The Honor Magic 6 Professional is a wierd telephone. It folds progressive new AI options, safe 3D face unlock, cutting-edge battery tech, and a strong digital camera into an expensively modern physique. However the MagicOS software program is buggy, the digital camera is inconsistent, and it’s probably the most costly Android telephones available on the market. (It’s additionally not formally out there within the US.)
Whereas the Honor Magic 6 Professional has delighted and impressed me over the previous couple of weeks, it has additionally pissed off and confused me. It may be oh-so-slick one minute and journey up the following. So is it smoke and mirrors or progressive magic? The reply appears to be a little bit of each. In the event you crave innovation and don’t thoughts a number of quirks, the Honor Magic 6 Professional delivers.
Now With Extra AI
On the launch, Honor talked up the AI-powered options within the Magic 6 Professional, loads. We tried Honor’s eye-tracking at MWC, the place my colleague glanced at instructions in an Alfa Romeo app to start out and cease the automotive and even have it drive ahead and again. When this rolls out, it can allow you to do barely extra mundane issues, like increase a notification with a look when your palms are full.
Whereas eye-tracking just isn’t out there but, there have been a few AI options I performed with for my assessment. Magic Textual content enables you to rapidly extract textual content from a picture. If there’s a telephone quantity in there, you possibly can faucet to dial it. You can even drag and drop extracted textual content into one other app. Thus far, so helpful.
With Magic Portal, you possibly can contact and drag content material, comparable to a passage of textual content, a picture, or a screenshot, over to the correct and drop it into one other app, like Gmail or Notes. The display screen you’re in folds away, and a vertical row of attainable apps seems on the correct as you hover. It may be helpful for stuff like addresses, which you’ll drag into Maps for instructions. It seems to be tremendous slick, however I’m unsure how usually you’ll bear in mind to make use of it.
These new options trace at how way more necessary AI will change into on our telephones. It’s price noting that they’re processed on-device utilizing Honor’s MagicLM, its very personal massive language mannequin. Honor can also be engaged on a brand new AI-powered software that may use your images and textual content prompts to generate video, which sounds intriguing and leads us neatly to the opposite headline function of the Magic 6 Professional: the digital camera.
Stylish Digital camera
Loopy-big, highly effective cameras are all the trend in China’s flagship telephones (see the Xiaomi 14 Extremely, Oppo Discover X7 Extremely, and Nubia Z60 Extremely). The Honor Magic 6 Professional isn’t any exception. It has a 50-megapixel fundamental lens with a variable aperture (f/1.4 to f/2.0), a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto lens that gives 2.5X optical zoom however goes as much as 100X digitally, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide. Across the entrance is a 50-megapixel digital camera paired with a 3D depth digital camera in a central pill-shaped cutout on the prime of the display screen.
The telephoto lens is well my favourite factor in regards to the digital camera. Whereas it technically solely helps 2.5X optical zoom, it may well obtain 5X lossless zoom by cropping photographs from the 180-megapixel lens. The 5X zoom photographs I took with the Magic 6 Professional are my favorites, capturing baggage of element and real looking colours. The primary digital camera can also be strong, with spectacular dynamic vary, depth of discipline, and good low-light efficiency.
Colour inconsistencies and a few bizarre processing mar an in any other case glorious digital camera. The weakest hyperlink is the ultrawide, which lacks the optical picture stabilization current within the different lenses, typically stretches the sides of photographs, goes overboard with smoothening, and dials the colour vibrancy manner up. The colour matching throughout the trio is usually poor, and the processing is typically heavy-handed, ironing out the noise however veering into oil portray territory, significantly when you zoom in past 5X.
You may report clean video in 4K at as much as 60 frames per second with any of the primary digital camera lenses. The autofocus is swift, and there’s a Film mode choice for a extra cinematic really feel. There’s additionally a Professional mode within the digital camera if you wish to shoot RAW or dig deeper into the settings. Selfies taken with the front-facing digital camera are above common, and it may well additionally seize 4K video, although it tops out at 30 fps. The Honor Magic 6 Professional can snap pretty images, however I needed to delete misfires slightly too usually.
