I tested the Honor 600 and was impressed by its ‘genuinely astounding’ AI features, even though they occasionally ‘nose-dive straight into the uncanny valley’

Honor 600: two-minute review

The Honor 600 is the brand’s latest mid-range phone, offering an iPhone-style design and a whole host of innovative AI features to Android users. Priced from £549.99, it’s a more affordable alternative to the flagship Honor 600 Pro, which was released around the same time for £899.99. But how does it hold up against other mid-range phones?

Let’s kick off with that AMOLED display. Coupled with its 2728 x 1264 resolution, this 6.57-inch screen delivers a pixel density of 458ppi, which means it can produce very crisp images. It’s also capable of ridiculously bright peak brightness, hitting up to 8,000 nits in certain limited circumstances. Colors are generally lush and vibrant, although on occasion, whites run a little blue for my liking.

In terms of design, I’d say the Honor 600 is attractive enough, though it doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from many of the best phones out there. Honestly, it looks far too similar to the iPhone 17 Pro, even down to the full-width camera module and bright orange colorway. Fortunately, it redeems itself somewhat with its solid build quality and IP68 / IP69 rating, meaning you can count on it to shrug off dust and the occasional dunk in water.

Under the hood, the Honor 600 runs the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 CPU with 8GB of RAM. While that’s not a top-of-the-range chipset, it’s still very decent for a mid-range handset and offers pretty credible performance. During productivity tasks and everyday use, it always felt smooth and stable. Even when playing Call of Duty: Mobile with its HD packs installed, the Honor 600 was slicker than a frozen lake… although not quite as icy, given it warmed considerably over the course of three matches.

The Honor 600 also puts this performance to good use when it comes to software. MagicOS 10 is not only smooth and intuitive, but it also has great multitasking features, like the ability to multiscreen apps or share files with Honor devices, iPhones, and Macs. The only black mark here is the bloatware it ships with — despite allowing me to deselect some during installation, it still came teeming with unnecessary third-party apps like Temu, leaving a slightly sour taste in my mouth.

Another thing you can’t get away from when trying out the Honor’s software is AI. The Honor 600 is absolutely crammed with generative AI tools. Some of these are genuinely astounding — being able to reanimate still photos or create convincing-looking drone videos from nature photography is awesome. But there’s some inevitable jank here too, with some of the output I generated hallucinating extra cats (there’s relevant context here, I promise) or giving people shifting, changeling-esque faces that saw me nose-dive straight into the uncanny valley. If you’re into generative AI, though, you’ll likely be tempted by the sheer variety of tools on offer.

The camera system on the Honor 600 also makes no bones about its use of AI, although here the results are a lot more subtle. Its 200MP AI main lens can produce impressively crisp images, and all the macro shots I took showed a wonderful level of detail. Generally, colors appeared vibrant, although the Honor does slightly overemphasize blues in some shots. At longer focal distances, though, I found its cameras could sometimes lack a little in HDR pop, which is a real shame given its talents elsewhere.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the Honor 600 is a little more pedestrian: its battery. At 7,000mAh, it’s one of the largest-capacity batteries on any phone I’ve used — only narrowly beaten by the OnePlus 15R and OnePlus 15 — and during my testing, it lasted over 23 hours of constant video streaming. Just as remarkable, its 80W supercharging can fill it all the way up again to 100% in just over 50 minutes, meaning you shouldn’t ever have to be without your phone for long.

All in all, the Honor 600 is an impressive phone that punches above its £549.99 list price. Its screen is crisp and bright, its battery is ludicrously long-lived and, if you’re into AI features, it has a staggering range of presets and effects. Sure, its camera is a little inconsistent, it features too much bloatware, and it gets warm when you really test its CPU. But for a mid-range handset, its peaks are very high indeed, while its low points aren’t as abyssal as they could be.

Honor 600 review: price and availability

• Launched May 7
• List price: £549.99 or £599.99

Launched on May 7, the Honor 600 is available now in the UK — but, as with other Honor devices, you won’t be able to get your hands on it in the US or Australia. It’s available for £549.99 with 256GB of storage or £599.99 if you’d prefer 512GB.

Storage size isn’t your only choice here, though: the Honor 600 comes in three different colorways. There’s the Golden White version I tested here, plus Orange and Black. It’s worth noting, though, that Golden White is only available on the £599.99 model.

Honor 600 review: specs

Honor 600 review: design

• Stylish albeit unremarkable design
• Solidly built
• IP68 rated

Starting with my first impressions, the Honor 600 is attractive enough, if a little anodyne. It’s not shattering norms like Nothing’s phones and its colorways will look eerily familiar to anyone who followed the launch of the iPhone 17 last September. But, on the whole, it looks sleek and inoffensive. The anodised metal trim and smooth glass back feel nice to the touch, and it has just enough weight to feel well-built without seeming unwieldy.

