The US sanctions on Huawei also affected its subsidiary Honor. In a bid to keep the company alive, Huawei and Honor split in 2020, with the latter beingsold to a Chinese government-backed consortium. Since then, Honor has launched a slate of impressive devices, like the Honor 90, theMagic 5 Pro, and the impressively thin open-book foldableMagic V2. With Qualcomm’s next-genSnapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipofficially out, Chinese manufacturers are in a race to announce their next flagship phone. Not to be left behind, Honor teased the Magic 6 and its AI-powered features at the ongoing Snapdragon Summit.
Honor did not fully reveal the Magic 6 but shared some key details about it. The company will leverage the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip’s generative AI language models to upgrade its personal assistant YOYO to use the on-device language models. This will enable the assistant to work on the Honor Magic 6 without sending any data to Honor’s servers, making it more privacy-friendly. You can even ask the assistant to generate a new highlight clip from all your photos or videos, with the template, theme, and music being fully customizable using additional prompts.
The Honor Magic 6 will also offer Magic Capsule to deliver a new way of interacting with your phone. The feature will use “eye-tracking based multimodal interaction,” allowing you to control the phone with your gaze. During the on-stage teaser video, Honor showcased the Uber app running at the top of a screen, which the woman holding the Honor 6 opened in full by simply changing her gaze’s direction.
This was not a real-life demonstration of the feature, though, so it remains to be seen how it will work in daily use. The 2012Galaxy S3 also had an Eye Tracking feature, but it was a gimmicky mess. Honor might be using IR blasters and some gestures for Magic Capsule, as the Magic 6 has a small Dynamic Island-like notch on the front housing more than just a selfie camera.
WithSnapdragon 8 Gen 3 going all in on AI, all upcoming Android flagships could leverage its power to deliver new AI-powered features. What will be interesting to see is how useful these additions are in real life.
There’s no word on when the Honor Magic 6 will ship. But given that the company has teased the device, it could launch before the end of the year, at least in China. It won’t be the first to the market with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered phone. Xiaomi will take that crown, as it is set to announce the Xiaomi 14 series running HyperOS instead of MIUI alongside a new smartwatch in China on October 26th.
