Honor Magic V6 review: A bad time to love technology

Honor Magic V6 review

The Honor Magic V6 isn’t just Honor’s 2026 premium foldable handset. It’s probably in the running for having one of the longest launches, after taking its sweet time to enter our market.

We’ve reported on the Honor Magic V6 since its first official reveal at MWC 2026, which took place in early March this year. The brand has since followed it up with a regional hype session (TikTok video below), and capped it off with a local launch on 4 June 2026. Even though Honor brought forward the Singapore launch window here by a whole month and a half, it took a whole quarter of 2026 to ready the phone for retail.

Why did it take so long? That’s because the bookstyle foldable Android (skinned with MagicOS) has both hardware chops and head-turning marketing. In the quantifiable space, there’s a high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, a bigger battery capacity of 6,600mAh (from 5,820mAh), a shallower crease, improved impact resistance, and heightened IP68 + IP69 resistance against dust and water).

On the fancier end of things, Honor also threw in a few head-turning perks like Notification Sharing with Apple devices (iPad, iPhone), as well as a super-slim 8.75mm to 9mm thickness when folded, depending on the colour you buy (Ivory White is the slimmer one, while Ferghana Red, Sunrise Gold, and Classic Black are 9mm).

The most head-turning detail is the S$400 (+18%) price increase since last year’s version (S$600 [+30%] increase if compared to the year before). At S$2,599 for 512GB storage and S$2,899 for 1TB, the Honor Magic V6 is just S$100 shy of OPPO Find N6, one of two recent premium foldables to earn our Editors’ Choice award (the other being Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7).

This puts Honor squarely against a challenging backdrop, exacerbated by uncertain international diplomacy, supply challenges, memory shortage, and serious competition. It must be a difficult decision for Honor to abandon its previous pole position as the best-value premium foldable, with minimal to no compromise, and we get it.

To the end user, this is also one of the most egregious price hikes we’ve seen in the Android phone space (two consecutive ones, by a significant margin). A quick glance at the tech sector’s current headwinds suggests it’s business as usual despite the crunch, but a phone buyer’s wallet is less forgiving and generous.

Can the Honor Magic V6 live up to its new price tag? Is the Apple compatibility just a gimmick? Are its fundamentals still intact? And who best deserves the S$400-S$600 price increase? We find out in this review.

When a foldable has the same size and weight of a Pro Max

The Honor Magic V6 in Ferghana Red (our review unit) leans towards an East Asian old-money aesthetic with its gaudy, high-polished, watch-like octagonal rim around its rear cameras, and a yellow-golden trim along its sides with a rounded hinge of equal shine. While its matte red rear has a pleasant suede texture, it looks more like redwood, especially in warm light. Taken together, it makes the user feel old enough to empty out their Central Provident Funds (CPF) account.

What sets the Honor Magic V6 apart is how the foldable comes very close to being a regular premium smartphone, plus the unfolding magic you’re paying extra for.

At just 219g or 224g ((Ivory White once again being the lighter variant while Ferghana Red, Sunrise Gold, and Classic Black are heavier), the Magic V6 across the board is literally lighter than a 231g iPhone 17 Pro Max. While Honor isn’t the only one to achieve this (OPPO Find N6 is almost 225g), the weight makes both foldables equal in handling when compared to a premium bar-type phone.

Another small detail is the 8.75-9mm thickness when folded. From this view, the Ivory White Honor Magic V6 shares the same thickness as a Pro Max iPhone, squaring off with equal portability. For comparison, OPPO Find N6 is at 8.93mm, so it’s not that far off.

While Honor did give reasons for its reduced 9mm profile (through the help of redesigned internals, an even thinner antenna, speaker chamber, SIM slot, USB-C port, NFC module, and smaller vibration motor), it did not explain how the Ivory White managed to be even thinner than the rest.

Honor Magic V6 is also one of the first consumer Android foldable phones to achieve IP68 and IP69-rated resistance against water and dust. Not only is it the highest IP rating so far (OPPO Find N6’s is IP58 and IP59), but it’s also on par with the ratings typically secured for premium bar-type phones.

Put together, foldable phones like the Honor Magic V6 are finally at a point where people can comfortably choose them over regular mobile phones. The rest depends on whether you can accept camera trade-offs and higher battery consumption, in favour of a bigger Main Display.

Honor also claimed that the 7.95-inch Main Display now has 33% improved impact resistance and 44% reduced crease depth. We’re not going to challenge its impact rating, but it’s clear that the shallower crease makes the panel remarkably adept at producing creaseless content when viewed dead-on. That said, it’s nowhere near as impressive as the OPPO Find N6’s creaseless form factor, which was difficult to discern by both sight and touch.

Magic V6’s Main Display also achieve accurate colours, fluidity, and sharpness, but the display leans on the dimmer side even at full brightness under shelter. The built-in speakers have a boxy sound signature, with clear mids dragged about by a bloated bass and hollow treble. 

