Honor Magic 6 RSR Review: Still cheaper than a real Porsche

Reviewing a luxury phone is always a slippery slope. Normally, these posh gadgets belong in Guy Ritchie's movies, where the super-rich Russian billionaire tries to buy an exclusive Porsche from the UK grand theft auto mafia and uses the proper phone to make the deal. You get the picture.

This time around, though, things are a little bit different because the Honor Magic 6 RSR Porsche Design is actually another phone under cover, more or less. And getting the RSR also happens to be the only way to own the aforementioned model (okay, let's not be cryptic about it; it's the Honor Magic 6 Ultimate) outside China.

These two are almost identical, barring some design elements and material choices, so you should look at this review not solely as a luxury phone piece but also as the Honor Magic 6 Ultimate review that never happened.

We already know how good the regular Magic 6 Pro is, so let's see how this RSR edition improves on that. And whether or not normal people, who aren't necessarily Russian mob, should consider getting this phone. Here we go!

Let's start with an overview of the Honor Magic 6 RSR Porsche Design specs:

The biggest and most obvious difference between the Magic 6 RSR Porsche Design and its regular sibling lies in… the design! If you're wondering about the subheading, Frozen Berry is one of the colors available, and it's taken straight from the Porsche Taycan palette. The Magic 6 RSR is also available in Agate Grey, another Porsche color typical of 911s and Carreras.

The overall design is very sleek and stylish, with a hood-like ridge going through the center of the back and "Porsche Design" written next to it. The camera bump is also different in shape than both the original Magic 6 Pro and the Chinese Ultimate. This hexagonal camera module is inspired by the "Flyline" design philosophy - which is described as a "sporty roofline sloping downward to the rear."

The huge 180MP periscope zoom camera sits on top of the main and ultrawide lenses in this arrangement, and there's a titanium frame around the camera module with some of the specs engraved for all to see. Pretty classy.

The back and front are made out of glass, but it's not your regular Gorilla Glass. It's NanoCrystal Shield, a proprietary tempered and hardened glass developed by Honor. We can't say if it's better than Victur or Armor, as we're not doing drop tests here, but this material feels great in the hand, and it did not pick a single scratch during our testing period. Honor markets this special glass as anti-scratch thanks to the silicon nitride inside, and we can attest to this claim.

Actually, in the review guidelines, Honor suggested running the back of the RSR against asphalt, marble, or sandpaper, so I felt compelled to try this. The granite kitchen top at home did nothing to the back of the Honor Magic 6 RSR, and I also slid the phone down an asphalt walkway with no visible damage to the back.

Overall, the Magic 6 RSR comes with unique design features and build materials as well. It's a stylish phone, and I got asked about it several times during the test run.

Another major difference is the retail package. The RSR Porsche Design comes in a big, luxury-looking box with some case candy in it. Our review sample came with two (not one but two) charging bricks, both 100W, one with a European two-prong plug and another one, which is a UK standard with three connectors.

There's also a very nice cover included as well. It matches the color; it has a nice hexagonal pattern with soft cushioning on the inside and faux leather with stitching on the outside. You also get a warranty card and a cable. Nothing too wild like a die-cast model of a Porsche (which would've been nice), but it's better than a regular retail box for sure.

Time to talk about the display and this very interesting 5,000-nit claim. To be fair, Honor provided a typical brightness rating as well, still pretty high at 1,800 nits. The company calls this panel a dual-layer Tandem screen, which, apart from the higher brightness, is supposed to extend the life of the display by 600%.

Further down the display specs sheet, we have more numbers. This LTPO OLED sports a 6.8-inch diagonal and a resolution of 1280 x 2800 pixels. The highest refresh rate is 120 Hz, and this panel can also display 1 billion colors. Now let's take a look at the test results.

This dual-layer Tandem display turned out to be exceptionally bright, as advertised. The Magic 6 RSR topped our brightness chart with a score of 1,726 nits. The color temperature and color accuracy are also excellent: 6525 Kelvins and 1.56 average deltaE, respectively. You won't have any troubles under direct sunlight, and it won't burn your retinas either, with a minimum brightness of 2.1 nits.

As far as biometrics go, the Magic 6 RSR sports both fingerprint ID and face recognition. Both work well, but the usual caveats with all under-display scanners apply here as well. You need to know where to place your finger every time; any imperfections might hamper the scanner, and it's still slower than a physical capacitive reader.

Video tops at 4K and 60fps, which should be more than enough for almost everybody. There's optical image stabilization working in tandem with gyro-EIS (electronic stabilization), doing a pretty decent job. What do you think about the video sample? Does it look good? We think it looks great, and it's a decent tool to film your child misbehaving at an early age (or something more appropriate, but real-life samples sometimes turn out this way).

The synthetic benchmarks paint an expected picture. The Magic 6 RSR is on par with other Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 equipped phones, even beating some of them here and there (one of the highest 3DMarks scores as well).

In real-life scenarios, the phone feels very snappy and fluid. There's no lag whatsoever, and everything feels extremely fast. There's no microSD card, but with 1TB of built-in storage and 24GB of RAM, this model is future-proof.

The Magic 6 RSR comes with Android 14 out of the box, and it has MagicOS on top of it. Honor's proprietary UI comes with the same bells and whistles as the regular Magic 6 Pro, AI-infused features such as Magic Portal, Magic Capsule (Dynamic Island, anyone?), and AI Privacy Calls.

However, really cool features such as navigation using eye-tracking remain China-only, at least for the time being. There are also Porsche-inspired themes and icons, so the RSR software looks different compared to a normal Magic 6 Pro or Ultimate.

I won't go into too much detail about the software. It's the same as what we have in Magic 6 Pro; you can check out the full review for a quick software feature overview. Long story short, it's functional and helpful, but still not on the same level as Gemini or Galaxy AI.

When it comes to software support, the Magic 6 RSR offers four major OS updates and five years of security patches. Not the seven years Google and Samsung are offering, but still not bad.

Let's talk charging. The phone can take up to 80W of power through a wire, and with the provided 100W brick, it charges from zero to full in 43 minutes. The Magic 6 RSR supports up to 66W of wireless charging power (we weren't able to test this due to a lack of proper charging hardware, but we're working on it).