I feel less ambivalent about that full-width camera module if I’m honest, though. I get that it helps with stability, but I still find them pretty unsightly, and I’m not convinced the problem they’re intended to solve is a big enough issue to justify the amount of space they gobble up. Regardless, the Honor 600’s hunchback still looks less awkward than the one now shown off by the iPhone 17, so I’ll give Honor the W here.

In theory, the Honor 600 should also prove pretty sturdy, with the brand claiming it has obtained 5-star SGS Drop & Crush Resistance certification. While I’m not about to try verifying this by chucking it from the top of the Shard or running it over in an SUV, it does seem as robustly built as many phones I’ve tested. Literally the only marks it seemed to gather during my testing were a little scuffing of the metal around the camera lenses, and I’ll admit that was probably more down to me stashing two phones in the same pocket.

It’s not just good at resisting being squashed; the Honor 600 also has some of the best water and dust resistance of any phone I’ve ever used. Confusingly, it’s labeled IP68 and IP69… and IP69K – something that’s apparently to do with differences in international standards for how each rating is tested. At the very least, though, it should survive a dunking in more than 1m of water.

• Design score: 4 / 5

Honor 600 review: display

• Very decent pixel density
• Blazing 8,000 nit peak brightness
• Colors vibrant but occasionally cooler than they should be

No matter how you look at it, the Honor 600’s screen is a serious achievement. At 6.57 inches, it might not be the largest screen on the market — getting absolutely dwarfed by behemoths like the 6.9-inch Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and iPhone 17 Pro Max — but it still outstrips many flagship screens in terms of scale.

Spreading its 2728 x 1264 pixel AMOLED display across those 6.57 inches gives the Honor 600 a 458ppi pixel density. That’s pretty impressive, falling just a little short of the iPhone 17 Pro’s 460ppi — although neither is anywhere near as impressive as the Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus’s meticulously detailed 513ppi. Trying out the screen on Planet Earth III, I could clearly see every wrinkle of the skin and every eyelash of an elephant matriarch and her calves in exquisite detail.

But where it really impresses is its brightness. I recently raved about how bright the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro was with its 5,000-nit peak, but honestly, the Honor 600 outshines it like a supernova, hitting an absurd peak of 8,000 nits.

OK, real life is never going to be as perfect as lab conditions. But I can certainly say my experiences with the phone revealed what a bright spark the Honor 600 can be. Comparing it side-by-side with my iPhone 16 Pro, the white levels were fantastic — while watching Planet Earth III, each of the fine white hairs on the cowl of a Cape fur seal pup practically glowed.

Colors on the Honor 600’s display are also impressively vibrant, with the beautiful blues and rich yellows of a golden-shouldered parrot looking exquisite and more expressive than my iPhone could manage. In some areas, the Honor loses a little accuracy, though, tending toward cooler hues that help those whites pop — for example, during a wildfire in the South African shrubland, the smoke looked overly blue while some of the reds felt a little lacking in range.

Thanks to its Sunlight Mode, the Honor 600 can maintain these impressively vivid pictures even when in direct sunlight. While that glass definitely shows visible reflections, they never overpower the bright peaks on the screen, although, naturally, they do swamp the darker areas. Despite this, I actually felt like my iPhone 16 Pro did a better job here, conveying more of a sense of color despite its duller screen.

Finally, the Honor 600’s display is capable of seriously fluid and responsive motion, even if it’s not literally the fastest on the market. Topping out at 120Hz, its display offers the same refresh rates as the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra or iPhone 17 Pro, while falling short of the 144Hz offered by the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro or the ludicrous 165Hz offered by the OnePlus 15. Certainly, it felt very slick to me in day-to-day use and when navigating menus. Only serious gamers are likely to spot a difference between this and phones with higher rates.

• Display score: 4.5 / 5

Honor 600 review: cameras

• Great detail, especially in macro shots
• HDR sometimes a little flat
• Unashamedly AI-enhanced

I’m not gonna lie: testing the Honor 600’s cameras has given me slight emotional whiplash. Because every time I’ve found something it doesn’t handle well, I discover another feature that blows me away. As a result, I want to acknowledge its shortcomings, while also emphasizing it’s still an impressive camera system in many ways.

First off, the level of detail it’s capable of is spectacular. Combining a 200MP AI main lens and a 12MP 112-degree ultra-wide lens, it takes some wonderfully crisp images – for example, showing the watchful eyes of two pigeons in sharp detail. I’ll admit, there’s a whole debate to be had about what level of AI enhancement can be laid over the top of photos before they stop being true photos, but I imagine more casual snappers won’t mind having this kind of helping hand in improving their shots.

