The Honor Magic 6 Pro is like a luxury watch for your pocket

When Honor partnered with supermodels, Burberry and British Vogue to unveil its bag-like Honor V Purse at IFA 2023, it became clear that this fast-growing Chinese electronics brand has bold designs on the luxury electronics market.

We recently dubbed its latest foldable effort, the Honor Magic V2, a “benchmark-setting beauty,” and Honor’s eye-catching successor to the excellent Honor Magic 5 Pro looks set to further disrupt an increasingly homogeneous (read: samey) mobile industry.

From a design perspective, the Honor Magic 6 Pro – which was just announced for the global market at MWC 2024 – might well be the best-looking phone of the year so far. At the very least, it’s the most distinctive. There’s no titanium in sight, but Honor’s latest flagship refines its predecessor’s ‘Star Wheel’ camera notch by taking inspiration from precious stones and luxury wristwatches.

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Honor says this new-and-improved module design is a nod to “cushion-shaped watches, jade congs, and baroque diamonds,” and given that the former were popularized by luxury watchmaker Panerai in the 1940s, it’s easy to see why Honor has embraced this unique ‘squircle’ shape on the Magic 6 Pro.

But aside from its aesthetic bells and whistles, the Honor Magic 6 Pro boasts hardware specs to rival the very best phones of 2024. On the front of the device is a 6.8-inch LTPO OLED display that not only sports an adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate, but also a peak HDR brightness of 5,000 nits and Honor’s proprietary Circadian Night Display technology. In layman’s terms, the latter filters blue light to improve the quality of your sleep, and it’s aided by an impressive 4,320Hz PWM dimming cycle rate that works to minimize strain on the eyes.

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This 6.8-inch display is protected by Honor’s NanoCrystal Shield, which is supposedly 10 times stronger than regular glass. Naturally, we’ll have to put that claim to the test, but it’s nice to know that Honor is confident about its new phone’s durability. The Magic 6 Pro has an IP68 water and dust resistance rating, too, which is the same rating boasted by the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Under the hood, Honor’s latest flagship is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset – again, that’s the same chipset you’ll find in the Galaxy S24 Ultra – and a 5,600mAh silicon-carbon battery, which should keep things ticking along nicely for well over a day.

Periscope power

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Honor Magic 6 Pro, however, is the camera technology hidden beneath that aforementioned ‘Star Wheel’ module. The new phone sports a 50MP wide lens, a 50MP ultra-wide lens and an almighty 180MP periscope telephoto lens which, at the time of writing, is the largest telephoto lens we’ve ever seen on a smartphone.

Annoyingly, that telephoto lens is only capable of 2.5x optical zoom (you’ll be able to zoom digitally up to 100x), but we’re still excited to put the Honor Magic 6 Pro through its photography paces in our full Honor Magic 6 Pro review.

As for what else is new on the Magic 6 Pro, Honor has made a big song and dance about the phone’s myriad AI-powered features, which range from a Dynamic Island-style ‘Magic Capsule’ to an intent-based ‘Magic Portal’ navigation system. Again, we’ll be testing out these AI features for ourselves over the coming weeks, but the early signs are promising – Honor clearly has Samsung’s Galaxy AI software in its sights with the Magic 6 Pro.

Honor’s latest flagship will cost £1,099.99 and begin shipping from March 8, 2024. You’ll be able to pre-order the Magic 6 Pro from March 1, 2024, and it’ll be available in two colors: Black and Epi Green. The former features “velvet matte glass”, while the latter features “ripple classic leather.” We’ve handled the Epi Green variant, and it’s a beauty. 

For reference, the Honor Magic 5 Pro launched for £949.99, so Honor has hiked the price of its successor by a not-insubstantial £150. As with most other Honor products, the Magic 6 Pro is unlikely to go on sale in the US and Australia.

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Axel is TechRadar’s UK-based Phones Editor, reporting on everything from the latest Apple developments to newest AI breakthroughs as part of the site’s Mobile Computing vertical. Having previously written for publications including Esquire and FourFourTwo, Axel is well-versed in the applications of technology beyond the desktop, and his coverage extends from general reporting and analysis to in-depth interviews and opinion.  Axel studied for a degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick before joining TechRadar in 2020, where he then earned an NCTJ qualification as part of the company’s inaugural digital training scheme.