Honor Magic 6 Pro: Beastly Performance With A Creator’s Eye

With the Magic 5 Pro being one of our favorite phones from 2023, Honor had a tall act to follow with its successor, especially since Samsung's Galaxy S24 Ultra pulls no punches. AI is once again a major buzzword when it comes to smartphones with the exception that it can be a useful addition to smartphones instead of just being a hazy promise of things to come.

Honor launched the Magic 6 Pro during MWC 2024 earlier in the year, with a tweaked design and, of course, the latest flagship processor from Qualcomm. There's more battery capacity than ever before, and as you would expect from Honor, the camera department promises to amaze. So how did the Magic 6 Pro hold up during our time with it? Join us after the break to find out.

Design

While also available in a green vegan leather finish, the Magic 6 Pro review unit came in the frosted satin black colorway which despite being of glass construction accepts very little in the way of fingerprint smudges. It's a neat finish which at first glance appears a little bland but it's certainly grown on me.

The one physical feature that stands out for all to see is the rather large, round camera housing. In a case it's camouflaged nicely, but without? Well, it's unabashedly proud. the power and volume controls are located on the right-hand edge, and towards the bottom of the rear panel is the Honor branding which is neatly understated.

Overall, it's a finish that is worthy of a flagship phone, but we would have liked to see a couple more options in terms of colorways. It's also a finish that is on the slippery side and you'll likely need a case to stop the phone sliding off flat surfaces without your permission.

Read: The Best Cases For Honor’s Magic 6 Pro In 2024

Hardware

Performance

With a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor under the hood, you would expect the Magic 6 Pro to fly through any task you set it. Rest assured, it does so with ease. The 12GB of LPPDDR5X RAM, coupled with the speedy UFS 4.0 storage, makes for a powerful accompaniment to the processor. The few issues I've experienced with performance occurred shortly after receipt of the review unit when it ran pre-release software.

The AMOLED display offers excellent viewing, is bright (enough for outdoor usage without issue), and has vibrant colors. There's the usual PWM Dimming feature which, depending on the degree of sensitivity you experience, may or may not solve the issue. It's one of those things you'll only know when you lay eyes on the Magic 6 Pro in the flesh, unfortunately.

The 3D face unlock works like a treat, even in low-light conditions. It's that good you don't notice it in action. The optical fingerprint sensor, on the other hand, sometimes needs a second attempt before it unlocks.

Audio is pretty good for a smartphone, although you won't be replacing your Bluetooth speaker with it any time soon. It's loud and clear enough for most normal scenarios though. A function that is slowly becoming rarer is the built-in IR blaster, which gives you a handy remote when in a pub with TVs bellowing full blast.

As we always do, we ran the Magic 6 Pro through the 3D Mark, GeekBench 6, and GFXBench benchmarking apps, with the results below:

Battery

Thanks to its 5,600mAh battery that makes use of second-generation silicon carbon technology, the Magic 6 Pro will last you the day with a big left in the tank. If you need two days of usage, it can do that too with a little care on your part.

If you have one of Honor's 80W wall chargers, the battery will speedily reach capacity within 40 minutes, with the 66W wireless charging achieving it in just under 80 minutes. The only bad thing is that Honor has followed Apple, Google, and Samsung by not offering a compatible charger in the box. I should clarify, that there is no charger in the box.

That's a problem in my eyes when forking out over $1,300/£1,000 for a flagship smartphone with proprietary charging standards. So factor in buying an Honor-branded charger if you want to experience those ultra-quick charging speeds.

Read: The Best Android Chargers 2024

Software

The Magic 6 Pro runs Magic OS 8.0 out of the box which is based on Android 14, and with it being 2024 there are plenty of AI features and functions built-in, with one yet-to-be-released ability giving the user to start, and move a car forwards and in reverse. While gimmicky, it's yet another sign of how much the black slab in your hand is capable of in 2024.

More useful AI features include Magic Text which lets you extract text from an image and drop it into another app. It also works for phone numbers and is great for sharing details. It's a similar story with Magic Portal, giving the ability to long-press and share content with another app which appears in a vertical strip on the right edge of the display. If you can remember to use them, Magic Text and Magic Portal will make your user experience much slicker.

As for privacy and AI, the above features are processed entirely on-device with no cloud involvement.

When it comes to customizing your home screen experience, there are options to personalize just about everything you might want to without needing to download third-party apps.

As for software support, it's acceptable but not outstanding and certainly no match for Samsung or Google's commitment to seven years of OS updates. Honor is offering four years of OS updates instead. There are a few apps pre-installed, with some redundancy, such as Calendar, Contacts, and Gallery. You'll need to head to the Play Store if you prefer the Google alternatives.

Read: The Best Car Phone Mounts in 2024

Camera

Honor has equipped the Magic 6 Pro with a 50MP main sensor with OIS, a 50MP ultrawide lens, as well as the 180MP telephoto lens with OIS, 2.5x optical zoom, and 100x digital zoom. In practice, using the 100x zoom is like trying to take a still shot whilst holding on to a powerline, with possibly even less probability of your chosen object being displayed.

Keep below 10x, though, and you'll be rewarded with excellent-quality images, as you can see in the sample gallery below. Low-light, ideal light, the Magic 6 Pro doesn't care, it will produce great imagery regardless although sometimes the ultra-wide can create something of a warped result. It's a shame that Honor didn't see fit to include OIS with the ultra-wide lens, and perhaps more importantly, color-match the lenses.

Handily, you can capture 4K@60fps video with any of the main lenses, with options such as Movie mode that gives content more of a movie production feel to it. RAW imagery is available via the Pro mode if you want the option to tweak the results further.

Conclusion

If excellent battery life, great cameras, a stunning display, and AI features that don't ruin the consumer experience are on your checklist, then the Magic 6 Pro should certainly be in your consideration. The Magic 6 Pro looks good in the hand, has proper fast charging in both wired and wireless scenarios, and can be bought for a couple of hundred pounds less than Samsung's base Galaxy S24 Ultra while offering double the storage.

It's pretty similar in price to the OnePlus 12 but perhaps offers that bit more in terms of cameras along with the inclusion of some AI features. There's a lot to like about the Magic 6 Pro, especially on the hardware side of things. We'd like Honor to at least bump up the software support to five years, and perhaps to polish Magic OS a little more than it currently is. A charger in the box would also be helpful to the consumer considering it's a proprietary charging technology.

If you are using the Magic 4 Pro, I'd say that the 6 Pro is certainly worth upgrading to, but if you have the 2023 model I'd say it's worth waiting for the Magic 7 Pro next year.

It's a shame that the Magic 6 Pro isn't officially available in the US, it's yet another flagship phone that can only be purchased via third-party sellers. Outside of the US. you can pick up the Magic 6 Pro for $1,100/£1.100 from Amazon and directly via the Honor web store below where it's sometimes on offer for as low as £850.