The Honor Magic 6 Professional is an odd telephone. It folds revolutionary new AI options, safe 3D face unlock, cutting-edge battery tech, and a strong digicam into an expensively smooth physique. However the MagicOS software program is buggy, the digicam is inconsistent, and it’s one of the crucial costly Android telephones in the marketplace. (It’s additionally not formally obtainable 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 revolutionary magic? The reply appears to be a little bit of each. If you happen to crave innovation and don’t thoughts a couple 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, lots. We tried Honor’s eye-tracking at MWC, the place my colleague glanced at instructions in an Alfa Romeo app to begin and cease the automobile and even have it drive ahead and again. When this rolls out, it is going to allow you to do barely extra mundane issues, like develop a notification with a look when your arms are full.
Whereas eye-tracking shouldn’t be obtainable but, there have been a few AI options I performed with for my overview. Magic Textual content permits you to shortly extract textual content from a picture. If there’s a telephone quantity in there, you possibly can faucet to dial it. You may also drag and drop extracted textual content into one other app. To date, so useful.
With Magic Portal, you possibly can contact and drag content material, akin to a passage of textual content, a picture, or a screenshot, over to the proper and drop it into one other app, like Gmail or Notes. The display you’re in folds away, and a vertical row of doable apps seems on the proper 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 typically you’ll keep in mind to make use of it.
These new options trace at how rather more necessary AI will turn out to be 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 be engaged on a brand new AI-powered device that may use your pictures 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 digicam.
Stylish Digicam
Loopy-big, highly effective cameras are all the fad in China’s flagship telephones (see the Xiaomi 14 Extremely, Oppo Find X7 Ultra, and Nubia Z60 Ultra). The Honor Magic 6 Professional isn’t any exception. It has a 50-megapixel predominant 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 digicam paired with a 3D depth digicam in a central pill-shaped cutout on the prime of the display.
The telephoto lens is well my favourite factor in regards to the digicam. Whereas it technically solely helps 2.5X optical zoom, it may possibly 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 lifelike colours. The principle digicam can be stable, with spectacular dynamic vary, depth of subject, and good low-light efficiency.
Shade inconsistencies and a few bizarre processing mar an in any other case glorious digicam. The weakest hyperlink is the ultrawide, which lacks the optical picture stabilization current within the different lenses, typically stretches the perimeters of photographs, goes overboard with smoothening, and dials the colour vibrancy means 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 possibly can document easy video in 4K at as much as 60 frames per second with any of the primary digicam 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 digicam if you wish to shoot RAW or dig deeper into the settings. Selfies taken with the front-facing digicam are above common, and it may possibly additionally seize 4K video, although it tops out at 30 fps. The Honor Magic 6 Professional can snap pretty pictures, however I needed to delete misfires somewhat too typically.
