I spent months testing the Honor Magic V6, and I'm not sure how foldables can get much better than this

As a person who reviews dozens upon dozens of different kinds of phones every year, I've long struggled with whether I prefer a foldable or a slab phone. Book-style foldables, like the Galaxy Z Fold or Honor Magic V series, are synonymous with multitasking and productivity, something I find myself using a lot as a remote worker.

But these phones have always come with significant tradeoffs in other areas. From worse battery life and camera quality to poorer heat management and durability issues, it felt like choosing a foldable phone was only good for a specific type of person. That's what makes the Honor Magic V6 different.

It's a foldable phone with a gorgeous, eye-friendly pair of OLEDs, the world's highest-capacity battery in a foldable, a top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, amazing software, and cameras that finally don't make me miss using a standard flagship phone. It's the first time I've felt like a foldable phone came with zero compromises, and it's easily the best foldable experience to date.

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By the numbers

The Honor Magic V6 is available across Europe, the Middle East, and throughout Asia. The phone retails for £1,999.99 in the UK, RM 7,699 in Malaysia, and CNY 8,999 in China, with the launch expanding to the remaining locations throughout June 2026. Early orders include lots of freebies from Honor, including headphones, watches, and projectors.

The Magic V6 is available in four colorways — Gold, Red, White, and Black — and just one configuration with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Honor includes a charger and a fancy case in the box, so you're fully set with just the phone purchase.

A tough design and the best displays in the business

The Magic V6 is more of a tweak on the Magic V5's design. I dislike the squarer edges on this versus the Magic V5, but the V6's substantially smaller camera island makes all the difference in the world regarding weight, size, and overall balance when holding it. It also doesn't protrude from my pocket as the V5 did because of the reduced camera island size.

This phone looks as elegant as the Galaxy Z Fold 7's thin design, but with a centered camera island, it doesn't feel off-balance like that phone does. Honor also managed to make this one IP68 and IP69 rated, so you can take it to a sandy beach and then toss it in the dishwasher to get all the grime off at the end of the day.

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Honor's OLED displays are the best in the business, too, providing not only leading brightness output and 10-bit color reproduction among foldable phones, but also excellent eye care solutions like the myopia-reducing defocus feature, as well as user-selectable dimming options up to 4320Hz PWM dimming for flicker-sensitive people.

For the first time ever on a foldable, both displays feature an anti-glare layer that substantially reduces glare from any light source, making it easier to see outside. It's not quite the same type that Samsung uses on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but it's a huge leap forward for foldables.

With the release of MagicOS 10, Honor addressed most of my biggest complaints with its Android flavor. The Magic V6 gets all the best foldable Android multitasking tools out of the box, including an optional persistent taskbar on the bottom of the larger display, 3-way 90:10 split-screen multitasking, and even more enhancements to its unique Magic Portal sharing feature.

There's even a new optional "stack" recents UI that apes iOS, which I'm happy with since that UI is substantially better than the awful default Android one. The inner screen still defaults to the 6-app grid, which is perfect for a tablet-like display.

But there are still some weird quirks that bother me daily. Many apps "don't support" split-screen, which makes absolutely no sense. Splitting these apps on the large screen would just make them the same ratio as the smaller outer display. I also still get annoyed with the app drawer, which takes a long time to open if you quickly go home and try to pull up the drawer again.

MagicOS is pure magic

And while those are annoying complaints, I truly enjoy Honor's ecosystem of products and how well they work together. I get message and call notifications on my Honor laptop, can easily run my phone's apps on that same machine, quickly transfer files between them, set up a hotspot (that doesn't use my carrier's hotspot data), and more.

Honor also heavily touts its interoperability with Apple products — something I care very little about — but it will undoubtedly come in handy for plenty of people. From Mac one-tap sharing and screen casting to notification sharing between the Magic V6, Apple Watches, and iPhones, plus native AirPods controls. There's a lot to explore here. And, yes, it supports the new Apple AirDrop/Google Quick Share interoperability for each iPhone to Android file sharing.

Battery life is what you would expect from a phone with a 25% silicon-carbon 6,660mAh battery inside. A full day's heavy use is a walk in the park for this phone, and I often get well into the second day before even considering charging. I don't have a North American-compatible 80W charger for this phone (the one on the box is for European power), but my 65W U.S. chargers were able to give me more than 70% battery in less than 30 minutes.

As with other book-style foldables, sustained performance on the Honor Magic V6 is best when the phone is unfolded. I put a lot of hours into the Monster Hunter Outlanders open beta while reviewing this phone and never ran across performance issues, even at the highest settings.

The best cameras in a foldable phone

The Honor Magic V6 has the best camera on any foldable outside of China. If that's all you needed to hear, you can stop here. I've taken over 1,000 photos using this phone since I received it in March, and am constantly blown away by its quality.

Most foldables up to this point have very obviously worse cameras than their similarly priced non-foldable flagship phones, and while the Magic 8 Pro is still slightly better, this is the first time I haven't felt compelled to have one of those phones in my other pocket just in case I needed to take a better photo.

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I put it head-to-head against the Motorola Razr Fold's camera and found that Honor generally won the competition. However, Motorola's processing tends to do a better job of balancing highlights and shadow detail in more extreme scenes.

But Honor's telephoto experience won nine times out of ten, delivering higher-resolution, more detailed photography with gorgeous depth of field, and the Magic V6 beat the Galaxy Z Fold 7's cameras in every scenario I tested.

Verdict

If money were no object and I had to choose any foldable in June 2026, it would be the Honor Magic V6. That, of course, implies that I'd even be able to buy one in North America, which is an obvious problem since there's no official after-market support here, even if you buy one through an import company. That's particularly a shame since it works so perfectly on the T-Mobile U.S. 5G network.

But if you live in Europe, Malaysia, or any of the other markets where Honor sells the Magic V6, this is absolutely the best foldable money can buy. It's gorgeous, has the most durable build of any foldable, sports the best displays (without sacrificing eye health features), has the best camera of any foldable outside of China, uses the highest-capacity battery, and has tons of fun software features you're going to love.

It's hard to imagine foldables getting much better than this.