Honor 600 Pro review: brilliant battery life wrapped in an iPhone-style body (aff)
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Honor’s latest flagship borrows heavily from Apple but nails the things most people actually care about
There’s something slightly odd happening with the Honor 600 Pro. On one hand, it’s blatantly chasing the iPhone crowd harder than almost any Android phone I’ve used recently. Flat sides, familiar camera layout, polished animations – even the software occasionally feels like it’s wearing an Apple Halloween costume. And yet… I really rather like it.
The Honor 600 Pro is one of those phones that you have to live with to love. It won me over after a few days because it gets so many important things right. Battery life is absolutely outrageous, the screen is lovely, performance is properly flagship-fast and the cameras are generally excellent. It’s a phone that feels expensive in the hand and surprisingly complete in day-to-day use.
The first thing that hits you is the battery life. In the UK we get the slightly smaller 6,400mAh battery, but it's still a monster.
I’m someone who absolutely hammers phones – constant camera use, Bluetooth streaming in the car, doomscrolling, editing photos, hotspotting laptops and accidentally leaving YouTube running while I fall asleep – and the 600 Pro barely seems bothered. Two-day battery life is genuinely achievable if you’re not caning it.
And when you finally do kill it, the charging is very quick. Around 80W wired charging and 50W wireless means the battery anxiety simply disappears from your life. This is outpaced by a few rivals, but not enough to make a difference.
The display is another big win. It’s bright, sharp and gloriously smooth at 120Hz, with enough punch outdoors to remain readable even in harsh sunlight.
More importantly, it just looks expensive. Honor has become very good at hardware design over the last few years and the 600 Pro feels every bit a premium flagship. As I've said, there's more than a faint whiff of iPhone 17 about this, especially if you spec it in orange, but that will appeal to plenty of people.
Performance is served up by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. Apps open instantly, gaming is effortless and multitasking never feels strained.
Camera-wise, it’s mostly excellent with a few familiar Honor quirks.
The 200MP main sensor produces detailed, vibrant photos with loads of dynamic range and the telephoto camera is genuinely useful rather than a spec-sheet filler. Portrait shots are especially good.
Personally, I’d still take the Pixel 10 Pro or Vivo’s top-end camera phones for pure photography consistency. But for most people the 600 Pro is comfortably in flagship territory.
The weak point, unsurprisingly, is the software. MagicOS isn’t terrible any more – in fact, it’s become pretty smooth and stable – but it still suffers from too much bloatware and an identity crisis. Some people won’t care. Others will absolutely hate it. It grew on me, but I'm never going to be an evangelist.
Its launch price is £899.99, so it starts drifting dangerously close to proper flagship territory, and that creates problems because phones like the Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S series and OnePlus flagships become realistic alternatives.
There is, however, a £200 discount voucher on the Honor website - and that makes it a more appealing prospect.
It may not have the outright polish of a Samsung or the camera magic of a Pixel, but it absolutely nails the fundamentals people actually notice every single day – battery life, charging speed, display quality and performance.
And after years of phones getting thinner, hotter, and more irritatingly fragile, there’s something refreshing about a device that simply refuses to die before bedtime.