Forty thousand rand.
That was the number we walked into The Venue in Melrose Arch looking for this afternoon, and HONOR gave it up without much drama. The Magic V6 lands locally on 1 September at an RRP of R39 999, in red, with a HONOR Watch 6 thrown in, through Vodacom and Cell C.
So now we can have the actual conversation, which was never about the spec sheet because this device was announced months ago globally, and specs have been covered extensively.
What it costs, and what it really costs
R39 999 outright is roughly where we expected this to land, and against the competition it’s not as bad as it looks.
So the Magic V6 comes in under the cheapest Fold 8 in the range, and the 512GB variant, undercuts the equivalent Samsung by six thousand rand while being thinner and carrying a meaningfully bigger battery.
Then there is the contract.
HONOR is offering the V6 from R1 599 a month over 36 months. Multiply that out and you get R57 564.
That is R17 565 more than the cash price, for the privilege of paying slowly. We have written about this before and nothing about it has improved. If you can pay cash, pay cash. If you cannot pay cash for a R40 000 phone, then sit down and think about it for a minute before you sign a three-year contract for one.
Out of the four colourways the Magic V6 ships in globally, South Africa gets exactly one. Red. If you wanted the black or the gold, that decision has been made for you, thanks HONOR.
The phone itself is genuinely very good. It is also not for most of you.
This is not in any way a knock on the hardware.
We covered the specs in this morning’s piece and in February, so the short version. The V6 folds to 8.75mm, opens to 4.0mm, weighs 219g, and carries a 6,660mAh silicon-carbon battery, which remains the largest ever fitted to a foldable. There is 80W wired and 66W wireless charging, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and a 64MP periscope telephoto that is the most interesting camera on the device.
The durability story also holds up very well. IP68 and IP69 together, a Super Steel hinge rated to 500 000 folds, and an anti-scratch NanoCrystal Shield on the outside. HONOR has clearly decided that the way to sell foldables in 2026 is to stop asking people to be careful with them, and that is the right read.
The Apple interoperability is the underrated feature. HONOR Connect and HONOR Share now work with iPhone, Mac, AirPods and Apple Watch, which sounds like a footnote until you are the one person in a family of iPhone users trying to move a video off your phone.
But let’s be honest about who this is for. HONOR positioned it at the event as the device for CEOs and captains of industry, and while that is marketing language, the price does the same job. At R39 999 this is a device for people who will genuinely use a 7.95-inch screen for work every day. If you are buying it because it folds, you are spending R20 000 on a party trick and that applies to any foldable today.
Dare to Be, and a room full of captains
HONOR also used the afternoon to reveal a new logo and a new brand slogan, Dare to Be, anchored by an ambassador roster that is doing a lot of work: Connie Ferguson, Mia le Roux, Sheldon Tatchell andTemba Bavuma.
The panel discussion was the usual format, but the ambassador choices are smart. When I think of a great captain, Bavuma instantly comes to mind, which lines up neatly with the positioning, and former Miss SA, Mia le Roux brings something really genuine to a technology conversation that most celebrity partnerships do not.
HONOR SA CEO Fred Zhou framed the afternoon as an ecosystem play rather than a phone launch, and the rest of the line-up backed that up.
The HONOR Pad 20 arrives 8 September at R11 999, Vodacom exclusive, with a keyboard, stylus and mouse bundled in. It is 6.29mm thin, 525g, with a 12.1-inch 3K display, and it is aimed squarely at back to school.
This was the real winner for me. Once you price the keyboard and stylus separately on anything comparable, R11 999 for the whole working setup is genuinely good value, and it will do more for more households than the R40 000 foldable will.
The HONOR MagicBook X14 2026 also lands 8 September at R16 499 through Vodacom, Telkom and Cell C, with a backpack and mouse. Fourteen inch display, 60Wh battery, 65W charging, and the new Intel Core 3 304 processor. This is a sensible if unexciting device and correctly priced.
About that Robot Phone
Now for the part that got the most reaction in the room.
HONOR showed the Robot Phone, and we got hands-on time with it. To be clear about what happened, this was a showcase, not a launch. The Robot Phone remains a China exclusive and is not coming to South Africa.
What it actually is, is a smartphone with a “four degrees-of-freedom” motorised camera arm built on what HONOR calls a Titanium Agile Gimbal, developed across 60 manufacturing processes with over 100 precision components and more than 100 patents. It moves and tracks its subject, it does Tilt Lock, first person view, and something called AI SpinShot.
There is also an ARRI partnership behind it, which is not nothing. ARRI makes the cameras most of your favourite films were shot on, and the Robot Phone carries ARRI LogC3, ARRI Wide Gamut 3 and ARRI Looks running on HONOR’s H1 image chip.
As an engineering achievement, it is legitimately impressive. Holding it, you can feel how much work went into making that mechanism that small.
Calling it a robot phone, though, is a stretch. It is a phone with a robotic camera and some clever AI on top of it. That is a gimbal with ambitions, not a robot.
And beyond hardcore content creators, the use case is hard to find. At least on this first generation. Most people do not need their camera to move by itself, and the ones who do already own a gimbal.
Here’s what’s to be applauded though. The rest of this industry has spent two years shipping the same slab with a slightly better camera and a new AI feature nobody asked for. HONOR built something genuinely strange and put it on a stage. The technology from that ARRI partnership is heading into the Magic9 series, which means the weird experiment is going to pay for itself in devices you can actually buy.
And honestly, we could do with a lot more of that.
