Shrinking the screen while beefing up the grunt, the Honor 600 Pro takes the fight to the mid-sized Android heavyweights.
Spun off from Huawei a few years ago, Chinese gadget maker Honor’s Android smartphones don’t get as much attention in Australia as household names like Samsung, Google and Motorola.
Despite its lower profile, Honor is producing flagship handsets which can go toe-to-toe with its rivals, like the new Honor 600 Pro and the foldable Honor Magic V6. More affordable than some options, but certainly not budget devices, they’re certainly worth a look if you’re prepared to shop beyond the usual suspects.
At $1,499, the Honor 600 Pro has seen a major price jump since the $999 Honor 400 Pro arrived in Australia last year (the 500 Pro was never officially released here).
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Honor 600 Pro first impressions
With a more premium look and feel than its predecessor, there’s no denying the Honor 600 Pro looks a hell of a lot like an Apple iPhone. Paying homage to Cupertino is a common design strategy among lesser-known Android smartphone makers like Oppo (such as this year’s Oppo Reno 15 Pro), Xiaomi and Realme.
The Honor Pro 600’s unibody aluminium matte frame with sharp edges, sandwiched between a glass front and composite fibreglass-like back, could easily be mistaken for an iGadget. One giveaway, as with most Android handsets, is that all the buttons are on the right-hand side, whereas iPhones place the volume and Action (mute) button on the left.
There’s also a programmable Apple-esque touch-sensitive Quick Button on the right, which can be used to easily launch the camera or access AI features.
While some Pro smartphone screens creep up towards the 7-inch mark, the Honor 600 Pro keeps it at a more manageable 6.57 inches, meaning it shouldn’t be too unwieldy for most hands. It’s a slight step down from the 6.7-inch Honor 400 Pro.
At the same time, Honor has managed to reduce the bezel to a mere .98 mm, making it a fraction thinner than what you’d find on an iPhone, but not enough to get excited about.
As always, I’m disappointed the fingerprint reader isn’t built into the power button. Instead, you need to reach down a long way with your thumb to access the onscreen reader, which I think increases the risk of the phone toppling out of your hand.
Fire up the Honor 600 Pro, and you’re faced with a super-bright and vivid 2728 x 1264 pixel AMOLED display. Even with 6.57 inches of screen real estate, you still enjoy a sharp 458 pixels per inch.
The screen offers 10-bit colour with a 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, along with up to 120 Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling. What really stands out from the crowd is an amazing 8,000 nits peak brightness, although it’s not for the entire screen. It can only push this extreme brightness to small, specific areas like HDR highlights or fine details,
You won’t see the full benefit of this in day-to-day use, although you can enable ‘sunlight mode’ to ensure the screen is brighter outdoors. You’ll only unlock full brightness when watching High Dynamic Range content from the likes of Netflix and Amazon – supporting HDR10+ but not Dolby Vision.
At the bottom of the handset, you’ve got a USB-C port, alongside a nano-SIM port with the benefit of eSIM, but no microSD card support. The phone features dual speakers for stereo (relying on a dedicated top speaker, rather than an earpiece speaker) but there’s no Dolby Atmos support, and you miss out on an old-school headphone jack.