Clasping it shut brings you to its 6.52-inch, 1080p outer screen that’s is a LTPO AMOLED daply (1-120Hz) with a max peak brightness of 6,000-nits. It also has a quality-of-life feature in which the active app on your main screen transitions to the outer screen when you fold. Here, the display is visibly brighter. The standard 21:9 aspect ratio also makes it ideal for scrolling through text messages, email inboxes, and common single-app operation.

A word on pairing with Apple devices

Keen-eyed users would have noticed that one key feature of Honor Magic V6 is Honor Connect, which allows selective pairing to iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. On paper, it enables your iDevice’s notifications to appear on your Magic V6.

Setup is pretty simple: on your Apple device, install the Honor Connect app that’s officially available on Apple’s App Store. Pairing the foldable with your Apple device is as simple as scanning a QR code, granting notification permissions, and enabling Bluetooth on both devices.

There’s also no need for you to install the same apps on your Magic V6, since the notifications come through Honor Connect, which is already built into the foldable.

From our experience, it replicates the pings that appear in your iDevice’s notification centre, arriving in real time. You get the app name, the sender (if any), and a few lines describing the contents. The entire notification history also sits within the Honor Connect feature inside your Magic V6, so you can see stuff that you previously missed out on before reaching out to your iPhone.

All this is transmitted via Bluetooth. Not only must your iPhone be near your Magic V6, but it will also constantly sap battery on both devices until it’s switched off. We actually favour this arrangement for security reasons; it would be dangerous if someone else remotely paired their Magic V6 with your iPhone and started receiving all incoming notifications, especially OTP and 2FA ones.

Only Notification Centre pings (those on your lock screen) from your iPhone are cloned to your Magic V6. This is an important point because the iPhone lets you to limit the appearance of notifications (as do Android devices). If you’ve limited an iPhone app to only give you banners or badges, the notification also won’t appear on Honor Connect on your Magic V6.

It’s quite impressive that Honor got such an ambitious feature correct on the first try, given its history with creating janky software add-ons. We’re definitely bumping up its User Friendliness score thanks to this helpful little add-on. It’s especially handy if you have an iPad somewhere in the house, or if your company-issued phone is an iPhone that you put away after hours.

Separately, Magic V6 also supports Screen Extension on Macs, allowing you to use the foldable as an extra panel to view your Mac’s screen. This requires the Honor Super Workstation app on your Mac. We didn’t have the opportunity to test this, but it’s worth noting if you also have a Mac device lying about.

Imaging performance

We don’t really expect too much from the imaging performance of foldables, but the Honor Magic V6 went ahead to include a triple rear camera array:

• 50MP main (f/1.6 aperture) with OIS, 23mm equivalent
• 50MP ultrawide (f/2.2)
• 64MP periscope telephoto with 3x optical zoom (70mm equivalent) and CIPA 6.5-grade OIS

Of note is the 3x optical zoom, which helps to round off the shooting versatility of the Magic V6. While these cameras are on par with the OPPO Find N6 on paper, the photos below should tell us whether they suffice and whether they can beat OPPO’s co-opted Hasselblad colour science.

To get 35mm equivalent shooting, all it takes is two taps on the 1x icon to achieve 1.5x zoom.

From our experience, the Honor Magic V6 leans very strongly into its colour correction smarts to deliver a balanced image. That also applies to how the phone handles highlights and shadows, but the result can vary, like getting escalators that are too dark to see even in a naturally lit shopping mall.

What drives its overall imaging prowess is the 3x optical zoom camera, which lets you capture sharp photos even when zoomed in. At 6x (digital zoom), details start getting lost, but that’s par for the course for many phone cameras when they aren’t using optical zoom and need digital correction to prioritise the basics of what makes a pleasant photo (colour, sharpness, exposure).

A good example is the boardwalk below, where you can see that its 3x optical zoom still reads indvidual planks as best as they can. At 6x, it starts to disappear, and this is with very sufficient lighting (a scorching hot afternoon).

It does have a muted palette when compared to the Find N6 foldable, and the opposite is also true: OPPO’s take on photos follows a mildly dramatised vibe, where nuance gives way to vibrant colours while keeping details intact. On the other hand, Honor Magic V6’s focusing is less picky, being able to maintain edge-to-edge sharpness. The OPPO Find N6 makes it clear that it wants to be a focal point, whether that’s your intention or not.

The Honor Magic V6 feels sufficient if you’re not scrutinising your photos too deeply, or if you want images that look and feel sharp at default focal lengths. It may be easier to shoot with a Magic V6 than a Find N6, but the latter offers greater expression and better detail.

Benchmark Performance

Honor Magic V6 is the second premium foldable in Singapore with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, pitting it directly against the OPPO Find N6 (S$2,599 for 512GB storage).

For users who don’t follow processor news, this means both foldables from Honor and OPPO are the earliest adopters of Qualcomm’s best 2026 mobile platform. Alternatives like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 and Galaxy TriFold are running on last year’s premium processors. Those aren’t bad, given that high-end mobile processors are powerful enough to run high-end graphics and compute these days.

Results here are based on default Balanced Mode power and battery tuning. More information below.

