The new flagship phone from the Chinese group wants to beat the best of the best of the competition. Here’s how, plus all the other products announced by Honor.
For some time now, Honor has established itself as a cutting-edge brand in the smartphone offering, and the Honor Magic6 Pro presented in these hours in Barcelona aims to further strengthen the position of the Chinese company among the big names in the sector, especially in Europe. The presentation event of the phone ended a little while ago on the sidelines of the annual Mobile World Congress which will open on Monday, and projects the group’s latest gadget into the Olympus of beautiful and impossible smartphones – that is, those top smartphones with a decidedly higher price the lines that will probably be talked about for the rest of the year. Next to him, other products of the brand were previewed, but it is better to proceed in order.
The launch of Honor Magic6 Pro
The phone presented in these hours takes up the baton of last year’s Honor Magic5 Pro, for many the first true high-end smartphone of the group. The newcomer is not a 360 degree revolution compared to its predecessor, but rather an incremental evolution: they essentially improve the design and above all the technical characteristics – with a notable boost in the performance, camera, battery and artificial intelligence sectors.
The specifications
The specifications of Honor Magic6 Pro were already known for weeks, when the gadget was unveiled at home, but it is worth reviewing them. The phone is a small colossus with a sumptuous 6.8-inch diagonal LTPO OLED display, characterized by slight lateral curves and a space at the top for what Honor calls the Magic Capsule and takes a lot from the Dynamic Island of Apple’s iPhones. The small oval houses a 50 megapixel selfie camera and a time of flight sensor for biometric unlocking of the phone with the face and for eye tracking, and by touching it it can be expanded to show information on notifications and apps in use.
The photographic sector is designed to impress, and composed of three elements that aim to capture the best even from challenging situations such as sports photography.
- 50 megapixel main sensor, optical stabilization and variable aperture f/1.4-2.0;
- 50-megapixel wide-angle sensor with f/2.0 aperture and 122-degree field of view;
- 2.5x zoom sensor with 180 megapixel optical stabilization, which allows you to bring your gaze even closer without loss of detail by exploiting the cropping of the relevant portion of the sensor.
At the base of a complete spec sheet basically everything – from waterproofing, to a 5600 mAh silicon-carbon battery, through the trifecta of fast, wireless and reverse charging (also via cable), infrared port, nanocrystal glass coated in silicon nitride and much more – there is a collaboration between software and hardware that has never been so close in a device from the Chinese brand.
Space for artificial intelligence
The software that powers the phone is Magic OS 8.0, the version of Android (now heavily) modified by Honor to make it more suited to its own and its users’ needs. In this iteration the operating system has been (and will be) enriched with functions and innovations based on artificial intelligence, or at least on the different implementations of what we have learned to call this way in recent years.
Honor’s idea for the future is that the interface understands the user’s intentions while they are using the phone and proposes relevant elements before the user decides to request them. For example, based on a text message mentioning an appointment at a restaurant, a sidebar will offer the address to get to the place, a shortcut to call the location and reserve a table and other useful links.
What makes all this possible is also the hardware platform underlying the phone – the powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 system on a chip, developed by Qualcomm with on-device machine learning among the priorities. Here then is the end of the era of performance as an end in itself for Honor – as is already happening and will probably happen within this year also for other manufacturers: benchmarks on speed and computing power will remain central in highlighting the potential of a device compared to its competitors, but they are starting to give way to what the phone can do through the AI algorithms and llms (large language models) implemented.
First impressions
What Honor Magic6 Pro can do from this point of view, however, we will only explore in the near future. For now, AI puts the most used apps at your fingertips, extracts useful text from photos and continues to drive the algorithms to improve the photos you take. Soon the phone should be enriched with all the elements shown during the presentation, from the aforementioned eye tracking to guide the use of the interface and anticipate user intentions, up to generative AI implementations.
In particular, Magic6 Pro should be able to execute commands formulated in natural language and give life to texts in a similar way to what ChatGPT does but without having to go through the cloud – using the Llama 2 system running locally on the Qualcomm processor. However, how these functions will translate into the daily use of the gadget is still a mystery, because the group has yet to release them in the form of a software update whose arrival date has not, however, been communicated.
In the time we have spent so far with the Honor Magic6 Pro the phone has proven to be exceptional and over the top, as expected. From interaction with the display to lightning-fast unlocking speed, through to stunning first-class photographs in every situation – especially at night and in zoom. This is a device that from almost all points of view can give the best on the market a run for their money – and moreover it is positioned in a way that is consistent with this ambition.
Not everything is perfect: the bold design chosen by Honor continues to not be for everyone, the weight of 225 grams makes itself felt and, despite the robust materials chosen, the look of the phone may give rise to the need to protect it with a cover. Even the graphical interface must be appreciated over time and is far from the simplicity and intuitiveness of Android, but above all the artificial intelligence functions must be thoroughly explored when they arrive, before evaluating them in their actual usefulness: we will report everything in the in-depth review in arriving in the next few days. In the meantime, the gadget is already on sale today in the manufacturer’s online store in the 12 + 512 GB RAM configuration.
Source: Wired
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