Honor has announced two new smartphones, the Honor 600 and Honor 600 Pro, but is rather hoping you pay attention to one more than the other. However, it’s probably not the phone you expect it to want to highlight.
Honor 600 and 600 Pro
What are the differences?
The Honor 600 Pro should be the phone you expect Honor to want you to look at first, but in reality, it thinks the cheaper, less technically impressive Honor 600 will be the winner in the line-up.
There’s quite a difference between the two spec sheets. The Honor 600 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, a 6.57-inch AMOLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, a 6,400mAh silicon-carbon battery (7,000mAh in some territories), and a 200-megapixel main camera plus a 50MP telephoto for a 3.5x optical zoom.
The Honor 600 shares the same screen and battery, but steps down to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 processor, and loses the telephoto camera entirely. However, it retains the 200MP camera.
Spec-sheet fiends will immediately favor the Honor 600 Pro, but may think twice when they get to the price. The Honor 600 Pro’s price will equate to around $835, while the Honor 600 will be around $650.
We’re still waiting for official European and UK prices, but expect an even wider gap between them. It’s here where Honor knows it’s going to struggle with the Pro. For $800 to $900, you’re into OnePlus 15 and Galaxy S26 territory, but at around the $500 to $600 mark, things are a lot more competitive.
Handling the phones
Just the right size
What’s interesting is when you hold both the phones, there’s little to split them. Both have metal frames and Apple iPhone-like designs on the rear panel, along with neatly curved corners to make them really comfortable to hold.
Because they both share the same screen, they feel practically identical in your hand, and you’re not missing out on any screen real estate by choosing the non-Pro phone either.
The 6.57-inch screen makes it sound like the Honor 600 will be quite big, but some clever engineering and some thin bezels make it surprisingly compact. Both should be durable, with an IP68, IP69, and IP69K dust and water resistance rating.
Both have a physical camera control on the side of the phone. It’s a double press to open the camera app, and a single click to take a photo. I’m pleased to see the camera react to it instantly, with no obvious pause when taking photos.
AI and camera
See what the 600 can do
The Honor 600 series has Android 16 and Honor’s Magic OS 10 software onboard, and it’s making a big deal about the AI-powered AI Image to Video 2.0 generation tool built into it.
What does it do? You can select up to three still images and tell the software to create a video from them, use templates to create videos with cinematic movement and special effects, and use natural language to create videos. This is in addition to other AI tools, such as short movie creation from a series of stills, AI filters for the sky, object removal, and so on.
The image-to-video tool may be a bit of fun. The video below was created using a basic prompt about the people walking and the dog jumping, and provided you don’t look closely at everyone’s horrific faces, it does a decent job considering the simple source photo.
It’s worth noting the feature says “Limited-time free trial” on the Generate button, so expect it to become a subscription or a microtransaction feature in the future.
Despite not having a 3.5x optical zoom, the Honor 600’s camera app shows a 3x zoom shortcut, and images are decent as long as you don’t pixel-peep, and the main and wide-angle cameras take colorful images suited to social media.
When will the Honor 600 be released?
Coming soon, but not to the US
The Honor 600 series will not be available in the US, and will initially be released in Malaysia on April 30. We’re expecting a European and UK release to follow, and will have more information ready for our full review of the Honor 600, expected very soon.
The Honor 600 faces a challenge from the Samsung Galaxy A57, the Nothing Phone 4a and Phone 4a Pro, plus various models from Motorola too.
