HONOR Magic6 Pro Review

Globally announced back in February 28 14during MWC 2024, the HONOR Magic6 Pro quickly drew attention after it clinched the #1 rank in smartphone camera in DxOMark.

So, the pressure is on with HONOR to deliver the best innovation and technology it can to help catapult the Magic6 Pro to the top of the charts once more.

Design and Construction

At first sight, the Magic6 Pro looks massive with its large camera module at the back.

True enough, with its 229-gram weight and 8.9mm thickness, the device is in the same weight class as other heavyweights like the Xiaomi 14 Ultra (229g, 9.2mm), Find X7 Ultra (221g, 9.5mm) and ROG 8 Pro (225g, 8.9). Slap a protective case and you’ll have to deal with this phone with both hands.

Our unit is the black colorway with glass back panel and comes with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage. The back panel is also made of glass with a smooth yet non-glossy finish. The other variant (Green) uses faux-leather finish.

The power button and volume rocker is on the right side, with the left side free from any ports or buttons except for the antenna bands. At the top, you have the 2nd speaker grill, noise-canceling mic and the infra-red sensor (IR blaster).

At the bottom, you’ll see the USB Type-C port, main speaker, primary mic and the SIM card slot.

At the back is the huge camera module that houses the triple camera system, LED flash, SMA Radar for AF and OIS, Multi-spectrum color temperature Sensor and Flicker Sensor.

There’s an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance of up to 30 minutes in under 1.5 meters of water. Just don’t forget to skip the pool or the beach as it’s not resistant from chlorinated water or salt water.

This phone is a heavyweight. Literally. You will need both hands to use this most of the time and it will take a lot of room or space in your pocket, especially if you have the case slapped on.

Display, Multimedia and Biometrics

The Magic6 Pro sports a 6.8-inch LTPO OLED display with a resolution of 2800×1280 pixels and 453ppi pixel density. You can actually manually set the resolution to 3 levels — Low (2100×960 pixels), Standard (2450×1120 pixels) or High (2800×1280 pixels) — which is common in most Display settings these day.

What’s unique to the Magic6 Pro is that you can also set it to Smart Resolution which automatically switches the resolution depending on the scenario or app you are using and is a power-saving feature.

Likewise, the screen refresh rate can also be adjusted to Dynamic (1Hz, 60Hz, 120Hz) to balance smoothness and battery life, Standard (1Hz, 60Hz) to save power and High (1Hz, 60Hz, 120Hz) for smooth visuals but uses more power.

The screen has an HBM of 1600 nits (High Brightness Mode) and a peak brightness of 5,000 nits. Suffice it to say, the display is really bright even at lower settings, colors are rich and vivid, and images are clear and crisp. The curved edges help smoothen the grip and make it feel thinner than it actually is. While we liked this approach, others find it annoying due to accidental touches and uneven pictures when watching movies.

Honor used their internally-developed NanoCrystal Shield to protect the display from scratches and drops. We don’t have an idea how comparable it is to Corning Gorilla Glass or Asahi Glass but based on a few tests we’ve done in their laboratory and factory (during our recent Honor HQ visit to Shezhen, China), the glass is pretty tough and scratch-resistant.

As mentioned earlier, the Magic6Pro comes with stereo speakers situated on the top and bottom ends of the device. They’re loud and crisp, great for gaming, watching movies or simply listening to your favorite tunes on Spotify.

The IR blaster is also a great addition and was a life-saver when we misplaced the remote control of the TCL aircon in my office room at the YugaTech HQ.

For biometric, you can choose between the in-screen fingerprint sensor or 3D face recognition, although we prefer the former as it is more accurate and faster to unlock.

Camera

The Magic6 Pro gained a lot of attention after getting the #1 ranking in DXoMark for the main camera and selfie camera. True enough, Honor put a lot of stock in the Falcon Camera System. Honor Philippines toured us to their Shenzhen, China laboratory to witness how they tested the camera system and we now understand why they got great results with DXoMark.

The primary shooter is 50MP Super Dynamic Falcon Camera (H9000) with adjustable aperture ranging from f/1.4 to f/2.0 and optical image stabilization.

