GoKawiilPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
On paper, the Honor Magic V6 sounds like a tremendous leap forward for foldable phones: It’s the thinnest one yet, with the biggest battery, and the best water-resistance ever. In practice, only the bigger battery feels like a meaningful improvement. The other upgrades are only fractionally superior to what came before.
This isn’t entirely Honor’s fault. It’s getting harder to make a foldable phone stand out; even last year’s offerings felt like complete flagship phones. Huawei’s Pura X Max stood out for its odd new aspect ratio, which we’re expecting to see both Samsung and Apple replicate later this year. Then there are the trifolds, which feel like a separate beast entirely. But book-style Android foldables have well and truly matured, now able to go toe-to-toe with regular flagship phones in almost every respect.
Honor has been one of the manufacturers pushing foldables forward most aggressively, so it’s earned the right to release a phone with relatively modest hardware improvements. I just wish the company had done more to overhaul the software, as MagicOS remains the main thing holding the Magic V6 back.
The Magic V6 launched at February’s MWC trade show. At the time, it only went on sale in China; it’s taken until now for Honor to begin the global rollout. The phone is now on sale in Malaysia and Singapore, where it costs RM 7,699 (about $1,930). More countries, including the UK and Europe, are set to follow later this month.
It’s only fair to start with the phone’s three foldable firsts, even if they’re mostly incremental. For starters, it’s the thinnest foldable in the world, just 4mm thick when open, and 8.75mm when folded shut (well, the white version is — other colors are fractionally thicker at 9mm). Closed, it’s no thicker than an iPhone 17 Pro Max, which is a true accomplishment. But it’s a mere 0.05mm thinner than Honor’s previous generation Magic foldable. That’s about the width of a human hair, so I think it’s safe to say we’re in imperceptible territory here.
My gold version of the phone isn’t quite the thinnest, but each half is still barely thicker than the USB-C port.
The Magic V6 is also the first foldable phone with an IP69 rating, meaning it’s dust-tight and capable of surviving exposure to high-pressure and high-temperature water jets. The rating means the V6 has better dust protection than the V5’s IP59 and can survive water exposure that the IP68 Pixel 10 Pro Fold couldn’t, but the practical implications still feel minimal. I can’t say I run into high-pressure jets with my phone in hand all that often, but even so, the extra peace of mind is welcome.
The most important of the three upgrades is to the battery, which is now 6,660mAh thanks to improved silicon-carbon cells (though China gets an even more capacious 7,150mAh model). This is bigger than any other foldable out there and a reasonable jump up from the 5,820mAh capacity of the Magic V5. And it pays off. The V5 could last for a day and then some, but I’ve been comfortably using the V6 for two days at a time, charging every other night, and I struggle to see how even a heavy user could run this thing down over the course of a single day. This, at least, feels like a meaningful improvement.
Closed, it’s increasingly hard to tell foldables like this from regular slab phones. The Magic V6 defaults to uncomfortably vivid display settings, but you can make it more muted. The triple camera island is big, but actually a lot thinner than the Magic V5’s. It’s a touch gaudy, but I don’t mind the glittery golden effect — it reminds me a little of silicon wafers.
... continue reading