Honor 600 Pro review: as iPhone-y as Android gets (but is that such a bad thing?) | Daily Reports Online
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Honor 600 Pro: Two-minute review
The Honor 600 Pro adopts a more premium look and feel compared to previous phones in the series, adding to the sensation that Honor is gunning harder than ever for the flagship brigade.
Honor’s display might be betwixt and between the competition in terms of size, but its quality is unimpeachable, with rich colours and ample brightness, not to mention an exemplary level of eye protection.
The 600 Pro’s performance, while not top of the pile, is good enough to make any shortfall academic, while its stamina and charging speeds are exemplary.
Honor hasn’t offered too much new in the camera department, but shots taken by the phone’s 200MP main camera remain sharp, and the new 3.5x telephoto camera gets you a little closer to the action than before.
Magic OS remains an acquired taste and is another element that seems just a little too in thrall to Apple’s work. I’d like to see Honor forging its own path in the future.
The company could do with easing its obsession with AI, too, with a few too many instances of AI-for-AI’s sake throughout the Magic OS 10 UI. Some of it’s useful, but a lot of it could be pared back.
It’s also somewhat concerning to note the steep price increase that seems to have accompanied the Honor 600 Pro’s launch. It no longer undercuts its high-end rivals anywhere near as aggressively, but the Honor 600 Pro joins an emerging breed of almost-flagships for those looking to save a little money without making too much of a compromise.
Honor 600 Pro review: price and availability
- Costs €999.99 (UK pricing hasn’t yet been confirmed)
- Available from May 6, 2026
- No US availability
The Honor 600 Pro will be available to buy from May 6, 2026. As ever with Honor devices, it won’t be receiving a release in the US or Australia, but it will be coming to Europe and the UK.
There’s just the single model on offer, which comes with 512GB of internal storage. This will cost €999.99 in European territories.
We aren’t able to share UK pricing just yet, but we can note that this European figure translates to about £870. From this, we can safely predict that the Honor 600 Pro is going to come in at somewhere around the £900 mark.
This pricing positions it well below most full-sized flagship phones, including the Pixel 10 Pro XL (€1,299/£1,199) and Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus (€1,249/£1,099). Instead, the 600 Pro sits alongside the likes of the OnePlus 15 (€949/£849) and Motorola Signature (€999/£899).
It’s worth noting, though, that the phone’s €999.99 price marks a considerable increase over that of its predecessor, the Honor 400 Pro, which landed last year for £699.99.
Honor 600 Pro review: specs
Here’s a breakdown of the Honor 600’s key specs:
| Header Cell – Column 0 | Header Cell – Column 1 |
|---|---|
Dimensions: | 156 x 74.7 x 7.8mm |
Weight: | 195g |
Display: | 6.57-inch AMOLED (2728 x 1264 ) up to 120Hz |
Chipset: | Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite |
RAM: | 12GB |
Storage: | 512GB |
OS: | Android 16 |
Primary camera: | 200MP 1/1.4-inch sensor |
Ultra-wide camera: | 12MP sensor |
Front Camera: | 50MP sensor |
Battery: | 6,400mAh |
Charging: | 80W wired |
Colors: | Golden White, Black |
Honor 600 Pro review: design
- Clear iPhone 17 Pro-indebted design
- IP68 / IP69 / IP69K dust and water resistance
- Nice in-betweener size
One thing you can’t accuse Honor of is sticking with the same design generation after generation. The Honor 600 Pro looks as different from the Honor 400 Pro as that phone looked from the Honor 200 Pro before it.
That’s not to say that the 600 Pro’s design is a breath of fresh air, however. While a lot of manufacturers have been taking a leaf out of the Apple design book lately, Honor has just grabbed the whole bound volume and legged it.
The Honor 600 Pro looks very much like the iPhone 17 Pro, from its flattened edges (including a dedicated camera/AI button) to its width-spanning camera module. Even the vaguely triangular configuration of its three camera modules and the positioning of the flash and sensor components are the same, though the ultra-wide camera has a slightly elongated look that sets it apart from Apple’s iPhone, at least.
Honor has even pinched Apple’s distinctive orange shade, though only for the Honor 600. The Pro model only comes in black or white, which is a little boring.
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All quibbles aside, this is clearly a very well-built phone, with comprehensive IP68, IP69, and IP69K dust and water resistance. It also boasts 5-star SGS crush and drop protection.
At 7.8mm thick and 195g, it also falls into that Goldilocks zone of being just the right size.
The most impressive design element can be found around the front of the phone, where a 0.98mm-thick bezel outshines all comers. Sat side-by-side with my iPhone 17 Pro, Apple’s flagship looks positively creaky.
One curious (and I’d argue unfortunate) rollback from the Honor 400 Pro relates to the selfie camera, which has lost its extended pill shape, and with it the ability to facilitate secure facial recognition. This is one area where Honor’s Apple obsession typically marks it apart from the rest of the Android crowd, so it’s a shame to see it taking a backseat on the 600 Pro.
