Honor Magic6 Pro review

Android 14 with a new MagicOS 8.0

The Honor Magic6 Pro runs Android 14 with a layer of Honor's MagicOS on top, v8.0. It's got the full Google apps suite - nothing like the Huawei software situation, where some limitations apply. Honor promises 4 major OS updates and 5 years of security patches, so the Magic6 Pro's software future is well secured.

MagicOS 8.0 is a lot like older MagicOS versions in terms of look and feel. That includes neat little things like large folders and cards - another name for the widgets that you can add for in-house apps, indicated by a bar under the app icon.

MagicOS 8.0

A seemingly new addition is the iOS-like pill-shaped Magic Capsule notification for background music and video playback that you get around the front-facing camera cutout. We had a few run-ins with that one, where we couldn't get it to disappear even though we stopped the YouTube video, though that should be easily fixable with an update. Also, we wonder if the pill interface will make it to other Honors with MagicOS 8.0 but differently shaped or positioned selfie cameras.

There are new features made possible via on-device AI. For instance, you can tap a message that briefly mentions a place you'd like to visit, and the phone will look up the address on Google Maps without any copy-paste.

Or take the new Magic Portal functionality - you can drag anything on your screen onto the bar, allowing you to search, email, and put down a note about the highlighted item. For instance, you could search online for any item you see pictured on a shopping site like eBay.

The front-facing camera assembly can also be used for air gestures - a familiar capability also found on the previous model. Smart sensing, meanwhile, keeps an eye out for... your eyes, and will keep the screen on while you're looking at it - also nothing new. That's not the eye tracking functionality that the Chinese version of the Magic6 Pro will have, though.

Magic Portal in action • Air gestures

The Honor Magic 6 Pro is also the first phone offering a full-screen, always-on display functionality.

Some other things haven't changed, with one in particular annoying us to no end. When you long-press on an app icon on your homescreen, there's no "App info" shortcut to take you to the app's details page where notifications and permissions settings live - instead, you need to go to the system settings menu and find the app in the list.

Benchmarks

The Honor Magic6 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the chipset of choice for most Android flagships in 2024. Manufactured on a 4nm process, the chip has an octa-core CPU in a 1+3+2+2 configuration with a prime Cortex-X4 core clocked at 3.3GHz, and an Adreno 750 GPU.

This global version of the smartphone will be available in a single 12GB/512GB memory configuration with storage speeds in our testing consistent with the UFS 4.0 standard. Several other memory tiers are available in China - 12GB/256GB, 16GB/512GB, and 16GB/1TB.

In our benchmark runs, the Honor performed to the high standard we'd expect it to, posting numbers roughly on par with other handsets with the same chipset. The phone does feature a High Performance mode but that didn't appear to make any meaningful difference in Geekbench (where we normally see an impact), but it did nudge the Antutu score to just over 2M points.

We've discontinued GFXBench graphics benchmarking as the app is often banned/blacklisted on the phones we receive for review. The graphics performance ranking in 3D Mark is just as meaningful, so we suggest you refer to that one instead.

The High performance mode also affected the Magic6 Pro's behavior under sustained CPU load, allowing it to maintain higher results for longer and posting an 81% rating in the CPU throttling test. That was an improvement over the 66% result in 'normal' mode, where the graph was somewhat unusual to begin with but ultimately not too bad anyway. In the Wild Life Stress test in 3DMark, the Honor got an okay 66% stability score too.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test