Honor 600 review: Saved by a swift price cut
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Bright, accurate display -
200MP main camera -
Six years of software support
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Mediocre battery life -
Derivative design -
No telephoto camera
The Honor 600 dodged a bullet. It’s one of many smartphones (and tech products at large) affected by the ongoing component shortage, and it initially launched with a massively inflated asking price that it couldn’t hope to live up to.
By the time I’ve come to review it, however, the Honor 600 is selling for the same price its predecessor went for – pre-RAM-crisis kind of money. This development turned what was sure to be an overtly negative review into something more nuanced.
At its original launch price, the Honor 600 would have been a hard no, but this discount puts it back among rivals that it actually has a chance of facing. It’s not perfect, and not even necessarily the mid-range phone to beat, but it’s done a better job of maintaining appeal in the current climate than most of its peers.
What you need to know
The Honor 600 builds on the success of last year’s Honor 400 with a few small tweaks. First up, we have a new processor – the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset clocked up to 2.8GHz and backed by 8GB of RAM. The battery is new, too, with a higher capacity of 6,400mAh (up from 5,300mAh) and support for 80W charging.
The display measures 6.57in across the diagonal, which is a tiny bit larger than the 6.55in panel on last year’s model, but it’s surrounded by what Honor is calling the slimmest black bezel on the market, at just 0.98mm thick. The resolution is roughly the same as before, at 2,728 x 1,264, and the refresh rate is once again 120Hz.
The only area that remains stagnant is the cameras. There’s a 50-megapixel (f/2.0) shooter sat atop the display, and on the rear, we have a dual-lens setup, with the massive 200-megapixel (f/1.9) main camera joined by a less impressive 12-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide camera.
Price and competition
The Honor 600 launched at a far higher price than its predecessor, with the 256GB model costing £549 and the 512GB £599 – another victim of ongoing RAM supply problems. Honor appears to have swiftly backtracked, however, as you can now grab the Honor 600 for £399 (256GB) or £429 (512GB).
As this appears to be permanent rather than a short-lived discount, I’m going to compare the Honor 600 to other phones around this price. Its biggest threat is the Google Pixel 10a, which starts at £429 for the 128GB model, while the 256GB version is £479.
The Pixel, like the Honor, lacks a telephoto camera. If you want one of those, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro with 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage is available for £379, while the 12GB model is only £20 more.
Interestingly, this price cut puts the Honor 600 dangerously close to its stablemate, the Magic 8 Lite (£299 for the 256GB version, £329 for the 512GB). This offers poorer performance, weaker cameras and a plastic build, but delivers some of the best battery life we’ve ever recorded.
Design and key features
Recent Honor phones (particularly in this number series) have latched onto Apple’s design language, and the Honor 600 might be one of the most blatant examples of this yet.
In addition to the flat edges, flat front and rear that we’re already fairly used to, the Honor 600 adds a width-spanning glass plateau to house its cameras and a camera control button low down on the right edge. The cherry on top is the vibrant Orange option that my review sample came in (you can also pick it up in Black or Golden White).
Still, it’s a solid enough look, if heavily derivative. It weighs around the same as the Honor 400, tipping the scales at 185g, and retains the same 75 x 156mm footprint, but it’s a little thicker, now 7.8mm front-to-back, compared to last year’s 7.2mm.
Dust and water resistance is better this year, however, upping to the belt-and-braces IP68/IP69K rating, which certifies it as dust-tight and able to withstand high-pressure, high-temperature water jets from any direction, as well as full submersion in 1.5m of fresh water for up to 30 minutes.
Honor’s MagicOS 10.0 software is based on Android 16 and is fluid enough in general. I do have some bugbears, however. The choice not to have an app drawer by default is a strange one, and the excess of preinstalled bloatware makes the operating system hard to love. On the bright side, Honor has pledged six years of OS and security updates. Only Google’s Pixel 10a goes further in this price range with seven years.
Display
The 6.57in AMOLED display is sharp and smooth, with the 120Hz refresh rate making scrolling and hopping between apps feel efficient. It gets bright, too, hitting a fantastic 809cd/m2 on manual brightness and topping out at 1,680cd/m2 when displaying HDR content. My usual control test of the adaptive brightness struggled to bring the brightness to its ceiling, but anecdotally, I was able to use the Honor 600 during a very sunny outdoor festival without issue, so it’s bright enough to stand up to relentless sunshine.
