Honor Magic6 Pro review

6.8-inch OLED is hard to fault

The Magic6 Pro features a 6.8-inch OLED display with gently curved side edges and minimal bezels. It's an LTPO panel with an adaptive refresh rate between 1Hz and 120Hz, and it uses high-frequency PWM (4320Hz) for dimming. The resolution is 1,280x2,800px in a somewhat unusual 19.7:9 (2.19:1) aspect ratio and pixel density is 453ppi.

Honor boasts a maximum brightness of 5,000nits in HDR usage and 1,600nits in regular high-brightness mode - like when you're out and about under bright sunlight. The first number we'll have to trust them on, but the second we were able to confirm in our testing, where the Magic6 Pro was good for 1,578nits with adaptive brightness enabled. In regular conditions when adjusting the slider manually, we got 774nits.

Refresh rate

Honor likes to point out in its marketing materials that the Magic6 Pro's display can refresh at 1Hz even at its minimum brightness of 2nits, and that is indeed the case. That feat enables full-screen, always-on display functionality with what we imagine to be a reasonable battery draw.

That specific use case aside, the Honor is predictably adaptable in its behavior depending on app, content, and interaction with the phone. The high refresh rate is available for high frame rate gaming too, though the dynamic mode might limit things to 90Hz, while the high mode does allow the full 120Hz.

Streaming and HDR video

The Magic6 Pro supports all sorts of HDR standards, including HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, and it also has Widevine L1 support. We got Dolby Vision streams from Netflix and HDR clips from YouTube, and both apps also had the HDR effect when playing back in PiP mode.

HDR for photos in the in-house gallery is available too, though seemingly not yet supported in Google Photos or Chrome.

Honor Magic6 Pro battery life

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

The Magic6 Pro is equipped with a 5,600mAh battery, a meaningful upgrade over the 5,100mAh capacity of the international Magic5 Pro and more than most handsets in the class. We like big batteries (and we cannot lie), so this increase is most welcome. It's also a silicon-carbon type of battery, the same that the Chinese version of the Magic5 Pro had, which boasts higher energy density and better performance in extreme weather.

That extra capacity is probably not the only reason, but it does contribute to the Magic6 Pro's longer battery life compared to the previous generation. The Magic6 Pro is particularly good in our gaming test, where it ranks towards the top of the all-time chart. The other screen-on results are also respectable and the Magic's overall Active Use showing is very competitive.

Charging speed

The Magic6 Pro is rated for 80W charging, but since our unit arrived without a bundled adapter, and it's the first (and so far only) smartphone from either Honor or Huawei with such a power rating, we had to improvise a bit with our charging test.

We tested with the Magic5 Pro's 66W adapter and a 65W Honor laptop brick (different sets of voltage/current specs on these), but we also dug up a 100W unit from a Huawei nova 10 Pro that we happened to have lying around.

With the Magic5 Pro 66W adapter, we got to 47% in 15 minutes and 82% in 30 minutes, and it took 44 minutes to show 100% in the battery indicator. Our power meter peaked at around 54W and tapered down gradually as the percentages climbed. With the 100W Huawei adapter, we got essentially the same charging speed, only the meter showed a whopping 73W during the first 3% of charging, before dropping to values in the 50s. The Honor laptop charger maxed out at around 48W and got us to a full charge in 57 minutes (62% in 30 minutes).

The Magic6 Pro supports wireless charging too, and Honor quotes a 66W rating - that has to be with proprietary charging pads, of course, and we haven't been able to test its speed.

Speaker test

The Magic6 Pro is equipped with a hybrid stereo speaker setup, with one speaker on the bottom and another one up top that also serves as an earpiece. The top speaker is assigned the right channel when the Magic is used in vertical orientation - unusual, in the sense that most phones have it set up to be the left channel, but hardly consequential.

In landscape, the phone will switch channels depending on the actual orientation. Each speaker will also play the opposite channel's track at an attenuated level in addition to its own channel.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker

In our testing, the Magic6 Pro ended up in the 'Very Good' category for loudness, the same as the previous model, even if the numbers indicate that the 6 is slightly quieter. The new model does sound better to our ears, with fuller bass and less dominating midrange, while maintaining nice vocals and clean treble. Overall, it's one of the most pleasing-sounding setups we've heard lately.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.