not so hot in others.
I’d get the black one if it was me, like I said get a case on it. This phone’s IP68 water and dust resistant as well, so it should be durable and with 512 GB of storage you’re going to have years of use on this thing before you fill it up.
Hopefully you enjoyed this review if you did and you want to know more about the Honor Magic 6 Pro let me know in the comments section below.
[…] while the Honor Magic 6 Pro has Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 stuffed inside, the most premium Qualcomm chipset right now, the […]