HONOR recently launched the Magic6 Pro in the Malaysian market. This time around, they only brought over the Pro model and not the standard variant, presenting only the best of what the brand has to offer.
I’ve used a couple of the Magic6 Pro’s predecessors in the past and I can tell you that while there are some notable upgrades in both the hardware and software on paper, its real-life performance only gets nominal improvements, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, it does retain a couple of flaws that have been around since the Magic4 Pro, which I’ll get to in a bit.
Specifications
The Magic6 Pro sports a 6.8-inch LTPO OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a stunning peak brightness of 5,000 nits for HDR content. For protection, it is fitted with its in-house NanoCrystal Shield that gives it significant drop resistance as well as an IP68 dust and water resistance rating.
Underneath the chassis is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It’s powered by a large 5,600mAh battery with support for 80W wired and 66W wireless charging. The phone can also act as a power bank as it can reverse charge other devices through both wired and wireless methods.
On the imaging side, the Magic6 Pro carries a 50MP main sensor with a f/1.4-f/2.0 variable aperture, a 50MP ultra-wide with autofocus, and a 180MP periscope lens with 2.5x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom. Up front is the 50MP selfie shooter alongside a 3D sensor for safer face unlocks.
Looks & Functionality
It borrows a similar design language to its predecessors, featuring a big, centred camera bump on the back with curved edges for the display. While it doesn’t sound interesting, I’d highly recommend the green plastic colourway. It has an interesting texture to it that gives it a subtle flare and it’s even practical because it provides good grip and is 100% resistant to sweaty fingerprints.
As always, the display of the Magic6 Pro is bright and vivid, providing an immersive experience no matter what kind of content you’re watching. It has a ridiculous peak brightness of 5,000 nits for HDR content and up to 1,600 nits for everything else. While the latter figure isn’t as impressive, it still gets the job done and provides great outdoor visibility.
While there’s not much to complain about the performance of the display, just like with the last two Magic phones, I will be pleading with HONOR to please switch to flat displays for their next flagship. Curved edges were a bad, trendy gimmick to begin with and some Android brands have already abandoned it in favour of the more traditional and practical flat screen. They make for great renders but in reality, curved edges always result in accidental touches, especially when typing, making them more of an annoyance than a feature.
Following the footsteps of the past models, the Magic6 Pro is equipped with a singular large camera island on the back with three sensors. I’ve sort of gotten used to the bump by now but it does still make using the phone on a flat surface quite tricky, but it’s not that big of a deal.
One major disappointment for me is that, just like the Magic5 Pro, the new phone uses an optical fingerprint sensor instead of the ultrasonic one found in the Magic4 Pro, which was spectacular and worked a lot better with sweaty fingers. Then there’s the speakers, which can get loud but significantly lean towards the lows and ignore mids and highs, requiring me to turn up the volume to an uncomfortable level to hear speech in most videos.
Of course, the highlight of this new flagship isn’t really the hardware upgrades, but the ones in the software. Shipping with MagicOS 8.0 based on Android 14, the skin used by the Magic6 Pro feels noticeably smoother with all the little things like transitions, swiping, opening up the menu, and the like.
The brand has also hitched a ride on the AI train with the integration of several AI-powered features peppered into the OS. First, there’s the Magic Portal which feels a bit like a lazy iteration of Samsung’s Circle To Search feature. This allows you to drag and drop text and pictures into Google as well as a few select apps to more efficiently search for it or send it to someone. Whether it works or not is a bit iffy and largely depends on which app you’re trying it with. It mostly feels like a gimmick and I found that the good ol’ copying and pasting works a lot faster, so I stopped using it entirely after a couple of days.
One of my favourite “AI” features is on the home screen. There’s a feature called Smart Folder that lets you expand select apps and it will automatically create two shortcut buttons for popular actions for that app. For example, when you expand the Google Maps icon, it gives you “Home” and “Work” shortcuts if you’ve already set those destinations in the app. With WhatsApp, you get a camera toggle button and your most frequent contact. It’s a small thing but it’s actually pretty useful and I hope other brands will implement something similar.