Honor 600 Pro specifications and price
| Display size | 6.57-inch |
| Display resolution | 2728×1264 pixels, 458 ppi |
| Display technology | AMOLED 1.07 billion colours DCI-P3 wide colour gamut 120 Hz refresh rate 8000 nits Netflix and Amazon HDR certified |
| Bands | 5G sub 6, 4G LTE-FDD/LTE-TDD, 3G WCDMA, 2G GSM |
| Chipset | Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform Octa-core CPU |
| GPU | Adreno 830 |
| Rear cameras | 200 megapixel (f/1.9 aperture, AF, OIS) |
| 50 megapixel periscope telephoto (f/2.8 aperture, AF, OIS) | |
| 12 megapixel ultrawide (AF) | |
| Front camera | 50MP Camera (f/2.0) |
| RAM | 12 GB |
| Onboard storage | 512 GB |
| microSD slot | No |
| SIM | Dual Nano SIM + eSIM |
| Charging | USB Type-C, USB 2.0 wired 80W SuperCharge wired reverse 27W wireless 50W SuperCharge |
| Battery | 7000 mAh Lithium polymer battery |
| Wi-Fi | Wi-Fi 7 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be 2×2 MIMO 2, 5G and 6GHz Wi-Fi Hotspot Wi-Fi Direct |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 6 BLE SBC, AAC, LDAC, aptX, aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, aptX Lossless, LHDC3.0, LHDC4.0, LHDC5.0, LC3 |
| Operating system | MagicOS 10 (Based on Android 16) |
| Security | Fingerprint reader Face Unlock |
| Ruggedness | IP68, IP69 and IP69K |
| Dimensions | 156 x 74.7 x 7.8 mm |
| Weight | 200 gm |
| Colours | Orange, Golden White, Black |
| Price | $1,499 RRP |
| Warranty | 2 years |
| Official website | Honor Australia |
Features
The Honor 600 Pro runs Android 16, customised with Honor’s own MagicOS 10, which unsurprisingly feels a lot like Apple’s iOS. You have to deal with a reasonably restrained amount of preloaded social media bloatware, plus links to popular apps like Spotify, WhatsApp and Netflix, so you can install them without searching the Google Play app store.
Honor says the handset will only receive two major Android OS updates and three years of security patches in Australia. That’s outrageous considering that Europe gets six years of coverage for the exact same device. Honor says it is “continuing to evaluate based on market and consumer needs” – which is corporate speak for “Australians are second-class citizens and we’ll see how many people complain before we even think about changing it.”
MagicOS 10 comes with the mandatory dollop of AI, including AI Deepfake Detection, real-time AI Translation, AI Text Extraction, AI Memories and AI Writing assistants. There is also an AI-powered photo editor, plus the ability to turn photos into videos.
Of course, if AI features are important to you, make sure you consider the Google Pixel 10 Pro.
As you’d expect with the Pro name, one of the Honor 600 Pro’s big selling points is a triple-lens rear camera array. Flip the handset over, and you’ll find a 200 MP s primary shooter with the benefit of optical image stabilisation. It’s blessed with a large 1/1.4 inch sensor to improve low-light performance.
The handset boasts a CIPA 6.5 rating (from the Camera and Imaging Products Association), meaning it can shoot at a shutter speed 6.5 steps slower than normal without motion blur to improve handheld and low-light photography.
Alongside is a 50 MP periscope telephoto with 3.5x optical and 8x digital zoom, combining to deliver a 120x hybrid super zoom – similar to the Oppo Reno 15 Pro, Oppo Find X9 Pro, Google Pixel 10 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and rivals from the likes of Xiaomi.
At this price range, a 3.5x telephoto lens is better than you’d expect, and arguably more useful than a macro lens. The trade-off is that the ultrawide lens is only 12 MP, where you’d really expect it to be 50 MP.
While the island around the rear camera array extends across the width of the phone, it’s still not enough to completely eliminate wobble when sitting on a flat surface.
Around the front, you’ve got a 50 MP ultrawide selfie camera, surprisingly lacking autofocus. It opts for a punch-hole design rather than relying on an Apple-esque notch, but MagicOS still replicates Apple’s Dynamic Island with Magic Capsule.
Under the bonnet, the Honor 600 Pro packs a beefy octa-core Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform with an Adreno 830 GPU. They’re accompanied by a generous 512 GB of storage and 12 GB of RAM. The 8 Elite is no longer the latest and greatest, but it still packs quite a punch.
When it comes to connectivity, it’s a sub-6 5G handset with the benefit of dual nano-SIM and eSIM. You can take advantage of Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, with an impressive spread of audio codecs, including aptX Lossless and the lesser-known LHDC5.0.
