Honor 600 Pro review: Every inch the value flagship

Honor's phone launch cycle seems almost punishing at times. There's a stack of Magic models, which range from the flagship Honor Magic 8 Pro through to the mid-range Honor Magic 8 Lite, not forgetting Honor Magic V6 folding phone.

Then there's this on review, the Honor 600 Pro. What's interesting about this phone is that it's only a hair's width away from being a flagship device. It achieves that by using slightly older flagship hardware, but coming in at an attractive price.

Something is obviously working, with Omdia reporting strong growth for the brand through 2025, although it's still dwarfed by the likes of Samsung. The Honor 600 Pro is, in effect, Honor's Galaxy S FE equivalent, with the aim of delivering a close-to-flagship experience for less cash.

Price & Availability

The Honor 600 Pro is available now with a retail price of £899.99 (12/512GB), but there's a "coupon" offer through Honor's retail channel that brings the price to £699.99. There's also a Molly edition (no, not that kind) with a custom design for the same price.

Honor is also bundling in gifts including a projector or Honor Pad tablet, as well as earbuds or a 100W charger, making its direct store the best place to buy. Otherwise you can buy for less on Amazon for £599, or there's wide availability from other networks if you want to pay monthly.

You won't find the brand in the US or Australia, though, with the international handset being for UK and European markets.

Honor 600 Pro vs 400 Pro: What's new?

• New iPhone-like design
• Reduced front camera
• Higher capacity battery
• Smaller and lighter

The Honor 600 Pro updates the Honor 400 Pro and you can almost see the evolution in the design to make it look like an iPhone 17 Pro, with an extended camera bump on the rear and triangular arrangement of lenses.

The Honor 600 Pro is actually smaller and lighter than the Honor 400 Pro, with a slightly smaller display – but an increased battery capacity. In the process, the wider front camera hole shrinks back to a single lens. The 600 Pro also has a flattened frame, so the design feels a lot more modern.

There's a move from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to the Snapdragon 8 Elite, so it's a slightly higher grade of hardware, with more powerful graphics handling. The display also jumps from 5000 nits to 8000 nits peak brightness.

It's a meaningful update in many cases, and while much of the camera is the same, there's an upgraded 3.5x telephoto lens on the newer device.

Design & Display

• 6.57-inch AMOLED display
  • 2728 x 1264 pixel resolution
  • 120Hz maximum refresh rate
• Aluminium frame, glass back
  • IP69K protection
  • 195g; 7.8mm thick

Let's deal with the big issue that the Honor 600 Pro has right up: it looks like a copycat iPhone 17 Pro. I'm not being nasty, but when Apple runs with Cosmic Orange as a hero colour and Honor chooses to produce a phone that looks almost the same – with its own vibrant orange colour – it's no accident.

Sadly I didn't get the Orange version for review. Instead I have Golden White, which is a sort of creamy colour. At a glance, people will probably mistake this for an iPhone because of the camera layout on the rear. Perhaps that's the desired effect: you have a phone in your hand that looks like the latest iPhone, but it's two-thirds of the price (and nobody knows it).

This new design addresses one of the things I didn't like about the Honor 400 Pro: the flattened sides feel great and look more modern than the previous version.

Dropping the sensor on the front to move away from the iPhone-like front camera cut-out is great too – although there's still a Dynamic Island-style use of the space around the camera to show things like media playback.

There's an additional button on the side of the Honor 600 Pro, which is a portal into Honor AI – which I'll discuss later. The button can be reprogrammed, but only to AI functions or to launch the camera – it's a missed opportunity in not supporting any app or function you might want.

The display on the Honor 600 Pro is excellent and while the headline brightness is 8000 nits, the high brightness mode reaches 1800 nits. I found this effective on really sunny days to keep screen content visible.

That high peak brightness figure isn't something that you'll be using: the phone supports HDR10+ and I found this content supported on Netflix, but nothing is mastered to 8000 nits, so don't think that you're getting a display that's going to be brighter than rivals in typical use.

The flat panel (with reduced selfie camera cutout) is great for gamers, while there's plenty of detail, with a 120Hz refresh rate to keep things smooth.

There's another minor detail that Honor is boasting about: this phone has the narrowest bezels of any device on the market. That means that more of the screen space is available to use – and that's certainly a positive thing.

Performance & Battery

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite
• 6400mAh battery; 80W wired charging, 50W wireless

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the hardware that powered many 2025 flagship phones, so that positions the Honor 600 Pro as exactly that – a powerful phone that offers a premium experience on older hardware.

It comes with 12GB RAM and 512GB storage as standard (and that's the only version being offered in the UK). The result is an experience feels every inch flagship, even if it's a notch down the scale. While 2026 flagship phones are more powerful, in day-to-day use, you're unlikely to find any difference.

Everything I threw at the Honor 600 Pro happened at pace, from hitting Call of Duty Mobile hard, through to performing quick photo edits on the move using AI. If you're looking for a flagship experience, you'll find it here.

That's backed up by a huge 6400mAh battery, which offers great stamina. I found it would last well through the day and into the next. It basically delivers a 2-day experience in light use, without the worry of having to charge.

There's 80W wired charging, which beats most big-brand flagship rivals, although it's a step down from the 100W previously offered. That's probably a reflection of the increased capacity of the phone. There's also 50W wireless charging supported, but you'd need a proprietary charger from Honor to get that to work.

Cameras

• Triple rear camera:
  • Main: 200-megapixel, f/1.9 aperture, autofocus (AF), stabilisation (OIS)
  • Telephoto: 50MP, f/2.8, AF, OIS
  • Ultrawide: 12MP, f/2.2
• Front: 50MP, f/2.0

Honor's camera is centred on the 200-megapixel main sensor, clearly positioned to give Samsung a run for its money on the spec sheet.