This level of detail is most apparent when taking macro photos. I’ve been taking macro snaps on several generations of iPhone, and I’ve honestly never seen detail like this from my close-up photos. Shots of lilacs and the leaves of lupines after a heavy rain showed off exquisite details, like the beading of individual drops of water. And while I assume it gets a healthy assist here from its AI algorithm, the results were incredibly true to life, focusing purely on upscaling rather than applying artificial polish.

Color performance on the Honor 600’s camera is vibrant and, for the most part, faithful. For example, the rich pumpkin orange of lady’s purse flowers really jump off the screen. Like some other cameras I’ve used, though, the Honor 600 slightly overplays its hand when it comes to blues — rather than the subtle cornflower blue they should be, it rendered green alkanet flowers a bright azure. It’s not a complete deal-breaker, but if, like me, you value faithful hues over brilliant color, it’s something to bear in mind.

Unfortunately, its HDR images were a bit of a mixed bag. While close and medium-range shots conveyed a good balance of light and dark, I found some scenes with a much longer focal length looked a little washed out, especially on overcast days. And while that might not be an issue if you live in, say, LA, that’s a real issue given it’s on sale in the UK, where we see the sun about as often as we see the dentist.

The Honor 600’s zoom performance is a definite highlight, though. Taking a series of photos of a waterside building in Bath at different levels of magnification, I was impressed by how crisp the fine details of the balcony railings and stonework were, particularly at 4x zoom.

And the AI superzoom is impressive, even if it doesn’t remotely feel as clean as the output of an optical zoom. When shooting distant buildings and rooftops at 8x to 12x zoom, it straightened up wobbly lines and enhanced blurry textures well, though I’m not sure they’re shots I’d be sticking in my photo books.

Night photography is very decent, showing everything in crisp detail without a hint of grain. Snapping shots of the River Avon running through the center of Bristol, the Honor’s camera accurately conveyed the reflected light shimmering across its surface, while maintaining the deep blacks of the shadows. Unfortunately, it does seem to stumble into one of my personal pet peeves of slightly overbrightening night shots — it often left the sky looking far bluer than it did in reality, losing some of the magic of shooting at dusk.

All things considered, the Honor 600 camera system has some minor shortcomings but also some things I’ll genuinely miss when going back to my flagship phone. And while I’m not totally comfortable claiming the creative polish of AI as my own, I’m sure a lot of people just want shots of their loved ones and their adventures to look their best, which the camera here can absolutely help with.

• Cameras score: 4 / 5

Honor 600 review: software

• AI features seriously powerful
• Decent productivity tools
• Way too much bloatware

The Honor 600 uses MagicOS 10, which is built upon Android 16. When setting up the phone, I was initially pleased with how the OS seemed to let me deselect all the bloat Honor wanted to install… until I actually booted the phone up.

At this point, I found it was still absolutely crammed with third-party apps. There’s a reason I don’t want apps like TikTok and Temu on my phone, and it’s quite irritating that Honor acts like it’s giving you a choice while actively making that choice for you when it comes to some of the worst offenders.

That’s a real shame because, outside of this, MagicOS 10 offers a relatively smooth user experience. Accessing the App Tray, Control Center, notifications, and wallpaper & style settings are all perfectly intuitive. While it’s not quite as versatile as something like NothingOS — with added features like scalable app icons — I generally found it easy to use, even as a diehard iOS user.

It’s hard to discuss software on the Honor 600 without talking about AI. A lot of the hype around this handset has been based around how absolutely crammed with creative AI features it is. And they’re often impressive, periodically janky — and occasionally just a touch unsettling.

One of the first features I used was the Honor 600’s Image to Video function. When looking at a photo in your gallery, all you have to do is hold the AI button, and up pops a dialogue allowing you to convert the image to a short-form video.

Like anyone who grew up perennially online, my immediate instinct was to create cat videos. So I selected a couple of shots of Muffin, my own little bundle of joy sociopathy, licking his paw, and clicked Generate. The results were seriously impressive — not only did the licking look realistic, but it even maintained details like the irregular white patch on his nose.

Occasionally, the results were a little wobbly. When I uploaded a snap of my cat looking worried after he’d clambered too high up the curtains, the generative AI did a good job of animating his movements but got his proportions really wrong. No way is my boi as chonky as the AI made him look.

But the Honor 600’s AI features extend far beyond just adding movement to still photos. You can also add prompts, although these can be far more prone to hallucinations. Using a shot of my cat sitting on the sofa and one of him standing on his hind legs by my French doors, I typed in a prompt asking the AI to make him get up and then start dancing. Weirdly, it made the choice to have Muffin flee the scene and be simultaneously replaced by a dancing doppelkitteh — although, to be fair, his moves were pretty on point.

