Honor’s Magic V6 sets three foldable firsts

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.

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.

Elsewhere things are boring, but only because I take them for granted in flagship foldables. Of course the Magic V6 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Of course it offers up to 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. Of course it includes fast wireless charging (but, of course, it doesn’t support Qi2). Of course it has dual 120Hz OLED displays and a triple rear camera and support for a stylus. These things aren’t just expected any more, they’re assumed.

Still, as much as foldable phones have advanced, there are drawbacks. The camera is still the big one. The triple rear camera here is certainly impressive and probably the best in any foldable bar Oppo’s Find N6. But, just like that phone, the camera system here lags behind the absolute top-end slab phones, held back by smaller sensors that limit light capture, heavy saturation on many shots, and some inconsistent color processing. In short: The camera is good, but not great, and that is still one of the big compromises you’ll make with any foldable phone.

The crease is another, of course. The V6’s is fairly subtle, but nowhere near as hard to detect as the nearly imperceptible one on Oppo’s latest. And then there’s durability. Yes, there’s an IP69 rating, but it’s still a foldable: The hinge is fragile, the inner screen is soft, and it’s difficult to protect fully with a case. Outside of China, Honor can’t match the repair and support infrastructure of the likes of Samsung, so you may have a harder time if it does ever break.

Then there’s software. The good news is that Honor is promising seven years of OS and security updates, two more than Oppo and the same that Google and Samsung offer. The bad is that Honor’s MagicOS is among my least favorite Android skins. The UI is noisy (and increasingly inspired by Apple’s Liquid Glass), Honor packs the phone with its own-brand apps, and the multitasking isn’t as powerful or as intuitive as Oppo’s. I much prefer using other versions of Android OS, and the software is a major reason the Oppo Find N6 remains my favorite foldable.

We don’t know exactly what the rumored foldable iPhone will offer, or Samsung’s imminent Galaxy Z Fold 8 for that matter. But Apple will be entering a mature foldable market, and I have to give credit to Honor as one of the companies that’s made sure that’s the case. Over the last few years its Magic foldables have pushed the limits of foldable design and battery capacity again and again, and the Magic V6 is the culmination of that steady progress in hardware, even if Honor has let its software side lapse. This is an impressive, complete foldable, but all those incremental upgrades are beginning to feel boring. Let’s see if Apple can make things interesting again.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge