Flagship feel at mid-range prices

Design

• Sharp and stylish looks
• Gorgeous off-white colourway
• Class-leading water and dust resistance

I noted in last year’s review of the 400 Pro that Honor had opted for a more grown-up aesthetic, although I think that’s been taken to the next level with the 600.

We’ve got a blend of brushed aluminium for the phone’s midframe and a composite fibre back that gives it a smooth and rather premium feel for a mid-range phone. A piece of plastic fantastic this is not.

I’m also a fan of the overall redesign Honor has opted for with this phone, with a small camera ‘shelf’ that spans across the width of the phone, rather than being a more obtuse bump just around the camera array. There are immediate iPhone 17 Pro comparisons that can be made here, but I’m not going to go that far.

Colour options are either black or golden white for this UK model (elsewhere also gets the orange), with my sample coming in the latter. It’s a mix of white and golden to create a subtle off-white, almost cream colour that I’m a big fan of.

The 600 comes with flat edges, which keep it right on trend with this year’s flagships, as it seems like we’ve moved beyond curved edges and back to flat again. What’s also quite impressive is that the bezel around the phone is less than 1mm thick, which helps the phone’s especially modern looks, and is a world first.

Ports across the bottom are standard fare, with a USB-C port and pop-out SIM tray, and for buttons, you’ll find a volume rocker and power button in their usual places, plus an AI button further down the side.

Honor has also bumped up the water and dust resistance for the 600, giving it full IP68/IP69/IP69K coverage that’s up there with the top flagship devices. There’s even a clever ‘Underwater’ camera mode that allows you to take underwater photos at a depth of up to two metres for a few seconds, which I’ve never seen before on a phone.

Screen

• 6.57-inch 120Hz 1264×2728 AMOLED
• 8000 nits peak brightness
• Smaller screen is pleasant to use

The display here is a standout point, with the 600 having a decent-sized 6.57-inch 1264×2728 AMOLED panel, complete with 120Hz refresh rate, meaning we’re getting good detail with lovely definition that makes it a good choice for everything from gaming to video consumption and, of course, general use.

Okay, it may not be as large as some of the other screens I’ve seen on more modestly-priced handsets, but I don’t mind that. The real estate on offer here is still more than enough for most folks.

Honor promises up a maddening 8000 nits of peak brightness with the 600’s screen, albeit this is a headline figure in a small percentage window on the screen. You’re more likely to see a peak close to 3000 nits in HDR, which is still plenty bright enough to keep content sharp and very vibrant.

Having up to 120Hz of refresh rate on offer helps general hippiness, and is a surefire bump if you’re moving from a more standard 60Hz or slightly higher panel. This phone is lacking the LTPO tech you’ll find on the 600 Pro, meaning the variable refresh rate works in a blockier manner. In my experience, I mostly saw and felt the full 120Hz, for what it’s worth.

There is an under-display fingerprint sensor here, which responds to unlock inputs, though it suffers the same issue I’ve observed on some Xiaomi phones: it’s mounted quite far down the screen.

Cameras

• Simple dual camera setup derived from Magic 8 Pro
• Good detail and depth in ideal conditions
• Lack of a dedicated telephoto becomes apparent at longer focal lengths

Against the 400, Honor has made some changes to the camera array of this new option in terms of the makeup of its arrangement, although it sticks to its core mid-range-ness.

We’ve got a dual-snapper arrangement, with some of the innards transplanted from the flagship Magic 8 Pro, with the main 200MP 1/1.4-inch sensor with a maximum aperture of f/1.9 and CIPA 6.0 image stabilisation. You also get a 12MP ultrawide with a maximum aperture of f/2.2. You get no dedicated telephoto lens – for that, you’ll need to step up to the 600 Pro.

The main 200MP sensor is understandably the star of the show here, offering solid detail for casual shooting and social media grid posting workloads you’re likely to undertake with this phone. To my eyes, by default, colours were rich and poppy, although perhaps on the saturated side for some; that’s largely because the phone’s camera defaults to ‘Vibrant’ mode. Change it to ‘Natural’, and it’ll resolve some of the issues.

For super-wide shots of buildings or landscapes, the 12MP shooter found on the 600 follows much of the same pattern in terms of its colour science. In cropping in, we are getting good detail resolution, although you are better off using the main sensor if you want to crop in – to my eyes, it’s sharper.

The lack of a telephoto zoom is apparent when going beyond around 4x (or 108mm) using the main sensor, and the further you get into the zoom range, the more you get into the weeds.

I had the same complaint about last year’s 400 Pro, which leaned heavily on some AI-assisted image repair and sharpening to try to make up for the lack of a dedicated telephoto lens. If you pixel peep, you are sure to notice, but for general photography that’s going to be compressed and posted to the social media app of your choice, you may fare a bit better.

There is a macro mode here, as is present on other Honor phones, and that extracted some pleasant detail on up-close subjects in my walkaround, such as flowers.

Low-light performance from the main snapper, even in particularly iffy conditions, is pretty good, with strong detail resolution when conditions are more favourable. Do things such as zoom in a little too far, or in situations with little light at all, and things don’t go too well.

