The Honor Magic 6 Professional is a wierd 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 obtainable within the US.)
Whereas the Honor Magic 6 Professional has delighted and impressed me over the previous couple of weeks, it has additionally annoyed and confused me. It may be oh-so-slick one minute and journey up the subsequent. So is it smoke and mirrors or progressive magic? The reply appears to be a little bit of each. For those who crave innovation and don’t thoughts just a few 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, so much. 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 automotive and even have it drive ahead and again. When this rolls out, it’s going to allow you to do barely extra mundane issues, like broaden a notification with a look when your palms are full.
Whereas eye-tracking is just not obtainable but, there have been a few AI options I performed with for my evaluation. Magic Textual content permits you to rapidly extract textual content from a picture. If there’s a cellphone quantity in there, you may faucet to dial it. You may as well drag and drop extracted textual content into one other app. Up to now, so helpful.
With Magic Portal, you may contact and drag content material, resembling a passage of textual content, a picture, or a screenshot, over to the fitting and drop it into one other app, like Gmail or Notes. The display screen you’re in folds away, and a vertical row of doable apps seems on the fitting as you hover. It may be helpful for stuff like addresses, which you’ll be able to drag into Maps for instructions. It appears to be like tremendous slick, however I’m unsure how typically you’ll bear in mind to make use of it.
These new options trace at how rather more vital AI will turn out to be on our telephones. It’s value 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 software that may use your pictures and textual content prompts to generate video, which sounds intriguing and leads us neatly to the opposite headline characteristic of the Magic 6 Professional: the digicam.
Elegant Digicam
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 is not any exception. It has a 50-megapixel foremost 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 high of the display screen.
The telephoto lens is definitely my favourite factor concerning the digicam. Whereas it technically solely helps 2.5X optical zoom, it may 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 baggage of element and lifelike colours. The primary digicam can be strong, with spectacular dynamic vary, depth of area, and good low-light efficiency.
Shade 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 usually poor, and the processing is typically heavy-handed, ironing out the noise however veering into oil portray territory, notably in the event you zoom in past 5X.
You possibly can document clean 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 additionally seize 4K video, although it tops out at 30 fps. The Honor Magic 6 Professional can snap beautiful pictures, however I needed to delete misfires slightly too typically.
