Honor is breaking all the rules with the Magic V6. Revealing the new flagship to a worldwide audience first, rather than giving China all the love as usual, shows the firm isn’t about to let Apple spoil the foldable phone party. Not without putting up a fight, anyway.
The outgoing Magic V5 already had Samsung and Google’s folding phones beat for battery, and was a lot easier to get hold of than compatriot Oppo’s effort. Its successor doesn’t just scoop the imminent Find N6, inevitable Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 and rumoured iPhone Fold – it earns the title of World’s Thinnest Foldable, while also finding room to raise the battery capacity bar.
Having tried one out at Honor’s Mobile World Congress preview event, I’m convinced everyone else is going to have to work harder if they want to keep up.
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It’s skinnier than ever
Design-wise Honor has stuck closely to the formula established by the Magic V5. The V6 has the same geometric rear camera island and similar proportions – only now those proportions are even slimmer. This phone is just 8.75mm when folded, not counting the camera bump, and only 4.0mm at its narrowest point when opened. That only a fraction of a millimetre less than a Galaxy Z Fold7, sure, but enough that Honor can call it the world’s thinnest.
This only applies to the white version, with the black, red and gold versions being ever-so-slightly thicker at 9.0mm folded and 4.1mm unfolded. Right now it’s unclear which versions are going global, or if some will be reserved for China; Honor is opening sales on home soil right now, but a worldwide launch (which unsurprisingly won’t include the USA) will probably happen in a few months’ time.
The Magic V6 also scores top honours for durability, with both IP68 and IP69 ratings. This is hands-down the best protection of any foldable, and bodes well for anyone worried about the flexible inner display being ruined by dust creeping into the hinge mechanism. Honor reckons the hinge is twice as strong as a car’s A-pillar, and the new design has helped make the crease even harder to see than the last-gen model.
You’re getting a 6.52in outer screen and a 7.95in inner one, each with high refresh rates, OLED colours and contrast, plenty of resolution and impressive peak brightness. I’ve been told to expect 6000 nits for HDR content on the outer screen, or 5000 on the inner one – which has also been given a new anti-reflection coating to dial out distractions.
A high pixel count camera trio
The rear camera bump doesn’t bulge out dramatically from the main phone body, but Honor has still found a way to slot three high pixel count sensors inside it. You’re getting a 50MP main snapper, 50MP ultrawide, and a 64MP telephoto.
That’s not at all removed from the outgoing Magic V5, so while I’ll have to wait for a full review to deliver a verdict on image quality, I’m expecting similar results. That should still mean a commendable performance for a foldable phone, with Honor’s generative Superzoom image processing stepping in when you zoom beyond 30x.
It’s also great to see Honor putting real work on the software side in general, to make better use of the Magic V6’s large inner screen – and not just with a bunch of AI-infused apps. Although those are there too, of course. Google Gemini has been integrated throughout MagicOS, letting you create calendar appointments from onscreen content, and you can aparently summarise missed parts of meetings with an “AI meeting assistant”.
More interesting is how heavily everything integrates with Apple. The Honor Connect app lets the phone act as a second screen for your MacBook, browse Keynote, Pages and Numbers files saved to iCloud, and tap to share directly to a Mac or iphone. It can also control a pair of AirPods’ more advanced features like noise control, and share notifications simultaneously with an iPhone and Apple Watch.
The new battery capacity king?
The outgoing Magic V5 already had Samsung and Google’s foldables beaten for battery capacity, but Honor is really sticking it to those rivals in 2026. The worldwide Magic V6 will land with a 6600mAh cell, which is as big as it gets in a book-style foldable. A Chinese variant climbs even higher to 7000mAh. I’m expecting both versions to deliver a comfortable two days of typical use, no matter which of the two screens you spend the most time with. 80W wired and 66W wireless charging are suitably nippy, too.
This is also the first foldable with Qualcomm’s top-spec Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 silicon. Honor hasn’t had to settle for a version with fewer CPU cores, and is keeping temperatures in check with a vapor chamber cooling system – something Samsung didn’t get around to for the Galaxy Z Fold7.
Will that make this the most powerful phone of its kind, as well as the longest-lasting? I’ll have to wait until a full review to find out. The Magic V6 is set to go on sale in China first, then see a wider release in the coming months.
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