Honor’s top-notch Magic 6 Pro flagship boasts plenty of useful AI-enhanced smarts
The reveal came during an event at at MWC 2024 in Barcelona. As you might expect, it’s based around Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
Honor has announced its Magic 6 Pro upcoming flagship phone and it’s a great-looking and impressive handset – even if the design isn’t too groundbreaking.
The reveal came during an event at at MWC 2024 in Barcelona. As you might expect, it’s based around Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Available in black and the above epi green, the £1099/€1299 Magic6 Pro is also available to pre-order from 1 March with sales from 8 March. Early orders from Amazon, Very and Currys come with a bundle including the Pad 8, Earbuds X6 and a 100W charger. At the show Telefonica – which owns O2 in the UK – said they would be bringing more products to the network which presumably includes the Honor Magic 6 Pro.
In addition to the Magic 6 Pro, Honor also launched the Pad 9 at the end of last week. It’s a good-looking mainstream Android tablet with a sizeable 12.1-inch 2.5K FullView display with a 120Hz refresh rate. The Honor Pad 9 is available in space grey or cyan lake for £299 or £399 and it coms with a keyboard.
For the Magic 6 Pro, Honor has introduced a personalised feature called the Magic Capsule a little like Dynamic Island which expands at the top of the display to give you more information – you just need to tap the notifications banner to activate it.
AI all around
As you’d expect Honor has infused much about this phone with AI. Magic Portal is Honor’s umbrella term for a lot of its AI capabilities, such as making sharing more intuitive or finding an address in a text message and directing you to Google Maps. It’s also designed to be capable of image-based shopping. In practice, this means fewer steps to do stuff. Because if you copy that address from a message, then the phone deduces what you might want to do with it and gives you options.
Back to the hardware – the bright 6.8in LPTO display is ‘quad curved’ – essentially that means it curves downwards on all sides. There are no super-high peak brightness claims as we have had from some other manufacturers recently. But it does have super-strong NanoCrystal Shield glass with 10x the drop resistance of standard glass. Honor claims that in a drop test it will remain unbroken versus the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Camera smarts
As you’d expect, Honor said quite a bit about the photography capabilities of the Magic 6 Pro’s Falcon Camera system. There’s a 180MP f/2.6 OIS periscope telephoto lens with a modest 2.5x optical zoom and up to 100x digital zoom. As with other digital zooms, this can be effective if you can hold the phone steady enough. Adding to the mix is a 50MP ultrawide (f/2.0, EIS) and a 50MP f/2.0, OIS main camera sensor. AI has also been deployed on the camera system to better sense motion to predict movement and capture even rapid motion effectively. There’s a 50MP front unit, too.
Honor also confirmed (as rumoured) that there will be a Porsche Design version of this phone, The Porsche Design Honor Magic 6 RSR – but all we got was a teaser at this event, so expect that to debut over the next couple of months.
Honor and Qualcomm have also worked to integrate the LLaMA 2 large language model (LLM) inside the HONOR Magic6 Pro, which means you can work with AI for things like text generation and comprehension offline.
The Magic 6 Pro is also capable of eye tracking – it has tested the Magic 6’s eye-tracking to the extreme by controlling a car hands-free. The idea may be a bit overblown, but the idea is to show that human control and AI can enhance how we interact with tech.
A new MagicBook – and price for the Porsche V2
Finally, there’s also a new entry in the MagicBook laptop series – the 16in MagicBook Pro 16 running Intel’s Core Ultra 7 chips. Like many manufacturers, Honor is talking up the AI PC, bringing more intelligence into Windows 11. MagicRing is Honor’s name for easier sharing between devices, again intended to remove steps from the process.
Honor also announced a price for the previously-announced Honor Magic V2 RSR – it’s available at the premium price point of £2349.99 or 2699 Euros (16GB of RAM and 1TB storage).
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief 
