HONOR 600 review: a mid-ranger boasting flagship-class cameras and performance

HONOR is back with the midrange HONOR 600, which became available on April 22 in the UK and Europe. It is also slated to launch in China following the announcement by the company earlier this week, making this a rare global-first launch.

Before we get underway, here is a disclaimer: HONOR provided a sample without any review pre-approval. Oh, and an apology: this review is rather image-heavy.

First up, let's dive into the specs:

Under the covers is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 powering the HONOR 600, which launched almost exactly a year ago. That being said, this is a midrange device, so expectations should be aligned as such. There's no wireless charging here, which is a bit of a disappointment, but there are several flagship-quality additions (mainly on the camera side) that HONOR claims align with flagship- class devices.

The colors offered on the product page are Golden White, Black, and Orange. Ours is the Golden White variant. I've put the bands it supports in a table below.

Looking at the specs on paper, this is a high-quality midranger that can rival anything and probably even exceed those in the same price class, especially with its ample-sized battery, 80W (wired), and 27W reverse wired charging for one.

In the box

• HONOR 600
• Sim Eject Tool
• USB Type-C cable (1M)

It should be noted that my minimal out-of-the-box experience may have to do with the review sample itself, as I had no documentation included in the box. According to the official product page, one can expect the following in the box:

• Phone (Built-in battery) x 1
• Type-C Cable x 1
• Quick Start Guide x 1
• Eject Tool x 1
• Warranty Card x 1
• External screen protective film (Attached to the phone before delivery) x 1

Day 1

The first thing I noticed when unboxing it was the weight. Even at just 185g, it is 29 grams lighter than my S26 Ultra but 5 grams lighter than the S25+ for those extra 1400mAh of battery.

The design is similar to the Magic8 Pro (without the large camera hump) but remains quite lovely with its rounded edges and 91.2% screen-to-body ratio, which is slightly less bezel than the Magic8 Pro's 89.6% if you find that sort of thing important; it is noticeable with a much thinner bezel of black around the screen edges.

Call quality

I made a few calls on it, and the call quality was excellent, but that's the minimum you should expect from any phone, in any price class. The earpiece speaker was loud enough, and that's good news.

Design

It is a typical candy bar shape with a double camera array on the left top rear that you will find on many smartphones. The entire phone is made up of metal unibody, which means it is seamless. Around the sides and antenna lines is sort of iPhone-esque if you ask me, but maybe you should ignore me because the last iPhone I owned was the iPhone 4 (not counting the iPhone SE 2 backup). However, as I have always experienced with smartphones, it all ends up feeling like it will slip out of my hand without a case.

On the rear, of which is made up from a "cold-carved unibody with translucent Composite Fiber," the camera array consists of a 200MP main camera, along with a 12MP ultrawide camera. On paper, it appears that the camera array is the same as the one on the HONOR 400, including the 50MP selfie camera.

On the right side of the phone, you will find the volume rocker and a power key that doubles as an action button. A little further down, there's an "AI button" that gives you access to Circle to Search, "Summarize", and "AI memories." The key is flush with the bezel, so it is a bit awkward to use. It also doubles as a means to wake the screen, a setting which can be disabled.

Aside from the AI button, the keys have a good height and are easily detected by feel. All of those buttons are completely smooth.

On the left side, there are no openings at all.

On the bottom, from left to right, there's a speaker grill, a USB Type-C charger port for the included 1m USB Type-C-to-USB Type-C cable, a mic hole, and the SIM tray.

The top of the 600 has another speaker grill and two pinholes, the function of which is not documented. On the front of the device and in the camera cutout, you'll find the 50 MP front-facing camera. There is no notification LED, which is actually redundant thanks to full always-on-display (AOD) support.

Display

The 600 has a 6.57-inch screen and is only 7.8mm in thickness. That weight also feels like it is distributed evenly across the phone, in spite of its relatively small camera hump that adds a few millimeters when the phone is lying on a flat surface.