For those who don’t want to do a whole bunch of prompt wrangling to bring their photos to life, the Honor 600 comes with a bunch of preset effects you can apply instead. Some of these produced truly amazing results. Using the Magic Motion feature on a macro photo of a bee I took nestled among some rhododendrons, the bee convincingly sprang to life and crawled through the blooms. When I used the Drone Pullback effect on a close-up photo I took of a thistle by a Scottish loch, it was utterly convincing in the way it zoomed out, perfectly maintaining the look of the water and mountains in the background.

Other features made me feel slightly queasy, though. One preset generated a video of my partner and me embracing that looked just different enough to us to give me the uncanny feeling that I was watching a stranger wear my skin like an ill-fitting suit. Another video that showed my girlfriend busting moves like a breakdancer struggled to accurately capture her face, making it morph between ersatz Selena Gomez and nigh-on Winona Ryder — watching AI do this to a face you wake up to every day definitely gives you slight body-horror vibes.

There are some strong productivity features. Single tap sharing is available between the Honor 600 and other Honor devices, as well as the iPhone — although if you’re sending from the iPhone, you’ll need to use the Honor Connect app. You can also connect and seamlessly share with Honor and MacOS laptops and desktops, something I couldn’t actually get to work on either of my MacBooks.

On top of this, the Honor 600 offers a lot of AI productivity features. Not only do you have access to Gemini, but you can also share your camera or screen in Gemini Live conversations so you can discuss things you’re looking at.

It also offers some AI security features, such as AI Deepfake Detection and AI Voice Cloning Detection. Short of building my own deepfake bot, I didn’t have much opportunity to test these last couple of features, but assuming they work, I can absolutely see how they’d be useful tools to have.

Fundamentally, this is a phone that goes all in on its AI software. How appealing or off-putting you find that will likely depend on your overall attitude to Generative AI, but either way, it’s hard to deny that the tools it offers are seriously powerful.

• Software score: 4 / 5

Honor 600 review: performance

• Decent mid-range chipset
• Smooth performance for productivity and gaming
• Gets quite warm under heavy loads

Under the hood, the Honor 600 runs the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, which is a very decent chipset for a mid-market phone. While it’s hardly the bleeding edge of the manufacturer’s chips, it’s the same chip used by the impressive Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and considerably more powerful than the Exynos 1680 packaged with the recent Samsung A57.

In practice, I generally found this combo of the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 and my testing handset’s 8GB of RAM gamely shouldered pretty much everything I threw at it. Whether I opened multiple games, loaded up myriad tabs in Chrome, or tapped away in Google Docs all while streaming videos in the background, I didn’t notice any real slowdown or stuttering, suggesting you’ll be fine carrying out most productivity tasks on this handset.

And its gaming performance was equally impressive, even if it wasn’t quite top tier. When I tried to set Genshin Impact to the Highest graphics setting, the game warned me that would overclock the CPU. But just one tier down, at High, it was incredibly stable, even when I was soaring through the sky or surrounded on all sides by enemies.

Next, I fired up Call of Duty: Mobile. Even with all of the HD graphics packs installed, it ran smoother than a waxed eel, not betraying any hint of judder or frame rate drops. Even wheeling round in the midst of battle, I could react fast enough to gun down groups of three or four opponents before they even had me in their sights.

But while its mid-range chipset seems to respond with impressive speed, it sure loses its cool easily. After three matches of multiplayer, it was warm enough that my sweaty mitts were slightly losing their grip. It wasn’t so hot that I was worried about the phone being damaged, but it does make me question whether you can game for hours at a time on this handset.

• Performance score: 4 / 5

Honor 600 review: battery life

• Huge 7,000mAh battery
• Lasted 23 hours of constant use
• Incredible 80W supercharging

Given that the Honor 600 banks so heavily on its super-bright screen and AI features, it would be a bit of a disaster if it had a meager battery capacity.

Fortunately, the opposite is true. Honor’s kitted out the 600 with a truly absurd 7,000mAh battery. That’s significantly higher than most flagships, and I think it’s only beaten by the OnePlus 15R and OnePlus 15, with their 7,400mAh and 7,300mAh respective capacities.

What does that mean in practice? Well, I set the phone streaming a 2K video from YouTube on a loop and timed how long it took for the battery to drain from full to empty. It finally conked out at just over 23 hours, which is one of the longest results I’ve ever seen. So you should definitely expect well over a full day of normal use.

And even when the Honor 600 does run out, its 80W supercharging tops it u unbelievably fast. When I hooked it up to a power brick rated for 100W, the Honor’s battery seemed thirstier than a middle-aged tech bro cranking out TikTok memes, drinking down enough juice that it went from flat to fully charged in just over 50 minutes. That’s honestly wild with a battery this large.

All in all, the Honor 600’s battery and charging put most phones to shame. It keeps going and going, and even when it finally falters, it needs to be plugged in for less than an hour to get it on its feet again. That’s truly fantastic.

• Battery life score: 5 / 5

Should I buy the Honor 600?

Buy it if…