Honor announces Magic v6, its thinnest foldable yet, and some nice extras at MWC

Honor is going big once again at MWC, a show at which it’s made itself very comfortable over the last couple of years. It just unveiled a pretty comprehensive new suite of devices, including another flagship folding phone and a pretty tempting Android alternative to the iPad.

The big headliner this year is the Honor Magic v6, the obvious follow-up to the Magic v5 from a couple of years ago. This is very much Honor trying to mount a sort of insurgent campaign in the folding phone space, to grab some of that market share that Samsung’s so proud of.

It’s got a thickness of just 8.75mm when it’s folded, an impressive marker at a time when sheer slimness has become a pretty key stat for foldables. It also embraces silicon-carbon battery tech, to pack in a 6,660mAh battery, which should reassure those who’ve found foldable phones to be battery hogs in recent years. That just so happens to be the biggest battery in any foldable available today.

Displays are the core of the foldable experience, obviously, and two LTPO screens in this case should excel. It’s a 6.52-inch external display and a 7.95-inch one when unfolded, both with adaptive refresh rates up to 120Hz. Crucially, Honor says it’s reduced the crease depth on the folding display by 44%, making it more imperceptible.

All of this is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and Honor’s keen to point out that it’s got the first foldable with that flagship at its core. It should make for super-smooth performance, although you shouldn’t be too shocked if there are soon others with similar boasts.

Away from the phone, Honor’s also launched the MagicPad 4 and MagicBook Pro 14 – both of which look to be aimed squarely at Apple. The MagicPad 4 is an iPad-esque Android tablet that has a hugely sleek design, at just 4.8mm thick. It’s also got a 12.3-inch 3K OLED display with 165Hz refresh rate, and I’ve been using it for a week or so: it’s a beauty.

It has the same Snapdragon chip as the Magic v6, and a battery that comes in at over 10,000mAh, for genuinely impressive battery life potential. Plus, that thickness makes it thinner than the iPad Air or iPad Pro, which isn't to be sniffed at. That said, its price of £599.99 also isn't to be ignored.

The MagicBook Pro 14, meanwhile, brings Intel’s latest generation of processors to the table, the Core Ultra Series 3. That makes for superb power to back up its 14.6-inch OLED display. Frankly, it should be a banker for light gaming, too, based on my recent experimentation with these chipsets.

To round things off, Honor seems to have wilfully grabbed the opportunity to again point people at its so-called Robot Phone, complete with its own little gimbal and camera. Whether the concept wins people over is something I’ll be interested in through the next few months.