Honor Magic 6 Pro review: brilliant and long-lasting

The flagship phone space is always crowded – that’s nothing new. But it feels like it’s never been a closer race at the top of the tree than in 2024. The Honor Magic 6 Pro is impressive on paper, but it has a huge amount of competition.

That said, the last two Honor flagships have impressed a lot. We said the 2022 Magic 4 Pro was a “shock to the system” in a good way, while last year’s Magic 5 Pro was another five-star effort in our eyes. Gone are obvious drawbacks and corner-cutting, replaced by bleeding-edge specs and impressive performance. That said, there are a lot of similarities to last year’s model and comparing the spec sheet does leave a lot.

Does Honor do enough to make it a triple five stars? That is going to be hard – primarily because of the £1099 starting price point which makes it more expensive at launch than the £999 512GB version of the OnePlus 12 (which has been further reduced at the time of writing) and S24 Plus.

NB At present there is an early bird offer to take the phone down to £849.99, though we don’t know if that offer will continue.

Design and display: too much of a good thing?

External design innovation is where a lot of brands are starting to struggle. Indeed, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a smartphone design that truly breaks from the norm. The similarity to handsets from both Honor and other vendors is pretty clear, for the black variant especially. The Epi green, with a special polymer back, is a more distinctive design but it won’t appeal to all.

Still, that doesn’t make things bad – this is still impressive in the flesh, with the large 6.8in LTPO OLED display looking terrific. Peak brightness can hit a huge 5000nits and, as is now fairly normal, it was a 12Hz refresh rate. It’s also Dolby Vision Certified. Honor also made a lot of eye comfort when it presented this phone and it has been working to make the screen dimming tech more pleasant to use.

The Magic 6 Pro is also IP68 rated for water and dust resistance as you’d expect. Interestingly the weight has gone up a few grams since last year – between 225-229g depending on which model you have. It’s also not the thinnest at 8.9mm.

One thing we weren’t able to test was Honor’s claims of much-improved drop resistance. However, Honor has received a full five-star certification for its drop resistance thanks to its improved NanoCrystal Shield glass.

Interestingly the pixel count has gone down from last year’s display ever so slightly 2800 x 1280 pixels, giving a pixel density of 453ppi, but of course, it’s not enough to make a difference at all.

Performance: typical Snapdragon power, plenty of storage

As with plenty of other 2024 phones, the Magic 6 Pro runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset with the associated Adreno 750 graphics. The performance gains this time around are a little more modest than they have been in recent years, but the performance of these handsets still impresses and they cope with gaming workloads without issue. Here the platform is teamed with 12GB of RAM and a standard 512GB of storage.

There’s no 256GB size available, but then there’s no 1TB version either. Since the Porsche Design V2 RSR comes with 1TB of storage, we believe the Porsche Design variant of the Magic 6 Pro (which will be known as the Magic 6 RSR) will come with 1TB of storage when it hits the streets later in the year. Elsewhere, the spec sheet is as you’d expect with Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C 3.1 and Wi-Fi 7 on board; a lot of this is down to the chipset used, after all.

Charging speeds have been improved – you now get 80W wired and 66W wireless charging meaning you can juice the phone in around 40 minutes. The battery is sizeable at 5600mAh and if you eke it out you can get to almost two working days of use.

Cameras: broadly great, slightly quirky

There is a key change from last year’s camera setup and that’s the periscope telephoto which is now a huge 180MP instead of 50MP. Has it made a lot of difference? We’re not that convinced – 100x zoom shots are just OK, but naturally better if you can get it very still. And the optical zoom is 2.5x which on paper certainly doesn’t compare with the 3x on the OnePlus 12, for example.

And it’s down from last year’s 3.5x zoom inside the Honor Magic 5 Pro, too. But in reality, the huge resolution means you can easily zoom in to 5x or even 10x without too much lost. Reportedly, this is actually Samsung’s 200MP sensor.

The main sensor is brighter than it was before and it seems to be the OmniVision OV50H which is also used in the Xiaomi 14. It takes some great shots as you can see from our images here and is rapid at doing it – just like last year’s Magic 5 Pro.

The ultrawide is 50MP – fine – but as always you won’t find yourself using it a huge amount. The wide is more than enough almost all of the time.

The front-sensor has had a major upgrade though, moving to a 50MP unit. The TOF sensor from the rear of last year’s model has now disappeared (no great loss), but there is still one for facial recognition on the front.

Software: a Magic AI tale

Honor’s MagicOS 8.0 (based on Android 14) is present here and, well, it’s fine. A bunch of Google apps are preinstalled alongside Honor’s own so there’s a little bit of jiggling to decide which apps suit you best, but when was that ever different with any Android device. The best thing is that MagicOS isn’t in your face and has been a little stripped back over time. It’s rather pleasant to use and once you get past the initial slew of ‘this is how it works’ pop-ups, very little intrudes on your use unless you want it to.

Face recognition is on board as standard and similar to Apple’s Face ID and other systems, it’s really easy to use; you very rarely get asked for your PIN or a fingerprint (provding you’ve got the latter configured). It just works!

There’s an iOS-inspired interface tweak around the camera cutout in the form of – wait for it – Magic Capsule. It’s invoked if you’re playing music, for example, and you can tap on it for more info. But is a poor version of the Dynamic Island. Still, it’s a positive rather than a negative. We had some issues where it wouldn’t always appear.

One thing that annoys us a little about MagicOS (though Honor aren’t alone) is that you have to go into the settings to enable the app drawer. Otherwise apps just stack up on the homescreens. This was OK a few years ago but now we think it seems a little dated to have as a default.

Obviously we’ve heard a lot of brands brag about AI in recent months, but the Magic 6 Pro has some genuinely very clever smarts. Chief among these is context sensitivity. It shouldn’t be big news but so many operating systems are bad at it. Here if you go to a message with an address it can look it up in Google Maps without you having to copy and paste.

Magic Portal is a slightly oddly named variation on the same theme. You’re able to drag items – such as the address we’re dragging here – onto a sidebar with context-relevant apps.

A lot has been made of the Honor 6 Pro’s eye-tracking capability, but that is a China-only feature for now and although we have seen a demo, we can’t judge it as part of this review. It does appear to work surprisingly well, however, for things like opening apps.

You get four major operating system updates and five years of security patches too. That’s not exceptional by today’s standards, but it’s welcome all the same.

Honor Magic 6 Pro verdict

The Magic 6 Pro is an excellent smartphone. But is it a great smartphone? The hardware is top-notch, but we feel the photography lies a little adrift of the very best. But the overall problem is the price point which is a little too high compared to rivals. It’s a shame, because what is on offer here is a fantastic phone.

If O2 do sell it in the UK (the network said it would be stocking Honor devices on stage at its launch) then it will be interesting to see how is priced on contract. If you can get it cheaply on a reasonable deal then you won’t go wrong – this is an excellent Android flagship phone.

Honor Magic 6 Pro tech specs

Display	6.8in LTPO OLED 120Hz display (2800×1280 pixels, 453ppi)
CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
RAM	12GB
OS	Android 14 + MagicOS 8.0
Storage	512GB
Cameras	50+180+50MP rear, 50MP front
Battery	5600mAh, 80W wired, 66W wireless charging
Connectivity	USB-C (3.2), Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3
Dimensions	163x76x9mm
Weight	225g
Colors	Black, epi green