Honor 600 Pro review: display
- 6.57-inch flat 120Hz OLED display
- 8,000 nits peak brightness
- 3,840Hz PWM dimming
At 6.57 inches, the Honor 600 Pro’s display is something of a ‘tweener, falling somewhere between the 6.3-inch crowd (the Pixel 10s and iPhone 17s of this world) and the 6.7-inch-plus bunch (most other phones).
It’s a beautiful screen, with a sharp 1264 x 2728 (aka 1.5K) resolution and a typical fluid refresh rate of 120Hz.
A good sign that a screen is particularly classy to me is if I’m happy with its colour output fresh out of the box. Most phones will go with an excessively punchy default color mode, prompting me to go rummaging around in the Settings menu, but I found the Honor 600 Pro’s Vivid mode to stay just the right side of distracting.
There are a pair of more muted, natural calibration options, should you still wish to rein in those reds some more.
This is a panel that gets nice and bright, too. Honor reckons that it can get to a startling 8000 nits in limited HDR scenarios, though it won’t get anywhere near that in general terms.
I recorded a maximum brightness of around 675 nits with autobrightness off, which is good, but is also around half what the Pixel 10 Pro can achieve. Still, the fact remains that it gets nice and bright in outdoor lighting.
Honor has always been ahead of the game with eye protection, and the 600 Pro gives you 3,840Hz PWM dimming to minimize eye strain, which is a nice bonus.
Honor 600 Pro review: cameras
- 200MP main (f/1.9)
- 50MP 3.5x telephoto (f/2.8)
- 12MP ultra-wide macro (f/2.2)
Despite what the look, feel, and even the price of the Honor 600 Pro might suggest, this is not a member of the brand’s flagship smartphone line.
This means that you don’t get the same level of camera innovation here as you do in the Honor Magic 8 Pro. The 600 Pro utilizes the same 1/1.4-inch 200MP main sensor as last year’s Honor 400 Pro, with the same f/1.9 aperture and OIS.
The 12MP ultra-wide is another shared component, and one that hints at the 600 Pro’s elevated mid-ranger status.
It’s not all static, however, with the 50MP telephoto camera now extending to a 3.5x optical zoom length, beating the Honor 400 Pro’s 3x. Conversely, the aperture is now a slightly narrower f/2.8.
By default, the phone’s camera captures images with the Vibrant color tone, which, as the name suggests, rather accentuates the colors. However, you can easily switch to the more muted Natural, or an Authentic mode that fusses less with shadier areas.
I shot with the default setting for most of my time with the Honor 600 Pro, and it yielded sharp, contrasty shots with well-controlled dynamic range.
The phone’s 12MP ultra-wide is an evident step down in overall quality, and on a sunny day it didn’t rein in highlights as well as that main sensor. However, ultra-wide shots look decent enough, and the tone is broadly consistent with that of the main camera.
Telephoto shots look good, however, particularly at the camera’s native 3.5x. It also handles 7x shots well, though detail drops off considerably beyond 10x.
Honor’s AI Upscaling technology – which takes a few seconds of processing to sharpen these extreme-zoom shots – continues to be one of the most impressive in the business, but we’re still talking about image quality that drops well short of optimal, and can look downright weird on more complex or organic subjects.
Selfie shots from the 50MP front camera are solid enough, though in the absence of a particularly large sensor, autofocus, or the depth sensor of previous models, they lack the depth and quality of the iPhone 17 and the Google Pixel 10 Pro.
Honor’s AI Image to Video 2.0 feature takes the brand’s video-generating system to the next level, allowing you to feed up to three photos into the AI mincer. When you do so, it’ll extrapolate to generate a video from the source materials.
It’s eerily adept at generating content (I hesitate to use the term ‘videos’) in this way. I fed it three shots of a dinner table scene — one a close-up of some noodles, one a little further out, and a third that incorporated my dining partner. Honor’s tool produced a convincingly smooth video that panned between the three, even having my partner tuck into the noodles at the end.
It’s not perfect, though, with an uncanny look to the action and evidence of AI jank. Besides, I always question the purpose of such tools beyond being a showcase for the power of AI. Do you really want to conjure up videos of incidents that never happened?
Video capture extends to 4K at 60fps, and the resulting footage looks nice and smooth.
All in all, then, the Honor 600 Pro’s camera experience is a good one, though I should note my experience of one or two bugs and shortfalls. There was one instance where the 120x extreme zoom refused to come into any sort of focus, rendering it unusable here.
Generally, I found night performance somewhat less than a nailed-on experience. On one night’s shooting, several of my shots failed to grab focus at all, while there was a general struggle with direct light sources, causing extreme instances of lens flare.
Honor 600 Pro review: camera samples
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Honor 600 Pro review: performance
- Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset
- 12GB RAM
- 512GB storage
Just like the Honor 400 Pro, the Honor 600 Pro performs about as well as a flagship phone from the preceding year, which is just a tad tougher to swallow given the higher asking price.
Honor has equipped its new phone with a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which is the chip used by such 2025 phones as the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and, indeed, the Honor Magic 7 Pro. It’s also the same chip that Motorola chose to run in the similarly priced Moto Signature.