Then there’s Magic Text, which is HONOR’s attempt at Apple’s Live Text feature. It can detect text in photos, not videos, and allow you to copy it or even directly make a call if it recognises a phone number. Last but not least, the Magic6 Pro is equipped with Magic Capsule, which is its version of Apple’s Dynamic Island but with one outstanding improvement: a quick tap will open up the widget of the app currently being displayed in Magic Capsule while a long-press will bring you to the app itself — in case you’re unaware, Apple’s implementation is the exact opposite for these two actions, which has long been considered a major UI design flaw.
Performance & Battery
Of course, when your phone is fitted with the latest and greatest chipset available on the market, you’d expect to see a big performance boost. And you do, at least through benchmarks and the like. Honestly though, you’re not going to notice a huge difference in everyday use if you’re jumping from one flagship to another, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good. Everything is fast, snappy, and fluid — all the synonyms to say that as with any phone using a recent flagship Qualcomm chipset, you’re gonna be able to use the Magic6 Pro without any lag in performance.
The Magic6 Pro performs nearly at the same level as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, at least on Geekbenck 6. Under a continuous heavy load, it actually outperforms some of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 peers on the Wild Life Extreme stress test, with a relatively stable performance and exemplary scores. When the phone heats up, you can barely feel it through the plastic back, but you can definitely feel the burn on its metal rails.
On the battery side, it was somehow both impressive and disappointing at the same time. Putting it through the ringer with a YouTube endurance test with brightness and volume set at 25%, the Magic6 Pro lasted a staggering 19 hours — far outperforming its predecessor — and regularly lasts about a day and a half. However, the iQOO 12, which has the same chip, lasted 25 hours on this same test and always gave me two solid days out of it.
Camera
The camera setup this time around is similar last year’s but with a notable upgrade for the telephoto lens. Its image processing also feels about the same, meaning it comes with familiar advantages and downsides.
In most situations, the Magic6 Pro takes amazingly sharp and vivid photos, but its HDR mode can be overwhelming when there’s too much sunlight, a problem that has been around in the Magic series for a while. This leads to a lot of outdoor photos under bright sunlight looking extremely overblown, but you can minimise this by turning off auto HDR, although that doesn’t solve it entirely. Golden hour photos are just gorgeous, with deep blacks and every shade captured. Even for photos taken in dimly-lit rooms, both the main and zoom cameras can take in a lot of detail.
The telephoto lens has noticeably improved in terms of sharpness. Zooming into 100x is still not the best I’ve seen on a smartphone but around 50x-80x, you can still make out a discernible amount of detail and text. It also makes for fun macro photography, and while it doesn’t exactly have a microscope lens, it still allows you to get incredibly close to small subjects.
Camera Samples
Competition
iQOO 12
The iQOO 12 is currently the best-value Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 smartphone, with a price tag of only RM3,399. It has a 6.78-inch AMOLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 3,000 nits. Inside, the Qualcomm chip is paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
Imaging-wise, it packs a 50MP main camera with OIS, a 50MP ultra-wide with autofocus, and a 64MP telephoto lens with OIS and 3x optical zoom. It’s powered by a 5,000mAh battery, which is a smaller capacity than the HONOR, but somehow manages to beat it in real-world use. However, while it supports 120W wired charging, it unfortunately lacks wireless charging.
Xiaomi 14 Ultra
The Xiaomi 14 Ultra costs a bit more than the Magic6 Pro, retailing at RM5,199. It is fitted with a 6.73-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 3,000 nits. Under the hood, it also uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
For photography, it features a Leica-branded setup with a 1-inch Sony LYT-900 50MP primary sensor, a 50MP floating telephoto lens with 3.2x optical zoom, a 50MP periscope lens with 5x optical zoom, and a 50MP ultra-wide camera. Powering it is a 5,000mAh battery with support for 90W wired and 80W wireless charging.
Conclusion
The Magic6 Pro is a solid and high-performing flagship that brings meaningful upgrades for the end-user. It has certainly upped its game with MagicOS 8.0 with features that are actually useful, despite some of them being a bit gimmicky. The only two major complaints I have with this phone are the same ones that I’ve had with its previous models, which are the unnecessary curved edges on the display and the image processing that goes too far, resulting in some of its outdoor photos being overblown.
At RM4,499, the Magic6 Pro is definitely not a cheap device, but as I said in the beginning, this is the best of what the brand has to offer and is in line with the price range of flagships these days when it comes to the cream of the crop.
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