The AMOLED display has a 1264 x 2728 screen resolution, with a 458 PPI pixel density, a 19:5:9 aspect ratio, and "Mohs level 4" screen durability. HONOR claims the display has an 8000-nit peak brightness for HDR Vivid, but the High Brightness Mode is not mentioned in the specifications. I found the screen to be excellent, vibrant, and bright enough all the time I was using it in Adaptive refresh rate mode, which automatically adjusts the refresh rate between 1-120Hz depending on the app being used. HONOR also claims that the display utilizes the industry’s narrowest bezel at 0.98mm.

Software

The 600 ships with MagicOS 10, which is based on Android 16, along with the March 2026 Security Update, which is now a month behind the April update. My contact told me that our review should be based on 10.0.0.107, which was pushed with an OTA update during the OOBE. However, in terms of software updates and support, HONOR will support up to six years of updates and security patches for phones on MagicOS 10.0.

I first used MagicOS around a year and a half ago with the Magic7 Pro review, and in that relatively short space of time, I have to admit that MagicOS is improving all the time, as you will see below.

Honor 600 Setup

I used Android Switch during setup and also transferred my physical SIM from my backup iPhone SE2; you can see the entire process above, which also included pages of opt-in services along with an optional invite to the User Experience Program and enabling Location Services.

Thankfully, the 600 also employs the default gestures found in most Androids, so I was off to a great start on the Home screen. I found navigating through MagicOS to be a pleasant experience, and I experienced no lag despite having a number of apps open in the background.

Factory reset?

However, for some reason, during the installation of apps, the HONOR 600 decided to Factory Reset (likely due to an update), so I had to do the process all over again! My contact told me that this was a security measure to ensure that any reviews were not done on the experimental version of MagicOS 10 that shipped to reviewers.

Mobile Data overrides WiFi?

Mobile Data is enabled by default, which I think is normal, but I was also on my own WiFi when I originally setup the HONOR 600 (and before it factory reset itself the first time), however it still managed to use up the entirety of my Pay As You Go credit on my backup SIM even though I was in my home office the entire time connected to WiFi. I took the phone out with me and experimented a bit with the camera, and although I didn't use any apps and was not logged in to social media, the HONOR 600 still managed to use 122MB of data for whatever is going on in the background, so I ended up switching off Mobile Data.

Post setup

Yes, even after all that, you'll find yourself spending an hour or two wading through tons more pages of consent when starting native apps. I think I covered everything in the above gallery. Be prepared to set aside at least a couple of hours to properly set up your phone, even when restoring from Google backup, or using Device Clone, you are still required to give the phone permission for every single app and permission type. Unfortunately, you can't expect to Clone and then just set off on your merry way, because the apps you rely on might not have the permissions they require.

HONOR 600 Home setup

Speaking of the Home screen, which uses HONOR Home by default, this is highly customizable. I have showcased this in previous reviews, and not much has changed on that front since I reviewed the Magic8 Pro back in January. You can change just about everything; in fact, the one thing I lamented that was not possible to change (the ability to remove labels from icons) is now possible in MagicOS 10. This also extends to Folders on the Home desktop, so if you have a folder of apps, you will only see their icons and not the app name.

I was also pleased to see a highly customizable AOD, which Samsung could take note of here. You can use a dimmed Lock Screen wallpaper or the "Partial" screen, which lets you add widgets such as images (including GIFs) or clocks. It must also be noted that to get to HONOR Home settings, you can simply long-press on any empty portion of a Home screen, which did not work on the Magic8 Pro; maybe an update fixed it.

The power button and Volume Down keys can also be mapped to launch a few tools like the camera, torch, recorder, timer, and Calculator. It is also possible to map an app to these keys.

Notification improvements

One thing that bothered me most about MagicOS 9 was the notifications. It seems like unless the app itself has specific notification channels (many do not) then it is an all or nothing deal, this is because there is a setting for "Gentle notifications" but this is ambiguous, I enabled it on some apps and it seemed to simply suppress the notifications to the notifications center, which resulted in not being alerted at all about certain aspects of an app you care about.

MagicOS 10 improves on notification management, you can swipe left on any notification to delete or manage it, and another cool feature is if you go into the notification's settings you might be presented with a huge list of notification channels, however the one you are editing will flash as you scroll the list, ensuring that you are editing the correct notification to block or modify, which is a really cool feature!

It might be because I restored my settings from my Honor account, but I can safely say that I was not missing any important notifications like I was on the Magic7 Pro with MagicOS 9.0.