The 180MP periscopic camera has 1/1.4” sensor size with f/2.6 aperture and a 2.5x optical zoom with up 100x digital zoom. The 3rd camera is 50MP ultra-wide with f/2.0 aperture and a 122° field-of-view.

On our way back from the Honor HQ in China, we stopped by Hong Kong to get a ride in the famous cable cars and spent an entire day at Hong Kong Disneyland so we could get sample photos and video.

The camera can focus real fast, in either main or zoom settings, including macro shots. Exposure is in the more conservative side in order to keep color accuracy and detail. Portrait shots, as shown in our samples, are pretty good even when taken indoors.

As shown in our sample photos here, the Magic6 Pro takes excellent photos across all 3 cameras. Even night shots look clean and crisp.

Check out the sample video below:

As mentioned earlier, Honor added a number of sensors to help the camera perform better and capture shots accurately.

These include an SMA Radar to assist in auto-docus and optical image stabilization, a multi-spectrum color temperature sensor to accurately identify/measure the color and temperature of the subject, and a flicker sensor that detects the frequency of lights (pulsating lights such as fluorescent and LEDs) so that the camera can automatically adjusts shutter speed and ISO and you don’t get banding effects in your photos.

OS, UI and Apps

The device runs on Android 14, skinned with MagicOS 8.0 on top. The interface is clean and simple with pure gesture controls for navigation. You can choose to keep the apps in a drawer or stick to the standard where all apps are shown in the home screen.

The environment is mostly search-driven — a Search button on the home screen, HONOR Search when you swipe down and Google Discover when you swipe left. Aside from the classic widgets, MagicOS also have Cards.

There are a lot of AI-powered services here but the one that we liked is the AI Suggestions folder that predicts what apps you will most likely use and add them there on the home screen.

You can group apps in folders or place them in the Essential folders so you can quickly launch them with just one tap.

Much like the iPhone’s Dynamic Island, Honor has a similar feature called Magic Capsule. Just like other Honor phones running MagicOS, the Magic Capsule can show info from a few services like Timer, Alarm, Audio Recorder and even incoming calls.

For device ecosystem, Honor has MagicRing which allows trusted interconnection across systems with multiple devices. This allows you to share content between phone, tablet or laptop. This is extended to a few features such as calls, notifications and apps (like video playback).

Honor installed a lot of its native apps on the device — Honor Docs, Honor Health, System Manager, Voice Access, Video Player, Music Player, Email, Tips, an App Market and My Honor for user account management.

There are also a few other 3rd-party apps here — Trip.com, WPS Office, Booking.com, Tiktok and Netflix. There’s one native tool here that caught our curiosity — Ride Mode. It basically disables Bluetooth and headset so that calls are diverted to voice or SMS messages when you receive calls. It also locks everything else, to keep from accidentally opening other apps while in your pocket, except for the Answer button.

Performance and Benchmarks

Powering the Magic6 Pro is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. This is composed of 4 clusters with a total of 8 cores — a single-core Cortex-X4 at 3.3GHz, three Cortex-A720 @ 3.2GHz with two (2) more Cortex-A720 running at a lower 3.0GHz, and a dual-core Cortex-A520 @ 2.3GHz. This is paired with an Adreno 750 GPU with a single configuration of 12GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 512GB UFS 4.0 storage.

Heavy workloads are not a big deal with the Magic6 Pro and running multiple apps and games, with even more in the background, does not choke the system. Running heavy games like Hongkai: Star Rail or Genshin Impact work flawlessly and buttery smooth.

Benchmark scores are equally impressive. Check out all the results we got from the Magic6 Pro:

Antutu Benchmark v10: 1,609,363
Antutu Storage: 3,854 MB/s (Read), 3551 MB/s (Write), 1,654 MBs/s & 1,005 MB/s (Random Read/Write)
PCMark Work 3.0: 17,422
GeekBench 6 CPU: 1,359 (Single core), 5,249 (Multi-core)
GeekBench 6 GPU: 13,922 (OpenCL), 16,222 (Vulkan)

While it only comes with 12GB of RAM (most other flagship in this category comes with 16GB, minimum), that did not significantly affected the performance since MagicOS automatic ally allocated an additional 8GB of RAM Turbo.

