HONOR 600 Pro Review: Awesome AI Tricks Wrapped in a Familiar Face

Let me get the obvious thing out of the way first.

The HONOR 600 Pro looks like an iPhone 17 Pro. Not “kinda similar” or “vaguely inspired”. We’re talking flat sides, flat back, flat front, large square camera plateau, matte metal frame, and an orange colourway that is dangerously close to Apple’s Desert Titanium. Put both phones face-down on a table at the mamak and your friend might genuinely do a double-take.

Okay. Elephant acknowledged. Now let’s talk about the actual phone.

Because underneath that familiar silhouette, HONOR has done something genuinely interesting with the HONOR 600 Pro. For the first time in their N-series lineup, you’re getting a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, a 7,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, and IP69K water resistance, features that were previously locked behind their more expensive Magic-series flagships. HONOR is calling this their “Accessible Flagship,” and the question is whether that label holds up in the real world.

I’ve spent time with the phone, and here’s where I landed.

Design and First Look

The build quality is genuinely good. At 200g with a 7.8mm profile, it sits well in the hand. Not too heavy, not too slim to feel cheap. The Golden White colourway what I’m using has a matte frosted back that resists fingerprints better than most glossy finishes, and the flat sides make it easy to grip without your fingers scrambling for purchase. It’s a phone that feels premium the moment you pick it up.

The 6.57-inch AMOLED display is one of the highlights. It hits up to 8,000 nits of peak brightness, runs at 120Hz, and the colours are vivid without looking overcooked. I took it out in the midday sun in full Malaysian heat and the screen stayed readable without me having to squint. That’s not always a given.

On the right side sits the AI button, a trickle-down feature from the Magic8 Pro. You can configure it for short press, double press, and long press, giving you up to three different actions. In practice, it mostly works for HONOR’s own AI features and launching the camera. I’d love for HONOR to open it up to third-party apps, being able to fire up Spotify or Grab with a dedicated button would be far more useful day-to-day. But as it stands, it’s a decent shortcut button that works best if you actually use HONOR’s AI suite.

The IP68, IP69, and IP69K ratings are worth calling out. That triple certification is currently the highest water and dust resistance you’ll find on any smartphone, and it’s a step up from the 400 Pro which topped out at IP68 and IP69. Rain, puddles, accidental toilet drops, the HONOR 600 Pro should handle them all.

One minor gripe: the ultrawide camera sits in a slightly oval-shaped housing that doesn’t quite match the aesthetic of the rest of the camera module. It gives the back a slightly mismatched look up close, though most people probably won’t notice.

Performance

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is a 2025 flagship-grade chip, and it shows. Day-to-day usage is smooth. Apps open instantly, multitasking doesn’t stutter, and MagicOS 10 on Android 16 feels polished and responsive. HONOR has cleaned up the UI over the years, and there’s less bloat than there used to be.

Helping things along is the 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM, paired with HONOR RAM Turbo feature that extends it by another 12GB using storage as virtual memory, giving you up to 24GB of total RAM when the system needs it. In practice, this means you can have a pile of apps running in the background and come back to them without any of them needing to reload from scratch. For someone who constantly jumps between WhatsApp, Google Maps, a browser with too many tabs open, and a work app or two simultaneously, this makes a noticeable difference in how fluid the whole experience feels.

Gaming performance is solid for the most part. Demanding titles run well, though the phone does get noticeably warm under sustained load. Internal temperatures climbed during extended gaming sessions, and I did catch occasional brief stutters when the phone was hot and the scene was particularly demanding. It’s not a consistent problem, but if you’re a hardcore mobile gamer who plays for hours at a stretch, just be aware.

Where the chip really shines is in efficiency. Combined with the 7,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, endurance is exceptional. I consistently ended busy days with plenty of charge to spare, and even on heavy-use days involving navigation, video streaming, and social media, the battery held up impressively. Silicon-carbon cells really have come a long way, and the HONOR 600 Pro is a good demonstration of that.

Charging is 80W wired. From flat to 50% in about 28 minutes, and a full charge in around an hour. There’s also 50W wireless charging, though you’ll need to buy HONOR’s own wireless puck separately for that, which is a bit of a con at this price point.

Daily Usage

Living with the HONOR 600 Pro day-to-day is a genuinely comfortable experience. MagicOS 10 on Android 16 is clean, snappy, and a lot less bloated than it used to be in older HONOR phones. Swiping through the UI feels smooth, and switching between apps doesn’t produce the kind of micro-hesitations that you sometimes get on phones with less efficient memory management.