Naturally, it doesn't capture 200MP images, instead offering 12.6MP images. It has a wider aperture (at f/1.9) than some rivals, meaning it can let more light in for making light work of processing in low light, plus a shallower depth of field for blurred backgrounds when subjects get close to the lens.

It's a 1/1.4in sensor size, which Honor says is optimised for night photography, with enhanced stabilisation to ensure things remain sharp in longer exposures. I found it to capture plenty of detail with nice colours, although in bright conditions it can overexpose a little.

The main camera loves to lighten an image, especially when lighting is a little lower, so indoor shots can lose contrast as the brightness increases and shadows get progressively less dark. That's also a problem with indoor video, where brightening can really change the hues that the camera produces.

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I found good consistency of tone between the different lenses, so moving from ultrawide through to the telephoto looks like it came from the same camera.

The ultrawide is reasonable, but it struggles to capture detail towards the edges of the frame – where things look like they've been 'painted', while only the centre looks sharp. That's not such a problem when using it as a macro camera, because subjects close to the lens retain their detail fairly well.

There's a 50-megapixel telephoto camera that comes with Honor's AI-enhanced zoom as an option. Optically, the zoom offers 3.5x (an 80mm equivalent) with a toggle for the AI zoom for anything over 8x. Where previously we've seen this offered at over 30x digital zoom (where the quality really starts to dip) now you can use it on much closer subjects.

The 3.5x is pretty good and the 7x option that's also offered in the viewfinder still gives fairly clear results. But at 7x some details are blurred and shots begin to lose their potency.

The AI enhancement can be fun and for those near-distance shots that reach beyond the optical zoom they can add texture and colour that looks fairly realistic. But bear in mind that it's using generative AI and it's not showing you what you're looking at, it's what it thinks it looks like compared to reference images. That will see textures added to grass or leaves that are hard to argue with, but it quickly starts to look artificial.

When there's less information, a generative AI texture – like a grid – can be clearly seen. At that point, you have to ask yourself what you're trying to achieve with such a long zoom. It's not restoring detail, it's just filling in the spaces with what it thinks looks about right.

The pictures of the boat below were taken at 120x zoom, first just from the lens and the second with AI. Neither are good photos, but bear in mind that from where I was standing (the third photo) these boats were barely visible.

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The selfie camera is let down by being fixed focus, so it's not as versatile as many flagship front cameras. Again, I found it overexposed a little and its Beauty Mode is on by default, so be sure to tap that off if you want to look like, well, you.

While talking about taking portraits, the portrait mode on the main camera is a bit of an oddity: it defaults to the telephoto lens and shoots at a slightly different aspect ratio to regular photos, so you might have to recrop if you want everything to match.

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A note on AI skills here too: when previewing a photo you'll find yourself in Honor's Gallery by default, which gives easy access to AI editing tools. I'd say these are now clearer than the options in Google Photos, which after much rearranging (for the worse) are now buried in menus.

Software & AI

• Android 16 with Magic OS 10
• 6 years OS and security updates

Honor's software has long been a point of contention: for all the good hardware and attractive prices, the intervention in the software can't be escaped.

Honor has stepped up beyond some rival brands, however, offering 6 years of OS and security updates for this phone – close to the 7 years that Samsung and Google offer.

The phone runs Android 16 with Honor's own Magic OS 10 software making a lot of changes to the stock Android experience. Along the way, a lot of the cohesion of Android gets lost as you're funnelled into an Honor experience instead.

Try as I might, my normal scheduling of Bedtime mode refuses to work in Magic OS, a byproduct of Honor's tinkering. But tinkering is something others do, Samsung included, so it's not an uncommon issue.

Despite opting not to install any of the suggested apps during installation, I also found about 20 apps preinstalled, all of which I've removed; there are a couple of apps remaining that I'm stuck with, but be prepared to do some husbandry to get this phone into a cleaner state.

The flip side is that Magic OS 10 gives a huge amount of customisation and lots of options to make visual changes, which I rather enjoy.

It's also not too heavy with the AI: while there's the AI button, the services within generally stay within and don't constantly try to get involved with what you're doing.

One of the AI services appears to just be a link into Booking.com so you can plan a holiday. It's far from useful and I suspect it's made its way in there through a sponsorship agreement.

I still find it irksome that there's an AI button that I can't repurpose to launch Gemini, or ChatGPT. Instead, you can have Gemini on the power button, but I much prefer to stick to the power menu instead.

While Magic OS 10 needs some taming, it's not as intrusive as Motorola's latest Hello UI or the advertising in Xiaomi's HyperOS. I've had some adverts served to me, mostly when using native apps, again building an argument to avoid them and stick to more widely established alternatives.

Honor 600 Pro review: Verdict

The Honor 600 Pro is a good alternative to a flagship smartphone especially if you're happy to put in a little work to remove a lot of the software bloat.

There's a great display, plenty of power, and solid battery life with fast charging, all for a fraction of the price of a current flagship phone.

But if you're not rushing to get one because it looks like an iPhone, then that's a little sad and all I can say is don’t be put off – as this phone is better than that.

Also consider

At the full price, the OnePlus 15 is more powerful and comes in higher rated, with a software experience that's a little more refined than the Honor 600 Pro.

Equally, the Samsung Galaxy S25 models with discounts offer similar power and software support for around the same listing price.

But the Honor 600 Pro's real rivals come in the form of other brands, like the Xiaomi 15T Pro or Poco X8 Pro, both offering a lot of phone for the money, with some compromises.