Link to Windows hell

I don't know what the HONOR dev team did, but Link to Windows is no longer constantly disconnecting. In fact, when I set it up, I got a notification asking if I wanted the program to "Ignore battery optimizations," which I did. I tested this multiple times by ending all background app tasks between benchmark tests, and every time I was able to open Link to Windows and grab the screenshots I took of the results.

Thanks to whoever is responsible for this improvement!

Cameras

As I have said in previous smartphone reviews I've done, I am no camera buff. I'm a point-and-shoot kind of guy, but it is clear to me that smartphone makers seem to want to concentrate a lot on camera quality, sometimes at the expense of other features, and on paper, at least, the 600 is also no exception.

On the rear, the 600 comprises an unnamed camera system with a 200MP Periscope Telephoto camera (f/1.9, (wide), 1/1.4", 0.56µm), a 12MP wide camera (f/2.2, 112˚), and a Color Temperature Sensor and flash making up the array.

Optical image stabilization (OIS) and AF (auto focus) are also included.

Gallery: HONOR 600 Daytime

As you can see in the above photos, it was mostly cloudy and overcast; the scene images came out rather well. The sixth and seventh pictures were taken to take advantage of the zoom functionality. I found that anything over 10X started to go south, where it looks like AI tried (and failed) to clean up the picture. Let's be honest, if you're going to use over 10X, wouldn't you prefer to have a DSLR anyway?

Gallery: HONOR 600 Nighttime

This is where the camera array really shines; the nighttime scenes managed to capture more light, resulting in a clearer picture. What you are seeing in the pictures above actually was darker in real life, and you'll have to forgive me, because near to the end of my nighttime examples it started raining heavily so I wasn't able to get steady shots; and this is important, as for the nighttime captures to work as intended, in the darkest scenes the shot takes a few seconds, and this is all automatic in the Photo mode. I did not have to switch to Night mode; all of the above images were captured in the default 4:3 1080p Photo mode.

Again, zoom is hit or miss. In my experience, anything up to 10X zoom is going to come out great; above that is not so great without any sort of image manipulation.

AI Eraser

I covered this extensively with the Magic7 Pro review, so I won't repeat myself here. The feature is there in the 600 and works as expected. AI Eraser is one of my favorite features of MagicOS. If I am honest, I am not all that interested in many of the other AI features to do with filtering. Filtering has existed almost as long as we've had smartphones, but now AI can make the filtering more believable; it can also be damaging, making fools easily part with their money. AI photo and video manipulation definitely has a place, but we're now heading into territory that makes people wonder if what we're seeing on the news is even real anymore.

For full disclosure, these are the AI features that HONOR showcases with the HONOR 600:

AiMAGE Camera System:

• AI Color Engine
• AI Enhanced Night
• AI Super Zoom 2.0

AI Edit:

• AI Image to Video 2.011
• AI Photos Agent
• Moving Photo Eraser & Breakout Collage
• Magic Color
• AI Eraser
• AI Outpainting
• AI Cutout
• AI Upscale
• AI Face Tune / AI Beauty

Now to the meat and potatoes of how I used it after first agreeing to the terms of service.

I should note that I kept removing things in the shot, and only saved the last picture, but this should show you how the feature can even create scenery from items that are only partially visible in the shot, like the corner of my couch, and the side of one of my speakers. In both instances, they were replaced by my curtains and laminate floor in such a way that you would think I removed everything myself and then retook the shot.

My advice to people who will be using this feature is to keep it simple! Remove the unwanted passerby, or the toy you forgot to stow when taking a selfie; that's really where it shines!

AI Image to Video 2.0

HONOR also has an AI image-to-video feature that I have seen in other reviews. It basically creates a video scene from only a few images, but I was not able to get this to work, so I might have to revisit this feature when I have a bit more time. The feature allows you to convert static images into 3-8 second animated videos within the native Gallery app. It supports adding text prompts, using 19+ cinematic templates (like "bullet time" or "drone"), and combining up to three images to create dynamic, AI-generated scenes.