Battery and Connectivity

With a large 5,600mAh Si-Ca battery, we expected the Magic6 Pro to last longer than any other flagships we’ve used. So far, the device managed to deliver more juice and lasted well enough for the entire day with mobile data turned on, using social media apps and the camera for most of the day during our trip to Hong Kong Disneyland.

In our PCMark Work 3.0 battery test, the device clocked in 14 hours and 28 minutes. That’s a pretty solid score that bested the ROG Phone 8 Pro (11 hours and 58 minutes) with almost identical capacity (5,500mAh) but not as great as the 15 hours and 53 minutes of the Galaxy S24 Ultra under the same conditions and with 600mAh less battery capacity.

Likewise, in our video loop test, the Magic6 Pro managed to rack up to 30 hours and 20 minutes playing a full HD video at 50% brightness, zero volume and in airplane mode.

For gaming, we also tried playing a few rounds of Ranked Game in Mobile Legends and we estimated roughly 8 hours and 15 minutes of game time on a single full charge (Settings in High Frame Rate and Ultra Graphics).

All these tests showed that the Magic6 Pro offered very long battery life in almost any condition or use case, thanks to the bigger battery capacity and optimizations.

In terms of connectivity, the Magic6 Pro has got it all and more — WiFi 6 and 7 support, Bluetoooth 5.3 with A2DP, LE, and aptX HD, NFC, GPS and an IR blaster.

SIM configuration can either be two (2) nano or one (1) nano and one (1) e-SIM.

The Magic6 Pro also supports reverse wireless charging though it did not indicate the power rating. For wired charging, HONOR claims you can juice this up from zero to 100% in under 40 minutes.

One of the key technologies introduced by HONOR is the use of Silicon-Carbon (Si-Ca) batteries. Compared to typical LiPo (Li-Po) batteries, Si-Ca can store much more energy, which means it can occupy a smaller space for the same high capacity.

Pricing

The HONOR Magic6 Pro will come with a suggested retail price of Php 59,999 for the lone 12GB+512GB variant.

Pre-order HONOR Magic6 Pro from May 9 to 17, 2024 and get a free Harman Kardon Luna (Php 9,499) and HONOR Choice X3 Earbuds (Php 2,200) for a total of Php 11,699 worth of freebies.

You can get these on Shopee, Lazada and Tiktok Shop for details.

Conclusion

The HONOR Magic6 Pro has all the makings of a great flagship smartphone — impressive camera, great performance, long battery life and beautiful display.

It’s hard to find any fault with the Magic6 Pro. You’d have to be really nit-picky if you had something wrong to say about this device. It’s not perfect, but it’s got everything you would hope for in a flagship smartphone.

HONOR did a good job in making the Magic6 Pro a polished and well-rounded flagship smartphone, placing it as one of the top contenders for best flagship smartphone this year.

What we liked about it:
* Long battery life
* Top-notch performance
* Impressive camera system
* Dust and water resistance

What we did not like:
* Bloatwares
* UI can be confusing

HONOR Magic6 Pro specs:
6.8-inch LTPO OLED display @ 2800×1280 pixels, 453ppi
120Hz refresh rate, 1600 nits (HBM), 5000 nits (peak)
NanoCrystal Shield
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC
1x Cortex-X4 3.3GHz + 3x Cortex-A720 3.2GHz + 2x Cortex-A720 3.0GHz + 2x Cortex-A520 2.3GHz
Adreno 750 GPU
12GB LPDDR5X RAM
512GB UFS 4.0 internal storage
Triple-rear cameras:
• 50MP f/1.4-f/2.0 main, Laser AF, PDAF, OIS
• 180MP f/2.6 periscope telephoto OIS
• 50MP f/2.0 ultrawide
4K @ 60fps, gyro-EIS, OIS, HDR, 10-bit video
LED flash
50MP f/2.0 front camera
Dual nano SIM
5G
WiFi-7 support
Bluetooth 5.3
NFC
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo
Fingerprint scanner (in-screen)
USB Type-C 3.2, DisplayPort 1.2
MagicOS 8.0 (based on Android 14)
5,600mAh Si-Ca battery w/ 80W wired charging, 66W wireless charging
162.5 x 75.8 x 8.9mm (dimensions)
229 grams (weight)
Black, Green, Purple, White, Blue (colors)