The Honor Magic 6 will bring Apple Vision Pro’s coolest feature to your pocket
Earlier this year, former Huawei subsidiary Honor wowed us with its excellent flagship Honor Magic 5 Pro, and the company’s next big phone release – the Honor Magic 6 – has the potential to be equally impressive.
While innovative display technology was the focus of the Magic 5 Pro, the Honor Magic 6 will (surprise!) put AI at the heart of its offering. Harnessing the power of Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset – which we know has the potential to bring useful AI functionality to smartphone users – Honor says its upcoming device will be an on-device large language model (LLM ) will use to “a new era of generative AI.”
What exactly does that mean? Well, at Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Summit, Honor gave us a sneak peek at some of the exciting new features made possible by this built-in LLM. And one of them – Magic Capsule – appears to have taken cues from Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset.
Honor describes Magic Capsule as an “eye-tracking-based multimodal interaction,” which, in layman’s terms, means you can navigate certain parts of the Honor Magic 6 interface using just your eyes (in a similar way to Apple Vision Pro).
We say ‘certain parts’ because it seems like Magic Capsule refers to a Dynamic Island-like digital cutout at the top of the phone’s display. Presumably this eye-tracking technology will be limited to that notch, but it’s still exciting to think that a consumer smartphone could soon offer this kind of hands-free functionality.
At Snapdragon Summit 2023, Honor shared a render of Magic Capsule in action. The short clip (above) shows a woman opening the Uber app by changing the direction of her gaze, so it looks like all kinds of apps could take advantage of the feature in the Honor Magic 6.
In addition to Magic Capsule, the Honor Magic 6 will also feature a virtual assistant, YOYO, which uses Qualcomm’s on-device AI to respond even when you’re offline.
Honor says this assistant can answer specific questions for you, and “create short videos using photos and footage stored on (your) device.” Sure, that all sounds a bit creepy, but this seems to be the general direction the entire mobile industry is going at the moment.
Honor hasn’t given a timetable for the release of the Magic 6, but since the company debuted the Magic 5 Pro at MWC Barcelona 2023, we’ll likely see the new phone unveiled at MWC Barcelona 2024.