The 600 also comes with a 50MP selfie snapper that’s decent for taking vain photos of yourself. It provides good clarity and depth, plus decent bokeh with the aperture at its widest. I did find that using some of the AI background blurring left a synthetic feel at times.

Performance

• Mid-range Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip inside
• Reasonable performance for day-to-day use
• More intensive loads reveal its limitations

The 600 features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip inside, which is a reasonably popular choice for powering mid-range handsets such as this one – it’s the same chip as you’ll find in the Xiaomi Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G, for instance. To go with it, my sample of this phone also comes with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

The scores in the likes of the Geekbench 6 benchmark test are similar to Xiaomi’s option and the Samsung Galaxy A57 5G with its Exynos 1680 chip inside, with performance equating to a flagship phone from a couple of years ago.

With this in mind, the OnePlus Nord 5 is a fair bit cheaper than this phone, and has it beaten for pure grunt, and I can’t help but feel the likes of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 found in the 400 Pro from last year would have been a step up for this year’s 600.

I found the 600 to feel zippy in general day-to-day use, whether I was scrolling through social media, undertaking some quick work in a Google Docs or streaming music via Tidal or Plexamp when out and about – most of the time, I was doing at least two of the three simultaneously with other apps open in the background.

More intensive loads, such as heavy gaming with titles like Wuthering Waves, will bring this phone down a peg against the more obvious flagships, though it’s still perfectly playable as long as you’re happy to dial back some settings and are realistic with your expectations.

Likewise, Honor has put a Game Mode in the 600’s menus that pops up when you boot up your favourite title, which allows you to do things such as mute any other notifications, record gameplay and the like.

For more prolonged and intensive use, the vapour chamber cooling that this phone has does an admirable job of keeping it cool. The phone can get warm under load, although it isn’t to the point where I felt as if I had to put the 600 down for any length of time.

Software & AI

• MagicOS 10 feels like Liquid Glass in some respects
• Other AI features return
• Image to Video 2.0 is interesting

The 600 ships with MagicOS 10 (Honor’s own skin atop Android 16), and needed to do a couple of software updates before it’d even consider allowing me to install apps or use Google Pay, but that’s more so for being a review unit than any funny business, so your handset shouldn’t suffer the same immediate fate.

The look and feel of MagicOS 10 is similar to the variant running on the Honor Magic V3 foldable I use every day, which makes it more familiar than it otherwise would.  There are cues borrowed from Apple’s Liquid Glass iOS refit, with translucent icons in the control panel and elsewhere, which make it quite smart and fluid to use.

Similar quirks and features from the previous iteration, such as the Magic Capsule, and handy customisation of the home and lock screen that automatically adjusts to the style of wallpaper you have fitted. For instance, cutesier hues, such as the pink in one of our wallpapers, completely changed the style of the time and date compared to another wallpaper I used.

As for AI gubbins, the 600 features a couple of intriguing new features, with most of them featured in the Gallery app for editing photos, adding them into a collage and more besides. By far the most interesting is the new Image to Video 2.0, where you can take an image you’ve taken and, with a prompt, turn it into a fake video. 

For my testing, I asked it to make our ceramic cats dance around, make a statue I spotted in Poundbury look as if it were in a rave, and turn into a Saturn V rocket. The usual silliness we expect from AI these days.

To be fair, the model generated videos I asked it to, with a maximum time limit of eight seconds. You can also choose the aspect ratio and whether you want sound or not. The video of the cats, for instance, captured the detail of the cats, although the sofa in the background isn’t right, and it added extra artificial weathering to our side tables. I do see what the phone is going for, though.

In general, I’m impressed by what it does, with video generation made possible by handing off to an off-site model while you wait for it to finish. As with any of this AI guff, I just question the actual utility of it beyond the novelty factor for the first couple of images.

As with previous models from Honor, the 600 also comes with a dedicated AI button. A long press calls up either the Circle to Search function from Google Gemini or Honor’s AI memories function.

Honor is also promising six years of security patches and six years of software updates with this handset, giving some peace of mind for long-term use.

Battery Life

• 6800mAh battery
• 80W wired charging
• No wireless charging

One of the big upgrades that the 600 makes over last year’s Honor 400 is its battery capacity and specs, as we’ve now moved up to a hefty 6400mAh for the European model, up from the 5300mAh on the older iteration.

With this battery capacity in tow, I was able to get around six hours of screen-on time when it came to an intensive day of multi-tasking and using my phone as normal – that’s scrolling my social media, streaming music through Tidal or Plexamp, taking the odd photo when out and about and dealing with a small amount of work in a pinch. 

For a more scientific test, a cursory run of the PCMark Work V3.0 battery test at 50% brightness worked out to nearly 16 hours of use.

The rated wattage for charging on the 600 has seen a bump, too, with up to 80W wired charging and 27W reverse wired to another device, although we are still without any form of wireless charging on this non-Pro model.

Honor doesn’t ship a charger in the box with this phone, so I was left to use my usual 66W 6A Honor adapter. As much as this isn’t maxing out the 600’s rated speeds, it was still brisk in its speeds, taking 28 minutes to get to 50 percent and 65 minutes to get back to full charge.

Should you buy it?