There are no costs associated with the AI-powered tools that HONOR delivers with the 600, either, which is also cool. HONOR 600 also comes with the Gemini AI Assistant, which is worth a mention, and of course, the "AI button" on the side of the phone, too. Let's not forget that.

Performance and Battery Life

The phone offers up to 80W charging speed and 27W wired; however, there's no wireless charging here, which is a bit of a bummer. As mentioned in previous reviews, and as required by the EU, HONOR does not include a SuperCharger in the box. I purchased an HONOR 100W SuperCharge Power Adapter and saw that it maxes out at around 39W when charged over 70%.

I drained the phone until it turned off and then connected my HONOR 100W SuperCharger, and it took around an hour to juice the 6400mAh battery fully. After placing the HONOR 600 in Performance mode to run the Battery Life test, the Battery settings said I should have around 40 hours, but of course, this estimation is based on "normal" use and not the looping Battery Life test of PCMark.

Benchmarks

For those who love benchmarks, I used AnTuTu v11, Geekbench v6, 3DMark, and PCMark. A few of the results are in the gallery below. But an important note to add here is that by default, HONOR decides users do not need to utilize the full capacity of the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 CPU, which results in lower scores. Unhelpfully, this is not something that is shown to the user either; one has to "discover" that the phone is not in "Performance mode," For this reason, there are benchmarks for what you'll get "by default" and another set of benchmarks for when you manually toggle Performance mode on.

HONOR 600 Balanced mode

HONOR 600 Performance mode

Benchmarking results for the HONOR 600 were surprising to say the least. From our testing, we only saw minimal gains switching from Balanced to Performance mode; it was actually so low that it resulted in an average of 1% uplift across the board, resulting in the following scores:

AnTuTu v11

• Balanced: Overall 1387787 CPU: 476713 GPU: 314431 Memory: 265884 UX: 330759
• Performance: Overall 1399234 CPU: 479376 GPU: 321001 Memory: 266304 UX: 332553

For some additional context, AnTuTu's Memory score also accounts for the UFS storage speeds on the phone, and the UX score weighs various real-world tasks like image and video editing/processing, document processing, and a bit of data analysis, among others.

The 600 finished under everything in the Samsung Galaxy S25 series in Default mode, including the OnePlus 15R in the AnTuTu v11 rankings. This seems to point to the Honor8 Pro being underclocked in order to preserve battery life rather than being configured for raw performance.

In Performance mode, the gains were minimal as shown in the above scores, which makes me wonder what was being saved (if at all) on the hardware side in Balanced mode.

Geekbench v6

• Balanced: CPU: Single-Core 1,324 Multi-Core: 4,006 GPU: OpenCL 4,778 Vulkan 5,421
• Performance: CPU: Single-Core 1,332 Multi-Core: 4,056 GPU: OpenCL 4,755 Vulkan 5,447

Geekbench 6, which returned a score of 1,324, is comparable to the Asus ROG Phone 5, which is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 in Single-Core mode; it still fell 5 points short of the older CPU. In Multi-Core mode, the HONOR 600's 4,006 score nearest Qualcomm comparison is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which achieved 4,049, besting our HONOR 600 by 45 points. On the GPU front, the 600 scored 4,778, placing it among the likes of the Motorola Edge with its MediaTek Dimensity 8020, which scored 21 points less at 4,757.

In Performance mode, the gains were minimal; we only saw a 2% uplift in memory performance in AnTuTu, which was also the highest gain out of all the benchmarks we ran.

If you are wondering, Geekbench ran a series of short tests which measured things like web browsing, document rendering, text processing, code compilation, various photo editing and processing tasks, and more.

3DMark (Balanced)

• Steel Nomad Light: 754 (avg fps 5.59)
• Steel Nomad Light Stress Test: Loop 1 (757) Loop 2 (758) Loop 3 (759)
• Wildlife (Vulkan): 7,437 (avg fps 44.54)
• Wildlife Stress Test: Loop 1 (7,426) Loop 2 (7,447) Loop 3 (7.393)+

In Balanced mode, Steel Nomad Light only managed to beat 3% of Apple 15 Pro devices, and the Wildlife test result was better than just 7% of all the same devices. Solar Bay reported that it was unsupported on the HONOR 600.