I was impressed with colour accuracy, too. Of the two colour profiles that you have to choose between – Vivid and Natural – the latter offered the better reproduction of the sRGB colour space. Using a colourimeter, I recorded gamut coverage of 97.3% against a volume of 98.9%, and the average Delta E colour variance score came back at just 0.88. We’re looking for 1 or under here, so the Honor 600 hits the mark beautifully.
Performance and battery life
The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset is a frequent flyer on 2026 mid-range phones, also cropping up in the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, Oppo Reno 16 and Motorola 70, and it’s a solid performer. Daily use sees it chugging along at a fine pace, swiping, scrolling and swapping between apps without notable pauses and running multiple programs at once without slowing down.
You can see below that the Honor 600 is a middle-of-the-road performer when it comes to the Geekbench 6 CPU tests, matching the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro in single-core operations but falling 9% behind when it comes to multi-core tasks. The Google Pixel 10a remains the strongest option here, with results that beat the Honor 600 by 34% and 14% in the single- and multi-core benchmarks, respectively.
Moving on to GPU performance, the Honor 600 maintains its average nature in the Geekbench 6 Vulkan test, with a score that is better than the Honor 400 and Magic 8 Lite but inferior to the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and Google Pixel 10a.
I found the Honor 600 to be competent enough with lightweight games, running laps in Asphalt Legends without stuttering or overheating – but anyone interested in hardcore 3D gaming will be better served by the Pixel.
Battery life was a weak point on the Honor 400, and despite dramatically expanding the battery capacity to 6,400mAh, the Honor 600 still struggles here. In our standard looping video test, the Honor 600 lasted for 24hrs 14mins, which is around four hours better than its predecessor, but still behind its main rivals.
The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro went a couple of hours longer, at 26hrs 45mins, but the real wins come from looking at the Pixel 10a and Honor Magic 8 Lite, which hung on for over 38hrs and 40hrs, respectively.
Charging is solid but unremarkable. It started around the 20W mark with my Motorola charger (80W, presumably, is retained for those using an official Honor brick), but ticking the option to boost charging speeds knocked it up to 33W.
As promised by the prompt, this did result in the phone getting rather warm, but it also got the phone from empty to 50% in around 30 minutes, which is decent for a 6,400mAh battery on a £400 phone, and it hit 100% in 1hr 6mins.
Cameras
The cameras being the same as last year would have been a disaster if Honor had committed to the new, far higher pricing; the complete lack of a telephoto camera would have seen this handset sink like a stone against competitors like the Xiaomi 17T and Oppo Reno 16. I still don’t love that there are no camera updates, but at this price, it’s more forgivable.
The 200-megapixel main camera uses a relatively sizable 1/1.4in sensor and supports optical image stabilisation, so shots are generally well-detailed and gorgeously coloured.
The quality carries through into night photography for the most part, with solid detail and natural colours, but I did notice some visual noise creeping into the sky.
With no telephoto in the deck, zoom photography remains fairly rudimentary, topping out at 30x but, realistically, you won’t want to venture much past the 10x mark. Shots towards the upper limit are smudgy and pixellated, to the point where there’s little point in bothering.
The 12-megapixel ultrawide lens is where I’d have liked to see some improvements. It’s not a bad lens, with a colour tone that broadly matches the main camera, but detail is fairly weak, especially towards the corners, and the dynamic range isn’t all that strong, either.
It’s back to positives with the selfie camera: it captures sharp portraits with natural-looking skin tones and strong focus and records video up to 4K/30fps.
You get the same on the rear camera, too, which is fine, but it falls a little short next to the Google Pixel 10a, which can record 4K up to 60fps.
Verdict
The Honor 600 not comparing favourably to the Google Pixel 10a is a common theme of this review. The Pixel 10a is still the best option in this price range and has better cameras, longer software support, a more powerful processor and far better battery life.
With that said, the Pixel suffers on the storage front, and £429 for the Honor 600 with a whopping 512GB of storage is a bargain. Add in the fantastic display, the 200-megapixel main camera and software that can almost match the Pixel, and the Honor 600 has a lot going for it – just make sure you get it for this new, lower price.
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