Honor Magic V6 Review: The Foldable to Beat

Even after a great many foldables from a great many manufacturers, the Honor Magic V6 still lands a blow the first time you open it. Little appears to have changed against its predecessors, yet Honor has perfected the foldable concept to a degree Samsung has not yet reached.

The hinge opens very pleasantly and without much force, and the mechanism still feels solid — though only a long-term test can say how it ages. Android reacts quickly to the changing screen proportions, and a galactic wallpaper moves dynamically as the phone unfolds.

Inside sits a proud eight-inch display in the format of a small tablet. Closed, the roughly 224-gram Magic V6 essentially feels like a conventional phone. The thickness of around eight millimetres is spoiled only by the camera island, which protrudes a fair way — though it is less of a nuisance in the hand and in a pocket than the bulky arrangements on something like a Vivo X300 Ultra.

Both screens convinced in lab assessment. The crisp sharpness makes even fine text easy to read. At a 120 hertz refresh rate, elements move very smoothly across both displays, and the rich colours and clean contrast of the OLED panels score well. Add high maximum brightness of roughly 2,000 to 2,500 cd/m² and using the Magic V6 in sunlight is genuinely pleasant.

It is on battery and performance that the Magic V6 competes directly with conventional flagship phones. Fitted with the best Android phone processor available at launch, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the foldable flexes twice over.

In everyday use and across various benchmarks it posts strong figures and never keeps you waiting longer than necessary when loading apps or editing media. Lab measurements put it at 0.8 seconds to load a PDF over Wi-Fi, 209 frames per second in GFXBench and 20,721 points in PCMark. The camera island can get hot under full load, though the rest of the body stays comfortable to hold.

That thermal management comes at the cost of performance. The Magic V6 throttles noticeably in the stress test — after several runs the graphics benchmark score fell to roughly half. In more extreme cases, such as intensive video editing, that can mean longer rendering over time, but it should really only put off the most demanding users.

Folded, it feels like a regular flagship, and it lasts about as long as one: in the standard battery test it managed a proud 21 hours 53 minutes of uninterrupted use on the external display, putting it level with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra or the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Unfolded, runtime falls to 13 hours 53 minutes, though at the time of testing only the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold had beaten that figure among foldables.

Charging over USB-C runs at normal speed: half an hour on the cable brought the test device back to 58 per cent, which is enough for eight hours on the inner display. Wireless charging on a Qi pad is available as an alternative.

The camera island may protrude as far as on non-folding Android flagships, but it takes similarly strong pictures. The main camera convinces with high sharpness, very attractive contrast and lively colour that never becomes unnaturally garish. There is no distracting noise in dark areas or at the edges of the frame, and even handheld shots impress. Portrait mode is particularly appealing with its clear detail, though the fairly strong bokeh effect could work more precisely.

The telephoto offers a 70-millimetre focal length for a 3x optical zoom plus a lossless crop to 6x. In both cases the crisp sharpness and pleasing colours survive, even if the sharpening looks a little more artificial than you would want. At the 100x digital setting the software intervenes heavily and produces an unattractive pixel mush.

Video records at up to 4K and a smooth 60 frames per second, with high picture and sound quality. It is a shame that continuous zooming during a take shows clear jumps as the phone switches to the telephoto or ultra-wide camera.

There is nothing to complain about elsewhere. The foldable offers a modern set of wireless standards — Wi-Fi 7, 5G, Bluetooth 6.0 and NFC for contactless payment — and an eSIM can be registered, though dual SIM requires at least one physical card.

The fingerprint sensor is not under the display but in the side power button; alternatively there is surface-level two-dimensional face recognition through the inner camera. On software, Honor promises updates until at least 2032, with new features guaranteed only until 2031.

This is an uncompromising flagship foldable. The hinge and the eight-inch inner display are the best execution of the format so far, the OLED panels are bright enough for sunlight at 2,000 to 2,500 cd/m², battery life folded matches conventional flagships at 21 hours 53 minutes, and the camera is genuinely on flagship level rather than merely good for a folding phone. The reservations are real but narrow: sustained performance throttles by up to half, charging is only average, and the 100x zoom is a marketing number rather than a usable one.

It was £1,899.00 on Amazon UK in the 16 GB / 512 GB configuration when we checked on 2 August 2026. Check the price on Amazon UK or search on Amazon US