It’s puzzling. The Magic V6 uses the full-fat 8-core version of this premium chip, yet it underperforms next to the OPPO Find N6’s 7-core variant (which has one fewer efficiency core). It also underperformed next to its predecessor and the older Galaxy Z Fold7.

We’ve taken extensive measures to re-run Geekbench’s CPU benchmark to arrive at this score:

• It’s running on the latest Honor-recommended firmware version, and using its default Balanced Mode for performance and battery output.
• Multiple retries after deleting and reinstalling the benchmark through Google Play Store.
• Factory resetted the phone to repeat the benchmark again.
• Asked Honor to run the benchmark on their phones, and to take photos of the results (similar to our findings).

The score is sadly, consistent, on both ours and Honor’s foldable.

We’ve also checked with two Honor spokespersons to confirm that there were no significant modifications to our review unit. It’s ready for retail but marked for media review.

In its current state (and after trying a variety of methods and multiple units), this shows that optimisation on Honor’s end still has a long way to go before it’s at the same level as the big boys like Samsung (which pays for branded customisation) and OPPO (which milks every ounce of performance they can get, even if they cut some parts).

The Honor Magic V6 also peaked at 40°C during its most intense benchmarking run, which is still comfortable enough to hold in hand, yet high enough to signify it was truly pulling every ounce of power it could manage. In real-world scenarios, there’s no visible stuttering or performance hiccups, as expected of the chipset of this calibre. 

Battery Life

Our battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life, with results shown in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage, such as web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing, and more. The test starts at 100% and ends with 20% left on the device.

Honor Magic V6 uses a 6,600mAh silicon-carbon battery, which is newer than lithium-ion types. In fact, its silicon-carbon mix comes with 25% silicon content, which is 9% more than what Honor claims is the industry average. 

At nearly 12 hours of uptime (average of multiple benchmark attempts), the Honor Magic V6 clocked in ~3 hours more than its predecessor and ~1 hour 20 minutes more than the lithium-ion Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. 

However, it was no match for the OPPO Find N6’s ~17 hours of uptime (5 hours more than the Magic V6). This speaks in favour towards OPPO’s amazing silicon-carbon blend, coupled with ColorOS’s optimisations, allowing it to last much longer on a smaller capacity (6,000mAh for Find N6).

From this, we know Honor made a great effort to improve its foldable battery efficiency, which deserves praise despite not beating the best that’s out there.

The 80W wired charging achieved 0-50% charge in ~25 minutes and 0-100% charge in ~90 minutes. The 66W wireless charging is located below its rear cameras, but you’ll need a compatible puck to use it.

Conclusion

All in all, the Honor Magic V6 is a pleasant foldable smartphone that meets the bare minimum in premium expectations, and its shortcomings are few. We liked its notification compatibility with Apple devices and its beautiful double-Ds (D for displays).

Notable weaknesses are the lower performance draw and lower battery uptime against its main competition here, OPPO Find N6. Arguably, power and battery are two of the most important factors (aside from its display and software), so it’s unfortunate that Honor hasn’t caught up in this space despite improving year-on-year. 

Where it excels is the durability and build (achieving IP68 and IP69 and its overall slimness), the colour accuracy and smoothness of both displays, and a handy Honor Connect feature for Apple notifications that’s new to its MagicOS operating system.

If the Honor Magic V6 came in at a price tag similar to past years, we can confidently say that it’s a much better foldable to get than before. However, that’s not the case here. Refer to the table below.

A S$600 increase since the return of Honor to the Singapore market is a massive 30% difference, and S$400 (18%) is still a lot of money if we strictly compare it to its predecessor (which is also a decent foldable).

As highlighted in our opening text, we recognise that it was likely a difficult decision for Honor to make. Perhaps the memory shortage, ongoing AI fever, and an uncertain outlook have not been kind to Honor.

One hint lies in its pricing decision. S$2,599 (512GB) is also exactly S$100 less than the (Editor’s Choice) OPPO Find N6’s 512GB variant, despite lacking the same level of power optimisation, battery efficiency, and camera R&D. OPPO’s foldable may have the better value proposition, but it’s also possible that Honor’s price point is at the lowest possible this cycle, all while having to protect margins, uphold innovation, and not end up in a worse position. After all, a more expensive foldable beats having no device at all (remember LG Mobile?).

Honor has also made it difficult for Samsung users to consider switching from their Galaxy Z Fold7 (which also got our Editor’s Choice). While the 512GB variant is significantly pricier at S$2,878 (now cheaper if you can find a good promotion), the Samsung foldable still outperforms in terms of compute using an older processor and has a cleaner design with much stronger overall appeal, with finer software and UX polish.

We also recognise that a user’s wallet is less forgiving, especially when the price increase is so steep. Plus, it’s not our business to tell you how to spend your money. It’s just painful to see that what was once an equal foldable with strong value, become another pedestrian option in a pool of premium rivals within reach. The Magic V6 has to bet big on locking in on its biggest fans. 

That said, those fans would be very happy to own one, as the Honor Magic V6 is easily the best foldable smartphone it has managed thus far. It’s just a bad time to be a lover of technology today.