Honor Magic V6 Review: 3 Foldable Firsts, 1 That Actually Matters

Three world firsts sounds like a compelling pitch. But when you sit down with the Honor Magic V6 — the foldable phone Honor is betting its global hardware reputation on — you quickly realize that headline figures and lived experience don’t always line up. Two of those records are so marginal they’re functionally invisible. The third, though, genuinely changes how you use the phone. In a market that’s rapidly running out of easy wins, that might just be enough.

• The Honor Magic V6 claims the title of world’s thinnest foldable phone at just 4mm open.
• The Honor Magic V6 packs a 6,660mAh battery — bigger than any rival foldable — delivering genuine two-day life.
• MagicOS remains the device’s biggest weakness, with a cluttered UI and weaker multitasking than Oppo’s software.
• Honor promises seven years of OS and security updates, matching Google and Samsung’s support commitments.

Honor Magic V6: Three Records, One Win

Start with the thinness claim, because it’s the one Honor leads with. At 4mm open and 8.75mm closed (in the white version — other colors land at 9mm), the Honor Magic V6 is technically the thinnest foldable on the planet. To put that in context, closed it sits at roughly the same thickness as an iPhone 17 Pro Max. That’s a genuine engineering achievement worth acknowledging.

The catch? It’s just 0.05mm slimmer than last year’s Magic V5. That’s approximately the width of a human hair. You won’t feel it in your hand. You won’t notice it in your pocket. It’s the kind of spec that lives in a press release and dies in a drawer. Honor has clearly squeezed everything it can out of the physical form factor, and that’s actually fine — but let’s not pretend it’s a reason to upgrade.

The second first is more interesting on paper: IP69 certification, a first for any foldable. Previous foldables, including the Magic V5, topped out at IP59. The Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold carries an IP68 rating. IP69 adds resistance to high-pressure, high-temperature water jets — the kind used in industrial cleaning equipment. It’s a meaningful spec for people who work in demanding environments, and it signals that Honor’s hinge engineering has matured considerably. For most buyers, though, the day-to-day peace of mind difference between IP68 and IP69 is minimal. High-pressure water jets aren’t a common hazard for smartphone owners.

Then there’s the battery — and this is where the Honor Magic V6 genuinely earns its headlines. The V6 ships with a 6,660mAh silicon-carbon cell globally (China gets an even bigger 7,150mAh variant), up from 5,820mAh in the V5. That’s not a rounding error — it’s a legitimate jump, and it shows in daily use. Where the V5 could last for a day and then some, the V6 delivers two full days without trying. Charge it every other night. Stop worrying. That’s the kind of upgrade that changes your relationship with a device, and it’s exactly what the foldable category needed.

The Specs You’d Expect — And the Ones You Won’t Get

Beyond the three headline numbers, the Honor Magic V6 reads like a comprehensive flagship checklist. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite powers the device, paired with up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Dual 120Hz OLED panels — one on the cover, one on the inner screen — deliver the sharp, fluid experience you’d now expect from anything in this price range. There’s a triple rear camera, stylus support, and fast wireless charging on board. These aren’t differentiators anymore. They’re table stakes.

What’s missing is Qi2 support, which feels like a small but irritating omission at this price point. And while the triple camera system is genuinely impressive for a foldable — arguably second only to Oppo’s Find N6 in this form factor — it still can’t match the top-tier slab phones from Samsung, Apple, or Google. Smaller sensors mean compromised low-light performance, and Honor’s processing leans toward heavy saturation with occasionally inconsistent color science. Good cameras. Not great cameras. That compromise hasn’t gone away.

The crease — that unavoidable flaw running down the center of every book-style foldable — is present and reasonably subtle on the Honor Magic V6, but it’s noticeably more visible than on Oppo’s Find N6, which has set a new benchmark for near-invisible fold lines. For some buyers this won’t matter at all. For others, it’s the first thing they notice every time they open the phone.

MagicOS Is Still the Weak Link

Hardware stories are relatively easy to tell. Software stories are harder — and less flattering for Honor. MagicOS, the company’s Android skin, remains the single biggest reason to hesitate before buying the Honor Magic V6 over its main rival.

The UI is busy. Honor has loaded the phone with its own-brand apps that you can’t easily remove, and the overall aesthetic has drifted toward something that feels increasingly derivative of Apple’s Liquid Glass design language — which is a strange choice for an Android manufacturer trying to stand out. More practically, the multitasking experience lags behind what Oppo has built. Split-screen management, floating windows, and app continuity across the inner and outer displays all feel less polished than on the Find N6. For a device where the whole point is using that big inner screen productively, that matters.

There is a silver lining: Honor is committing to seven years of OS and security updates for the Magic V6. That matches the support windows offered by Google and Samsung, and it’s two years more than Oppo currently promises. For a phone that costs the best part of $2,000, longevity matters enormously. The question is whether you’d want to spend seven years with MagicOS as your daily interface.

A Mature Market Getting Harder to Crack

Honor launched the Magic V6 at MWC in Barcelona back in February, but the phone is only now reaching global markets. It’s available in Malaysia and Singapore priced at RM 7,699 (roughly $1,930), with the UK and European rollout following shortly after. That’s a significant amount of money for a phone whose main selling point, outside of battery life, is incremental refinement.

But context matters here. The foldable phone market in 2025 looks nothing like it did three years ago. Book-style Android foldables have genuinely matured — they’re proper flagship alternatives, not engineering curiosities. Huawei’s Pura X Max is experimenting with unusual aspect ratios. Trifolds are carving out their own premium niche. And later this year, both Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 and a rumored foldable iPhone are expected to arrive, the latter potentially reshaping consumer expectations overnight.

Honor deserves credit for being one of the manufacturers that made this category credible. The Magic series has consistently pushed hardware boundaries — thinner hinges, better waterproofing, larger batteries — and the Honor Magic V6 continues that tradition even when the gains are marginal. The company has earned the right to a more conservative hardware cycle. What it hasn’t yet earned is a pass on software. MagicOS needs the kind of overhaul that Honor applied to its hardware two generations ago.

When Apple eventually enters this market — presumably with the polish and ecosystem integration that only Apple can deliver — foldable buyers will have more options than ever. The Honor Magic V6 will still be able to point to that battery. That might not sound like much. But in a category where the compromise used to be everywhere, making one major problem disappear entirely is real progress.

Source: The Verge

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