The Honor Magic 6 Professional is an odd cellphone. It folds progressive new AI options, safe 3D face unlock, cutting-edge battery tech, and a strong digicam into an expensively modern physique. However the MagicOS software program is buggy, the digicam is inconsistent, and it’s probably the most costly Android telephones available on the market. (It’s additionally not formally accessible 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 case 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, quite a bit. 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 automobile and even have it drive ahead and again. When this rolls out, it would allow you to do barely extra mundane issues, like develop a notification with a look when your palms are full.
Whereas eye-tracking isn’t accessible 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 cellphone quantity in there, you may faucet to dial it. You can even drag and drop extracted textual content into one other app. To date, so helpful.
With Magic Portal, you may contact and drag content material, corresponding to a passage of textual content, a picture, or a screenshot, over to the suitable and drop it into one other app, like Gmail or Notes. The display you’re in folds away, and a vertical row of potential apps seems on the suitable as you hover. It may be helpful for stuff like addresses, which you’ll be able to drag into Maps for instructions. It appears tremendous slick, however I’m undecided how usually you’ll bear in mind to make use of it.
These new options trace at how far more essential AI will turn into on our telephones. It’s price noting that they’re processed on-device utilizing Honor’s MagicLM, its very personal giant language mannequin. Honor can be engaged on a brand new AI-powered instrument that may use your photographs 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 major lens with a variable aperture (f/1.4 to f/2.0), a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto lens that provides 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 concerning the digicam. Whereas it technically solely helps 2.5X optical zoom, it will possibly obtain 5X lossless zoom by cropping pictures from the 180-megapixel lens. The 5X zoom pictures I took with the Magic 6 Professional are my favorites, capturing luggage of element and practical colours. The primary digicam can be stable, with spectacular dynamic vary, depth of discipline, and good low-light efficiency.
Coloration inconsistencies and a few bizarre processing mar an in any other case wonderful digicam. The weakest hyperlink is the ultrawide, which lacks the optical picture stabilization current within the different lenses, generally stretches the sides of pictures, goes overboard with smoothening, and dials the colour vibrancy approach up. The colour matching throughout the trio is mostly 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 principle 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 will possibly additionally seize 4K video, although it tops out at 30 fps. The Honor Magic 6 Professional can snap pretty photographs, however I needed to delete misfires somewhat too usually.