The AI features are where HONOR really wants you to spend time, and I’ll be honest, some of them are more useful than others. Circle to Search and Magic Portal are still here, and they remain handy shortcuts for quickly looking something up or sharing content across apps. Magic Capsule handles live activity notifications in a neat little pill above the camera cutout. AI Translate and AI Summary are quietly useful for those moments when you need to parse a long document or a foreign-language article without switching apps.

The one that genuinely impressed me, though, is the AI Deepfake Detection. During a video call, the phone can flag in real time if the person on the other end appears to be using an AI-generated face. Given that scam calls have gotten disturbingly convincing lately, having this kind of safeguard built into the hardware, not a third-party app, but baked right into the phone. I honestly feel like something that should be industry standard by now. It’s easily the most practically useful AI feature on this phone and I hope more brands take note.

Then there’s AI Image to Video 2.0, which is HONOR’s big creative AI push this year. The short version: you feed it up to two photos, type a text prompt, pick a template, and it generates a short cinematic video blending everything together. Templates range from Embrace (great for anniversary-type content) to Freestyle, Life Morph, and Pet Roleplay. I actually did a full hands-on breakdown of AI Image to Video 2.0 and the experience on the HONOR 600 Pro is smoother than on the 400 Pro, partly because the Snapdragon 8 Elite gives the phone enough headroom to process everything locally without the AI features feeling sluggish.

Now, the battery. This is where the HONOR 600 Pro genuinely surprised me. The 7,000mAh silicon-carbon cell is not a gimmick number. I used this phone as my daily driver and it lasted me two full days before I had to think about plugging it in. Two days. With WhatsApp, social media, navigation, and the occasional gaming session mixed in. That kind of endurance in a phone this slim feels almost unfair to the competition.

When you do eventually need to charge it, 80W wired charging means you go from flat to 50% in about 28 minutes. A full charge takes roughly an hour, which means even if you’re running late, a quick top-up while getting dressed is enough to carry you through the day. There’s also 50W wireless charging if you have the HONOR wireless puck, though that is sold separately, a minor annoyance at this price point.

Camera

The camera setup on the HONOR 600 Pro is: a 200MP main camera with a 1/1.4-inch sensor (largest in its class) and CIPA 6.0 OIS, a 50MP periscope telephoto with 3.5x optical zoom and CIPA 6.5 OIS, and a 12MP ultrawide. There’s also a 50MP front camera for selfies.

Daylight photos from the main camera are genuinely impressive. Detail is sharp, colours look accurate rather than artificially boosted, and the AI Color Engine, which uses a dedicated colour temperature sensor does a good job of nailing white balance even under mixed lighting. Outdoor shots of cityscapes, landscapes, and food all came out looking natural and well-exposed.

Portrait shots are a highlight. Subject separation is clean, skin tones look real rather than smoothed-to-plastic, and even in tricky lighting conditions the phone manages to balance exposure well. If you’re someone who takes a lot of people photos, the HONOR 600 Pro will not disappoint.

Telephoto performance is good up to the 3.5x optical zoom length where images stay sharp and usable. Beyond that, detail starts to soften, as expected from digital zoom. The maximum 120x zoom is there mainly for bragging rights and moon shots (and the Super-Moon 2.0 feature actually works well for the latter), but for general use, you’d want to stay within the 10x range.

Low light is decent but not class-leading. HONOR’s Night Engine improves things noticeably compared to shooting without it, but when there are strong light sources in the frame alongside dark areas, the phone sometimes struggles to balance both well. The ultrawide also has some barrel distortion at the edges, though it’s correctable in post-processing.

Gallery

Conclusion

The HONOR 600 Pro is a phone that has a lot going for it, as long as you can make peace with its… let’s call it “design inspiration.”

Snapdragon 8 Elite performance, a massive silicon-carbon battery that lasts all day, IP69K water resistance, a solid 200MP main camera, and some genuinely useful AI features for an “Accessible Flagship,” it delivers on most of that promise. The charging speed is fast, the display is bright and smooth, and the build quality is premium.

The weaknesses are real though. Low-light camera performance isn’t quite at flagship level. The phone runs warm under sustained load. And depending on how you feel about the design, carrying it around might get you a few unsolicited “eh, you changed to iPhone ah?” from literally everyone you know.

At RM3,099.00 for the sole 12GB + 512GB variant, it’s competing in a tough bracket. If camera performance is your top priority, the upcoming HONOR Magic series costs a bit more but delivers a noticeably better imaging experience.

But if you want a phone with stellar battery life, fast charging, a reliable everyday camera, and enough AI tricks to keep you entertained and you’re okay with people assuming you switched teams, the HONOR 600 Pro is a genuinely solid pick.

The HONOR 600 Pro is available in Orange, Golden White, and Black.

More info at https://www.honor.com/my/phones/honor-600-pro/