Honor 600

The argument

The review opens on a contradiction the writer sees in the phone market. Flagships keep getting better and keep getting more expensive, and yet the reasons to actually buy one keep thinning out. What used to cost $800-1200 to get hold of — a 7,000 mAh battery, a 200 MP camera, an AMOLED panel with hairline bezels, 80 W charging — now turns up on a midrange handset. The Honor 600 is offered as the case in point.

Design and build

That camera bar is an iPhone 17 Pro camera bar, and Honor clearly does not mind you noticing. There is no attempt at a signature look, just the shape that happens to be selling.

The build is better than the design. 7.8 mm and 190 g with a 7,000 mAh battery inside is the real achievement here. Matte back, so no fingerprints, and the frame is cleanly machined. It does not feel like the usual chunky midrange brick.

IP68/IP69, with IP69K claimed in some markets. At this money that is unusual. Most of the competition stops at splash resistance, or quietly says nothing at all.

There is a dedicated AI key on the side rail. The thinking is to bring AI features out of the software menus and into everyday use. It is handy for jumping straight into the camera, Google Lens or similar tools, but the customisation options are limited and it does not change how you use the phone.

HONOR 600 Lite Dual-SIM 256GB ROM + 8GB RAM (GSM OLY | No CDMA) Factory Unlocked 5G Smartphone (Velvet Gray) – International Version: Check Availability on Amazon

HONOR 600 Dual-SIM 256GB ROM + 8GB RAM (GSM Only | No CDMA) Factory Unlocked 5G Smartphone (Orange) – International Version: Check Availability on Amazon

HONOR 600 Dual-SIM 512GB ROM + 8GB RAM (GSM Only | No CDMA) Factory Unlocked 5G Smartphone (Orange) – International Version: Check Availability on Amazon

Display

The screen is what makes this phone feel more expensive than it is. 6.57-inch AMOLED, 1264 x 2728, 120 Hz. The size is sensible too: big enough for video and games, without the slab feeling you get from the 6.7 and 6.8-inch phones everyone ships now.

Honor claims 8,000 nits peak. Treat that as marketing. Figures like that come off a small patch of the panel under conditions you will never see. In normal use the screen is bright, readable outdoors, and very good with HDR.

The bezels are about 0.98 mm, even on all four sides. That one detail does more for how the front looks than anything else on the phone.

There is a fair amount of eye-strain work too: 3840 Hz PWM dimming, DC dimming, various low-fatigue modes. Handy if you read in bed.

Performance

Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, Qualcomm’s upper-midrange chip, in 8/256 or 12/512. Benchmark scores are not the point here. Browsing, social apps, video, a bit of photo editing, the usual games: all of it runs with room left over.

Geekbench and 3DMark put it roughly 40 percent ahead of last year’s model, which is a bigger generational jump than you usually get. Twenty minutes into a gaming session matters more, though. The phone gets warm, not hot, and the frame rate drops a little and then holds. A lot of phones at this price just keep sliding.

PUBG Mobile, Wild Rift and Arena of Valor are fine if you leave a couple of sliders alone. Genshin Impact runs. Turn the graphics down and it runs steadily.

Software and AI

The phone ships with MagicOS 10 on top of Android 16. Honor commits to long-term support, up to six years of OS and security updates in some markets. Held to, that would be a real advantage over many Android rivals in the same bracket.

MagicOS 10 is a glossy interface with smooth animations and a number of visual borrowings from iOS, among them the control centre, the transparency effects and a capsule-style element that surfaces contextual information.

AI is something Honor pushes hard here. The feature list runs to Magic Portal, Magic Text, AI captions, live translation, intelligent photo editing, object removal in motion photos and, the headline item, AI Image to Video 2.0. That last one takes up to three photos plus a prompt and produces a three to eight second clip, with templates built in.

Video generation models are expensive to run, so the free daily allowance is worth something. Generation is reasonably quick at two to three minutes per clip. For anyone who likes experimenting with AI tools, or who edits video and occasionally wants extra source material, it is a feature with everyday use in it.

Cameras

The rear setup is a 200 MP main camera with optical stabilisation alongside a 12 MP ultra-wide that doubles as the macro lens. The front camera is 50 MP. On paper that is a strong showing for a midrange phone, especially with 4K video on both front and rear.

The 200 MP main camera is the one you will actually use. In good light it gives you plenty of detail, punchy colour and HDR that holds together. Honor pushes saturation past neutral, so photos look good on a phone screen and better still on Instagram. Anyone who wants the colours that were actually in front of them will find it heavy-handed.

Because the sensor is so dense, a 2x crop out of the main camera still holds up. Push further and AI sharpening takes over, which cleans the image up at a glance without ever becoming an optical zoom. That is where the gap to a flagship shows, and to the 600 Pro too.

The 12 MP ultra-wide is the weak one. Fine for a landscape or getting eight people into frame, visibly softer than the main camera the moment you put the two side by side.

The 50 MP selfie camera counts as a plus. Detail is good, skin processing is restrained, and it is more than enough for both selfies and video calls. 4K capture on the front camera is useful for anyone making content, short vlogs or social video.

Taken as a whole, this is not the most complete camera system in the segment, given the missing telephoto and the basic ultra-wide. For most everyday shooting, though, the main camera is more than enough.

Battery and charging

While many flagships are still hovering around 4,500 to 5,000 mAh, the Honor 600 carries 7,000 mAh. That is striking given a body about 7.8 mm thick and under 200 g.

On mixed use — social media, messaging, photos, video, browsing and the occasional game — the phone lasts a long time. Moderate users can reasonably expect to approach two days between charges.

Charging is 80 W wired, with 27 W wired reverse charging. A full charge from empty takes somewhere around 45 minutes.

Verdict

Five years ago this spec sheet would have been a flagship spec sheet. 7,000 mAh, 80 W charging, a 200 MP main camera, 0.98 mm bezels, IP69, six years of updates, and somehow still 190 g.

What you give up is the telephoto, wireless charging, and a chip that loses to any flagship you stand it next to. The telephoto is the one I would actually miss. The other two I would stop noticing after a fortnight.

So it comes down to how you shoot. Anyone who lives at 3x and 5x should look elsewhere. Everyone else gets a very good screen and a battery that survives a long day, which for most people is the whole argument.

Specifications at a glance

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