The Honor 600 is a superb budget smartphone with a premium camera system and a battery that goes on for days

The launch of the Honor 600 series rounds off a stellar year, so far, for the Chinese company. From capturing mass attention with its RoboPhone at MWC, to a slate of critically acclaimed devices, the company has yet to miss in 2026.

Its new mid-range devices, the Honor 600 and 600 Pro, are both signs of a smartphone manufacturer that has hit a groove. I have been using the standard 600 for a couple of weeks, and it has impressed me in so many ways.

Honor 600: Design and display

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Honor has largely done a splendid job with the designs of its most recent handset. It can occasionally go too far towards the ostentatious – like the Magic V6 – but the 600 series is both neat and distinctive without being too flashy. The handset has smooth, rounded edges, a matte metal chassis, and a composite fiber back cover, with a sort of translucent camera bump that houses two lenses. It does resemble the iPhone 17 Pro in the Orange, but we have it in a cool white finish.

The screen is 6.75in, and has a small circle at the top for the selfie cam, and very little in the way of bezels. Overall, the device is just 7.8 mm thick and weighs just 185g (190g for the EU edition). It's comfortable in the hand, but more importantly, it feels like a premium device.

The 600 series has a 6.75in AMOLED display, with 120Hz refresh rate, vivid HDR capabilities, and can hit 8000 nits in brightness, according to Honor. With a colormeiter, I recorded 855.75cd/m2, which is crazy bright. You also get a 'Sunlight mode' which allows for extended high brightness; like all modern smartphone displays, the 600 has an automatic control that adapts brightness, so I am puzzled why the Sunlight mode is even needed.

Other modes include normal, vivid, and professional colors. Normal and vivid are, but now, self-explanatory, whereas 'Professional' seems somewhat confusing. It takes the blue out of the screen when you initially turn it on, and doesn't seem to make anything improve. Overall, the display is crisp, and colors are largely true to life, particularly in photos and streaming.

Honor 600: Specs and performance

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, which is developed with a 4nm process, also gives the illusion of a premium device as it powers a wealth of top-tier features for AI and camera enhancements – not to mention long battery life (more on that below).

With Geekbench 6, the 600 notched 1,316 for single-core and 4,075 for multithreaded workloads. These are just benchmarks, and they don't come near any iPhone or the top Samsung scores. But what these scores don't really tell the whole story; the phone is zippy, goes through an awful lot of web searches, intensive usage (mainly social media), and lasts and lasts.

As is slowly becoming the norm, we needed to play our looped video test to deplete the Honor 600's 640mAh battery. In total, it lasted 36hrs and 12mins, putting it on par with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and the iPhone.

Honor 600: Cameras

The standard model of Honor 600 comes with a 200MP, f/1.9, wide lens (with the night vision technology), and a 12MP, f/2.2 ultrawide lens. The front camera is a 50 MP, f/2.0 wide one. If you opt for the Pro model, you get an extra 50MP rear lens, but from my experience, the standard model is a superb system for point-and-shoot needs, video capture, and low-light shots.

It begs belief that this is a mid-range device when it comes with such high-quality camera technology. The 200MP sensor, in particular, is as premium as they come – the night images I captured are stunning (and I recently reviewed the S26 Ultra). What's more, it captures images more quickly than you would expect, and not too much holding still while it creates the image.

Video is also good; you can shoot 4K up to 30 fps or up to 60fps with a lower resolution (720p). I used this for recent ITPro YouTube content and found it to be crystal clear and steady, even without my gimbal.

Honor 600: Is it worth it?

The Honor 600 is a sub-£500 smartphone. Having used it for two weeks, I feel that the price should be higher; its camera system is as good as most premium models. Its screen is nice and bright. And the battery goes on and on. All powered by a decent Snapdragon processor. It is, arguably, the best budget phone around.

Honor 600 specifications