Honor Magic 6 Pro Review: Innovative but Inconsistent

The Honor Magic 6 Skilled is an odd phone. It folds progressive new AI choices, secure 3D face unlock, cutting-edge battery tech, and a robust digicam into an expensively clean physique. Nonetheless the MagicOS software program program is buggy, the digicam is inconsistent, and it’s one of many essential expensive Android telephones out there in the marketplace. (It’s moreover not formally obtainable throughout the US.)

Whereas the Honor Magic 6 Skilled has delighted and impressed me over the last few weeks, it has moreover pissed off and confused me. It could be oh-so-slick one minute and journey up the next. So is it smoke and mirrors or progressive magic? The reply seems to be a bit of bit of every. For many who crave innovation and don’t ideas a variety of quirks, the Honor Magic 6 Skilled delivers.

Now With Further AI

On the launch, Honor talked up the AI-powered choices throughout the Magic 6 Skilled, tons. We tried Honor’s eye-tracking at MWC, the place my colleague glanced at directions in an Alfa Romeo app to start and stop the automotive and even have it drive forward and once more. When this rolls out, it’ll let you do barely additional mundane points, like develop a notification with a glance when your palms are full.

Whereas eye-tracking won’t be obtainable however, there have been a number of AI choices I carried out with for my consider. Magic Textual content material lets you quickly extract textual content material from an image. If there’s a phone amount in there, you could faucet to dial it. It’s additionally potential to tug and drop extracted textual content material into one different app. So far, so helpful.

With Magic Portal, you could contact and drag content material materials, paying homage to a passage of textual content material, an image, or a screenshot, over to the appropriate and drop it into one different app, like Gmail or Notes. The show display screen you is likely to be in folds away, and a vertical row of attainable apps appears on the appropriate as you hover. It could be useful for stuff like addresses, which you’ll have the ability to drag into Maps for directions. It appears to be super slick, nevertheless I’m undecided how normally you’ll deliberate to make use of it.

These new choices hint at how far more important AI will grow to be on our telephones. It’s worth noting that they’re processed on-device using Honor’s MagicLM, its very private large language model. Honor can be engaged on a model new AI-powered instrument which will use your photographs and textual content material prompts to generate video, which sounds intriguing and leads us neatly to the other headline operate of the Magic 6 Skilled: the digicam.

Elegant Digital digicam

Crazy-big, extremely efficient cameras are all of the pattern in China’s flagship telephones (see the Xiaomi 14 Extraordinarily, Oppo Find X7 Ultra, and Nubia Z60 Ultra). The Honor Magic 6 Skilled isn’t any exception. It has a 50-megapixel foremost lens with a variable aperture (f/1.4 to f/2.0), a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto lens that gives 2.5X optical zoom nevertheless goes as a lot as 100X digitally, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide. Throughout the doorway is a 50-megapixel digicam paired with a 3D depth digicam in a central pill-shaped cutout on the prime of the show display screen.

The telephoto lens is certainly my favorite issue regarding the digicam. Whereas it technically solely helps 2.5X optical zoom, it would presumably acquire 5X lossless zoom by cropping footage from the 180-megapixel lens. The 5X zoom footage I took with the Magic 6 Skilled are my favorites, capturing baggage of component and life like colors. The precept digicam can be steady, with spectacular dynamic fluctuate, depth of space, and good low-light effectivity.

Color inconsistencies and some weird processing mar an in some other case great digicam. The weakest hyperlink is the ultrawide, which lacks the optical image stabilization present throughout the totally different lenses, usually stretches the perimeters of images, goes overboard with smoothening, and dials the color vibrancy means up. The color matching all through the trio is generally poor, and the processing is often heavy-handed, ironing out the noise nevertheless veering into oil painting territory, considerably must you zoom in previous 5X.

You might file simple video in 4K at as a lot as 60 frames per second with any of the precept digicam lenses. The autofocus is swift, and there’s a Movie mode risk for a additional cinematic actually really feel. There’s moreover a Skilled mode throughout the digicam if you happen to want to shoot RAW or dig deeper into the settings. Selfies taken with the front-facing digicam are above widespread, and it’ll presumably moreover seize 4K video, though it tops out at 30 fps. The Honor Magic 6 Skilled can snap stunning photographs, nevertheless I wanted to delete misfires barely too normally.