Together with 12GB of RAM, it produces a phone that feels every bit as fast as the current flagship brigade, even if it isn’t technically quite that good. Benchmark results drop the 600 Pro short of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and the Honor Magic 8 Pro, though it hands the Google Pixel 10 series a good hiding.
In the hand is where it really matters, and on that front, the Honor 600 Pro simply doesn’t miss a beat.
Meanwhile, high-end games like The Division Resurgence run well on Very High graphical settings. Unless you’re a seriously committed mobile gamer (and if you are, you should probably be looking at the RedMagic 11 Pro), you won’t observe any clear difference.
There’s just the one model of Honor 600 Pro available, and it gives you a generous 512GB of storage out of the box.
Honor 600 Pro review: software
- Magic OS 10, based on Android 16
- 6 years of OS updates and security patches
The Honor 600 Pro runs on Magic OS 10 — the company’s latest custom UI, and the very same Android 16 skin that we saw on the Magic 8 Pro at the beginning of the year.
If you haven’t encountered Honor’s UI before, then the main thing you need to know is this: it owes as much of a debt to Apple as the phone’s physical design.
Everything from the heavy use of transparency across its menus to the shape of the icons and the basic layout of the Settings menu hews fairly closely to Apple’s latest version of iOS.
Even in the absence of an extended display notch, Honor still includes an equivalent to Apple’s Dynamic Island, called Magic Capsule, providing heads-up animated widgets centred around the front camera.
It’s a pretty solid attempt at emulating Apple’s success, all things considered. The Notes and Recorder apps might be very familiar, but they’re very intuitive and work very well.
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There remains an issue with bloatware here, however. The global model that I was sent to test includes an excess of preinstalled third-party apps, including Facebook, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Trip.com, Amazon, and Temu. There’s also a folder containing three poor-quality games.
You also don’t get quite the same Samsung and Google-matching seven-year update promise of the Honor Magic 8 Pro, but Honor is still offering six years of software support to the 600 Pro — at least in Europe.
Honor’s AI initiative continues to be somewhat hit and miss, with the company still treating the term as a wearisome buzz phrase that needs to be attached to even fairly humble tools. AI Memories, for example, is a glorified screenshot system that saves and categorizes snippets in a fairly perfunctory way.
The AI Settings Agent, meanwhile, lets you find and access basic system settings through a chatbot interface, which feels like a curiously long-winded way to turn off Bluetooth.
Deepfake and voice cloning detection is welcome (and effective), but did we really need a folder on the Home Screen dedicated to a rotating series of recommended apps? And did it need to be called AI Suggestions?
Elsewhere, Magic Portal is a reasonably intuitive way to drag text, images, and other content between open apps using a novel knuckle gesture.
Honor 600 Pro review: battery life
- 6,400mAh silicon-carbon battery
- 80W wired charging
- 50W wireless charging
Honor has really upped its battery game with the 600 Pro, moving on from the Honor 400 Pro’s 5,200mAh capacity to an impressive 6,400mAh cell. That’s even bigger than the 6,270mAh battery in the European model of the Honor Magic 8 Pro.
While this isn’t the biggest power unit we’ve seen in a smartphone of late, it’s still well above average. More to the point, it’s enough to see the Honor 600 Pro through two full days of fairly ordinary usage, provided you don’t consume too much media or find yourself on a weak mobile network for much of the day.
Charging speeds have taken a bit of a backward step, but it’s not one that I find particularly problematic. The provision of 80W wired charging support remains strong, even if it falls short of the Honor 400 Pro’s 100W equivalent.
I didn’t have an Honor charger to hand, but utilizing a Vivo 120W charger, I was able to get the Honor 600 Pro from empty to 63% in 30 minutes, and to full in around 50 minutes.
There’s also 50W wireless charging support, should you have a compatible charger.
Should I buy the Honor 600 Pro?
Attributes | Notes | Rating |
|---|---|---|
Design | This phone’s design is clearly a little too indebted to the iPhone 17 Pro, but it’s built very well indeed. | 4 / 5 |
Display | Honor’s screen is really bright, impressively color-accurate, and good on eye protection. | 4.5 / 5 |
Performance | It’s not the fastest phone on the market, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip provides flagship-approximate performance. | 4 / 5 |
Camera | Honor’s 200MP main camera takes good photos, barring a few glitches, and the improved 3.5x telephoto takes solid zoomed-in snaps. | 3.5 / 5 |
Battery | A 6,400mAh battery is one of the largest we’ve seen on an an Honor phone here in the West, and it’s good enough for two days of moderate usage. | 4.5 / 5 |
Software | Magic OS is too indebted to Apple and full of bloatware, but it’s also quick and flexible, while six years of updates is a solid support promise. | 3.5 / 5 |
Value | The Honor 600 Pro has received quite the price bump over the old model, and so isn’t quite the bargain it used to be. | 3.5 / 5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
Honor 600 Pro review: also consider
The Honor 600 Pro is a classy flagship alternative, but there are several other options to consider:
How I tested the Honor 600 Pro
- Review test period = 1 week
- Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, gaming, streaming video, music playback
- Tools used = Geekbench 6, 3DMark, native Android stats, Vivo 120W power adapter
First reviewed: April 2026
