HONOR Magic6 Pro Review – Flagship Overhauled With a Touch

I guess it has been over 2 weeks since we have received the Magic6 Pro, so now we have the review and our verdict of this phone. For unboxing and first impression, CLICK HERE to find out more, while for the four main features of the Magic6 Pro, CLICK HERE to know more.

With that out of the way, lets dive in to this phone.

Who is this for ?

It’s simple, this is for those who wanted the best you can get from the performance side, photography and most importantly a flagship phone that last long with adequate software support and updates, along with a long battery life that retains good amount of usage. The price is not a critical concern rather it is the quality you are paying for a phone.

Design

At a glance, the HONOR Magic6 Pro similar to the Magic5 Pro in terms of the camera placement and largely the form factor. So talking about the camera placement, the design is slightly altered with a brand new metal looking outing that is sloped gently towards the back cover, which is now fully covered by either glass or eco-leather back depending on what colorway is chosen.

The HONOR Magic6 Pro comes in two colors (at least to what we know for the Malaysian market), Black with glass back and epi green with leather back. While we have not really ‘touch’ the black one, the Epi Green has a very well built leather back with textures that is easy to clean, while the advantage is it does not bring any fingerprint smudges when touching on it, or otherwise if it has dirt on it, just wipe it simply with just a cloth.

Over towards the front, the dual curved screen is well protected with HONOR’s own second generation NanoCrystal Shield, along with SGS certified five star glass drop resistance which HONOR claims that it is able to resist drops over 10 times compared to the previous version. Among that, the HONOR Magic6 Pro is IP68 water and dust resistant. As usual the phone button placement, sim card tray position and speakers remain similar to the HONOR Magic5 Pro.

Display & Audio

It is no surprise that the HONOR Magic6 Pro retains some of the similar display specifications with some minor upgrades to it. One of the major ones are the increase of the screen brightness up to 5000nits in automatic mode while mostly it can still peak up to 1600nits in most situation which is highly visible during day time. Apart from that, it still has an LTPO Dynamic 120Hz OLED display measured at 6.8 inch carrying 453ppi. The screen to body ratio remains almost at 92%. Our experience with the device is the quality, color and contrast still holds up beautifully with the display images that project vibrantly. It also supports Dolby Vision along with 4320Hz PWM Dimming, Dynamic Dimming, Customizable Circadian Night Display, and Nature Tone feature.

Towards the audio, the HONOR Magic6 Pro has dual stereo speakers, and this around, DTS:X is being used with several pre-sets available, giving some of the flexibility towards the audio enjoying whether it is on the phone stereo speakers, earbuds or USB C earphones. With the speakers use, I find it much richer in sound when playing music or games compared to the last generation, with some minor therelack of for treble, but still produces clear vocal. Calls and communications are clear too with the added AI privacy call options when setting the call volume at level 9 or below.

Camera

Next up is the camera, a 50MP main lens, 50MP Ultrawide, and finally a 180MP periscope telephoto lens. The usual thing like PDAF and OIS is there to serve as the crucial support in order to stabilize the optics and picture taking. This is followed also by a 50MP front facing selfie camera.

Day Time Shots

Night Time Shots

Zoomed shots

I will begin with the daytime shots in good lighting conditions, the HONOR Magic6 Pro performs excellently in bright areas, both outdoors and indoors with lots of sunlight. The camera, in addition to the software, can intelligently recognize objects and surroundings thanks to AI improvements, while maintaining a faithful representation of the environment and details. You have the ability to zoom in up to 100 times (via digital zoom), allowing you to take pictures of the moon or other distant objects that turn out fairly well, with some enhancements noticeable when compared to the Magic5 Pro. Other options like Portrait, wide angle, and Super macro are also available for capturing photos in various modes. During night time, the tri camera combination produces sufficient quality images that can pick up on light and shadow details, but you must ensure proper focus when capturing specific objects. The Falcon motion sensor is also present here to capture rapidly moving subjects with a simple click to take a photo. No complaints about selfie shots because they can easily recognize subjects and backgrounds.

We will provide a sample of a rear video camera from the HONOR Magic6 Pro capable of recording up to 4K and 60FPS. Although 8K video is not available, most users find 4K to be the ideal choice for capturing high frame rate videos with details and quality.

Performance & Experience

The HONOR Magic5 Pro packed some serious internals also. For a start, it came with the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Octa-Core SOC with 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of internal storage. If you wish to add more storage there is no options for it, leaving certain alternative such as cloud backup such as Google Drive will be a good choice if you ever out of storage internally, but I find it ok so far since most Android users uses cloud drives to save and backup. Since we touch on the RAM also, you have HONOR RAM Turbo too, which is a dynamic virtual memory taken from internal storage up to 7GB, that will make your application switches faster over 20 applications/games at the same time with close to no lag times to it. All your usual internals such as 5G, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.x, NFC. The HONOR C1+ RF chip is here to make signal smarter, stronger with smart redirection and sensing of signal, ensuring quality of calls and data transfers optimal while keeping your battery usage optimal with other hardware.

In terms of operating system and user interface, it comes with Android 14 featuring the new MagicOS 8, which includes all the improvements and performance updates from the previous version. From a usability standpoint, the stock Android UI remains familiar with added essential tools and apps from MagicOS like RAM Turbo, Game mode, AI assistant (for text extraction from images), themes, storage management, AI Privacy call (for reduced sound leakage), Smart sensing (for quick face recognition), HONOR Magic Desktop and more. The HONOR Discrete Security Chip S1 includes dual-TEE for comprehensive privacy protection.

With the large 5600MaH battery capacity, usage will last about 14 hours of usage that translate to a whole day of use, maybe another charge in the late evening will get you going again. Charging from empty to 100% with the included HONOR 80W Supercharge takes about less than 45 minutes, which is good enough over my daily usage and it is within expectation.

The last part is the benchmarks for reference, still holds as one of the top tier in scoring and this is also effectively reflected on the real usage daily.

Technical Specifications

Verdict & Conclusion

The HONOR Magic6 Pro continues the magical smartphone journey with a considerable amount of improvement and a set of camera that still produces top tier images with one of the flagship internal specification there is along with a longer rated battery capacity that makes the experience more enjoyable and productive. While the RM4499 price tag is a bit on the steep side, you are getting one of the refined phones out there with all the bells and whistles you can imagine, an adequately long enough firmware support, now in your hands.