The phone packs a very generous 7000 mAh battery, which should get you through a very long day and well into the next. When it’s time for a top-up, the phone can take advantage of 80-watt wired and 50-watt wireless charging, although keep in mind there’s no AC charger in the box.
When it comes to ruggedness, you’ve got IP68, IP69 and IP69K certification – the latter of which is the highest ingress protection rating, meaning it is completely dust-tight and can survive close-range, high-pressure and high-temperature water jets. The body has an SGS 5-star certification for drop and crush resistance, but I’d feel better if Honor also cited the nature of the glass.
Compared to the more affordable $999 Honor 600, the $1,499 600 Pro upgrades to the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, while adding the 50MP telephoto lens with 3.5x optical zoom and 50W wireless charging.
Quality
Geekbench 6 results tell an excellent story thanks to that Snapdragon silicon, scoring 3,053 single-core, 9,039 multi-core and 17,990 OpenCL. That sees it outgun most handsets around this price point, like the Oppo Reno 15 Pro and Google Pixel 10 Pro. It still falls short of the more expensive Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Oppo Find X9 Pro, not to mention the more affordable standard-issue Apple iPhone 17, which has inherited more ‘pro’ features.
| Phone | CPU single-core | CPU multi-core | GPU |
| Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra | 3,770 | 11,422 | 23,805 |
| Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max | 3,768 | 9,443 | 45,451 |
| Oppo Find X9 Pro | 3,165 | 9,418 | 20,447 |
| Motorola Signature | 2,609 | 9,391 | 17,415 |
| Apple iPhone 17 | 3,520 | 9,057 | 37,161 |
| Honor 600 Pro | 3,053 | 9,039 | 17,990 |
| Google Pixel 10 Pro | 2,317 | 6,455 | 3,233 |
| Apple iPhone 16e | 2,679 | 6,144 | 23,732 |
| Oppo Reno 15 Pro | 1,555 | 6,330 | 11,828 |
| Motorola Edge 60 Pro | 1,432 | 4,695 | 9,107 |
| Samsung Galaxy A57 | 1,389 | 4,435 | 6,674 |
| Motorola Edge 60 Fusion | 1,050 | 3,014 | 2,581 |
When it comes to photography, 200 MP primary shooters always sound impressive, but we all know by now that pixels aren’t everything. Thankfully, it does an impressive job, delivering sharp and vivid images that don’t look too overblown or overprocessed. Thanks to that large sensor and great stabilisation, it does a particularly good job with tricky lighting conditions and low-light environments.
The 120x super zoom also does an impressive job; unfortunately, the For Sale sign across the creek from my house is gone, but it still does well with challenging scenes that don’t just include straight lines (making it harder for AI to make an educated guess). Overall, it’s not as impressive as the 100x super zoom on the Honor Magic V6 that I’m testing at the same time (review to come).
You do see a quality drop when switching across to the 12 MP ultrawide lens, although it’s not as big a drop as you might expect.
Honor spruiks the 600 Pro’s low-light capabilities, and it did a very good job of my standard low-light test in the junk in cupboard under my stairs. But like most phones, it struggles to get the balance right outside.
The photo below was taken at 10:30 PM mid-winter. The clear sky should be black and at least one star should be visible, but the photo is working too hard to brighten the scene (while leaving the shadows very murky). The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra did a better job, but not as good as the iPhone 17.
When it comes to selfies, you don’t have the option of 2x optical zoom as with some rivals, but I respect the default ‘warts ‘n all’ results, resisting the temptation to go all-in on AI-assisted retouching.
Who is the Honor 600 Pro for?
The Honor 600 Pro has a lot to offer if you’re looking for a great camera array including a telephoto lens. All in a relatively compact handset with a decent battery life and heaps of grunt.
That said, there’s some tough competition in the pro space. Its nearest competitor would be the similarly priced iPhone-esque Oppo Reno 15 Pro, which doesn’t pack as much screen real estate or grunt but offers a slightly better camera array (such as 50 MP ultrawide, selfie auto-focus) and throws in a fast AC charger for good measure.
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