3DMark (Performance)

• Steel Nomad Light: 756 (avg fps 5.60)
• Steel Nomad Light Stress Test: Loop 1 (754) Loop 2 (757) Loop 3 (762)
• Wildlife (Vulkan): 7,484 (avg fps 44.81)
• Wildlife Stress Test: Loop 1 (7,424) Loop 2 (7,451) Loop 3 (7,434)

In Performance mode, again, the gains were minimal at less than 1% across the board.

Also, in case you are wondering, Steel Nomad tests rasterization. Meanwhile, the Wild Life benchmark also measures rasterization, though to a lesser scale.

PCMark (Balanced)

Lastly, I ran PCMark, even though you cannot download it from the Google Play anymore (just like AnTuTu, for some reason), it is still a valid test to find out details about the battery life and performance.

• Work 3.0 performance: 14182
• Storage 2.0 score: 102265
• Battery Life: Failed after 10.5 hours from 100% to 45% [image]

PCMark (Performance)

• Work 3.0 performance: 14567
• Storage 2.0 score: 92811
• Battery Life: Failed after 2.5 hours due to Google sign-in alert [image]

As can be seen above, there's no meaningful bump when the phone is placed in Performance mode, and surprisingly, the Storage 2.0 score actually went down quite a bit.

Battery Life

The Battery Life test failed with a nondescript error after 10.5 hours; the same happened after 2.5 hours in Performance mode, thanks to a Google sign-in alert (from my PC). The Work 3.0 test loops endlessly until the battery goes down to 20%, giving an indication of how long the phone will last under heavy use. Although it didn't complete fully here, we can safely assume that the 6400mAh battery will get you through the day, even under heavy use, with no problems.

What's going on?

I shared all the benchmark scores with my contact, asking why there was so little uplift between Balanced and Performance mode, and I was told that R&D was looking into it.

Networking

In our Magic8 Pro review, internet speeds were quite poor (184.5/112.5Mbps up/down) in comparison to the S23 Ultra I was using as a daily, that has now flipped on its head with my new Galaxy S26 Ultra showing a much worse result than the HONOR 600, even though the WiFi hardware in the Samsung is newer and better (up to 802.11be WiFi 7) while the HONOR only supports up to 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6). I should note that my own WiFi network supports up to WiFi 6 on a 4Gbps up/down fiber ISP.

This marks yet another improvement in MagicOS 10 that I should probably revisit with the Magic8 Pro at some point.

Conclusion

One thing that I love (again) about this phone is the face unlock. It is unlike anything I have previously used. HONOR says in its documentation that it uses 2D face unlock, which I can only assume is a lower version of the 3D Face Recognition that's included in the Magic8 Pro. I found it to be just as responsive. When I pick the phone up, it immediately unlocks, so I only have to swipe from the lock screen. I literally cannot fault it. It seems like it does not require you to point your face to the screen at all for it to recognize you and unlock; it is just super fast. The same can be said of the fingerprint sensor; it is quick.

Time will tell if MagicOS 10 slows to a crawl. I think OS slowdowns affect all handsets; the more apps you install and have running in the background, the more it slows stuff down, but MagicOS 10 appears to have a (annoying warning when an application seems to be using a lot of battery (you can disable the global alerts). The tools are there to fix lag and slowdowns.

The HONOR 600 really is a premium midranger; it costs half as much as a flagship, but for that, you do get some tradeoffs, such as the weaker Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset, with the weak Adreno 722 GPU, and no Qi wireless charging. If you don't game at all on a smartphone, then you won't really notice this weaker chipset; that's all that holds it back, really. Where it shines is with the camera array, and the strong performance of the AI imaging and video features; HONOR isn't wrong when it says it rivals flagships, especially on the camera side.

The HONOR 600 is available now on the HONOR website or at Amazon UK at the links below. If you order on the official website, you can also get several free gifts with your order that include the HONOR SuperCharge Power Adapter 2 (Max 66W) White, HONOR Screen Damage Protection Service (1 Time in 12 Months), and HONOR Extended Warranty (12 Months).

• HONOR 600 (256GB/512GB): £449.99, £449.99 / €549.90 (2X Storage upgrade in EU)
• HONOR 600 (256GB/512GB): £449.99 / £449.99 at Amazon UK

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

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