As part of its Mobile World Congress presentation, Honor has debuted the global version of the Honor Magic6 Pro, its new flagship for 2024. I’ve had an early look at the latest design, improved camera, and substantial battery.
The design of the Honor Magic6 Pro does feel like a design of two halves. With a display that curves down and away at the edges into a thin chassis line, the first impression of the flagship smartphone is one of repetition. This design language has been seen on the last few Honor handsets and on many of its competitors’ leading handsets in previous years.
The first handsets launched in 2024 suggest moving away from this “curve and cutting” design to something more boxlike and harsh edges to allow for more internal volume, flat screens and a more secure grip on a naked handset. Set against those, the Magic6 Pro feel like last year’s model when it comes out of the box. I wasn’t a massive fan of the narrow edges and thin buttons then, and my opinion hasn’t changed in 2024.
The rear of the Magic6 Pro catches my eye and helps the handset stand out with its own identity. The design team has worked to break out of the usual expectations for a smartphone. That’s resulted in an interesting texture across the rear panel (available in two colors), and a camera island that takes three different shapes to catch your eye. There’s the raised lip to a square squircle, reading into a silver washer and then to the glass-covered surface of the camera island. That the various elements are symmetrical around the vertical is the final subtle touch,
This is where Honor has pulled off the best twist possible… the Magic6 Pro looks genuinely fresh and exciting at the rear. The last few models have tried to do something large and circular with the camera housing, and this time, I think they’ve hit on a language that should be repeated across the 2024 portfolio and iterated into 2025 and beyond.
Honor Magic6 Pro
Regarding the “base” specification, the Magic6 Pro follows the 2024 formula for a flagship. It’s running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, backed up by either THE TWO SKU; it has a 5600 mAh battery with fast charging (80W wired or 66W wireless); an OLED screen with a high 120Hz refresh rate, offering 2800×1280 pixels and up to 5000nits with HDR or 1800 nits in regular use; and sports one of the highest IP rating s on a smartphone with IP68 certification.
All in all, it’s exactly what you would expect, and you’ll undoubtedly see this baseline repeated across multiple phones and manufacturers throughout the year.
Honor Magic6 Pro
The big number here is the 180-megapixel periscope camera lens, which offers 2.5x optical zoom, a seamless zoom up to x5, another comfortable detente at x10, and then digital up to x100. Going in the other direction, the mix of lenses and software lets you zoom out and down to x0.6 magnification. The large megapixel count allows Honor to use pixel-binning technology, with 16 pixels considered before the software decides on a value for one pixel passed down the image processing chain.
The main 50-megapixel lens offers a relatively new function for a smartphone, namely the variable aperture, allowing better close-in shots while also offering benefits in handling lower light levels. Also tucked away is a wider dynamic range and a tweaked HDR sensor. It’s most noticeable in low light shots, where the Magic6 pro can deal with small but bright light sources while other areas of a phone stay in relative gloom.
Out of the box, I’d say that the Honor Magic6 Pro edges out SSamsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra regarding general camera performance. Of course, the S24 Ultra camera software looks still in flux, so we’ll need to wait for that to find its stable point before a full comparison can happen… yet in that time, can Honor build on what it has here?
For the average consumer, you can consider the Magic6 Pro camera to be in the top tier of smartphones.
Honor Magic6 Pro
MagicOS, Honor’s Android flavour, remains the manufacturer’s Achilles’ heel. It has many echoes of EMUI developed by Huawei. Honor has tweaked this since spinning out of Huawei to find its own global success, but it’s rather sprawling and not the cleanest of Android implementations to navigate around. There’s no consistency across every application, and at times, it still feels like an Android UI trying to be a bit like Apple’s iPhone without directly calling it out.
It gets the job done, but it’s not at all graceful.
Like most manufacturers in 2024, Honor is leaning into the artificial intelligence capabilities of the Magic6 Pro. However, some of the more eye-catching features are marked as “coming soon” rather than available out of the box. If you’ll pardon the pun, the eye-tracking facility to help select parts of the user interface will not be available until later in the year.
Not available in the supplied review unit, but expected in March, is Honor’s generative AI features. Labelled MagicLM, this will be an on-device assistant that will work in similar ways to Google Assistant.
There’s nothing wrong with buying a phone where the key features have not yet been released, but there will be a chance that your expectations may not quite meet the reality of the experience. Consider this a caveat emptor.
Honor Magic6 Pro
Honor has delivered on the hardware front. You have a potentially class-leading camera in terms of both imaging and physical design; you have a battery that is second-to-none in terms of capacity and has a welcome level of fast charging; and an OLED screen that lifts everything up.
There is a question mark over software. First up are the AI features that are coming but not yet on the device. The devil is in the details with AI, so it remains to be seen just how accurate a service we will see is. But the ‘regular’ software and apps are here and work well, so the AI features can—for now—be considered a bonus.
What’s not a bonus is the update policy. Four years of software updates and security patches would have been solid twelve months ago, but with Samsung and Google pushing out to seven years, Honor’s flagship smartphone is lacking in this area.
Nevertheless, Honor has put together a strong hardware platform to build on that will hold its own in head-to-head reviews with its rivals’ best handsets.
Disclaimer: Honor supplied a Magic6 Pro for review purposes.
