{"id":816070,"date":"2026-07-22T07:38:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/816070\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T07:38:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:38:14","slug":"honor-600-pro-review-performance-camera-and-all-day-battery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/816070\/","title":{"rendered":"Honor 600 Pro Review: Performance, Camera and All-Day Battery"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Honor unveiled their latest smartphones earlier this month, launching the foldable Magic V6, as well as the Honor 600 series, including the Honor 600 and Honor 600 Pro bringing \u201cflagship AI imaging and outstanding durability\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Honor 600 is the follow up to the Honor 400 series which was a part of Honor\u2019s Australian launch last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Honor 600 series comes with a durable design, and a 200MP Ultra-Clear Night Camera on the rear powered by AI imaging, with a massive 7,000mAh battery powering you easily through the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Honor 600 Pro adds a more premium design to the series, using a glass rear for a more premium feel, as well as more powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile processor with 512GB of on-board storage and a telephoto camera on the rear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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At $1,499 the Honor 600 Pro is going up against flagships from the big names, so the big question is, Is it worth it? I spent the last week with the Honor 600 Pro and here\u2019s how it went.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hardware<\/p>\n

Design<\/p>\n

The Honor 600 Pro design is essentially identical to the Honor 600 with a few small differences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They both include a massive camera continent (island, plateau \u2013 your choice), which spans the top \u2153 of the phone from side-to-side. The Honor 600 Pro is easily distinguishable by the third camera lens \u2013 a telephoto sensor which sits in an oval cutout.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The camera continent also has one of my favourite smartphone features: an IR Blaster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite it being mounted on the rear (instead of the top rail like most phones), this little tool can help you anytime, be it at a bar, food court or any place with a captive TV. A little monkeying around and you can be watching the World Cup on any TV.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The app covers multitudes of appliances, not just TVs, so you can tune your Air-Con, lights and more to use this remote. Brilliant.<\/p>\n

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The Honor 600 Pro has a matte metal frame for added strength, with glass either side \u2013 a glass sandwich if you will. It uses something Honor calls \u2018translucent composite fiber\u2019 on the rear and it\u2019s a nice feeling material in-hand, if not a little slippery and with no free case in the box \u2013 best you keep a hand on this one.<\/p>\n

The phone comes in a choice of three colours: Golden White, Black and Orange, with the Orange colour being the exclusive for the Pro line. It\u2019s a gorgeous colour, and despite similarities to other mobile designs<\/a>, I still think it looks great.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"\"Black<\/p>\n

The phone is durable, with IP68\/IP69\/IP69K ingress protection \u2013 allowing it to remain submerged in 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes \u2013 or be sprayed by high-pressure jets. The phone was also tested and rated drop resistant by Swiss firm SGS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The phone includes the volume rocker and power button on the right, with the AI key slightly lower down on the frame \u2013 and we\u2019ll get into that shortly. There\u2019s the downward fring speaker on the base, with a SIM tray and USB-C port alongside. <\/p>\n

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Display and Audio<\/p>\n

On the front, Honor has used a 6.57\u201d AMOLED display surrounded by one of the narrowest black bezels on the market. There\u2019s really almost nothing around the edge and it looks great.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The high-resolution display supports up to 120Hz refresh \u2013 though it\u2019s not LTPO, so you do need to select between 60-120Hz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The display has a peak brightness of 1800 nits, bright enough to use outdoors for most use cases. There\u2019s also a High Brightness Mode (HBM) that can ramp up to 8000 nits for brief periods if you activate the Sunlight Mode in Settings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s other settings in there for eye-comfort, including a Natural tone mode and adaptive dimming. There\u2019s also an Ultra-Dark Mode which can dim down to just 1 nit brightness, and a motion sickness mode to help reading in the car, and other places you\u2019d normally get motion sickness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The only other part of the display is the in-display fingerprint sensor. It works pretty well, though it appears to be an Optical sensor as opposed to an ultrasonic which would be slightly faster. You can use Face Unlock as an alternative if you have issues \u2013 though it\u2019s not secure enough for bank apps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the audio front, the Honor 600 packs dual speakers using the bottom-firing speaker and the earpiece. The volume is fine, the audio quality is ok \u2013 and Honor Sound allows for Spatial Audio effects with headphones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Performance and Connectivity<\/p>\n

On the performance front, the Honor 600 Pro shows its real power, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC, with 12GB RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.1 on-board storage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s absolutely no issues with performance here. The SD 8 Elite and 12GB RAM handles everything you can throw at it, with very little, if any, hiccups.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Honor 600 Pro sailed through GeekBench and 3DMark benchmarks and here\u2019s how they look.<\/p>\n

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On the connectivity front, the Honor 600 Pro has a dual SIM setup with NANO and eSIM. There\u2019s a 5G NR (New Radio) modem inside covering a wider range of 5G bands across the standard. There\u2019s also full support for 4G LTE, and 3G\/2G \u2013 even if Australia has turned off that tech on our networks.<\/p>\n

More locally, the Honor 600 supports WiFi 7 \u2013 a nice speed increase if your router supports it, and Bluetooth 6.0 which has improved power consumption and latency, as well as Channel Sounding for improved location tracking.<\/p>\n

Camera<\/p>\n

The 200MP main camera on the rear of the Honor 600 Pro is paired with a 50MP telephoto sensor with 3x Optical zoom, as well as a 12MP ultra-wide sensor that has a 112\u00b0 field of view, while on the front you get a 50MP sensor embedded in the display.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The main camera can capture a great shot. The 1\/1.4\u201d sensor allows a lot of light to be captured at any time of day, including as the sun goes down and into the dead of the night. The sensor also comes with Optical Image Stabilisation, so blurry photos are hard to take.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The ultra-wide offers wider field of view, but at 12MP and a smaller sensor, it doesn\u2019t quite capture the amount of light the main sensor (or even the 50MP telephoto) can.<\/p>\n

The Zoom lens offers a way to get closer to the action, without compromising the quality of the shot by cropping \u2013 which is where we get into the 50x and 120x digital crop of your shots, and while the 50x looks ok, the 100x loses a lot of detail. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>0.5x 12MP Ultra-Wide<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>1x 200MP Main<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>3.5x 50MP Telephoto<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>50x Digital Crop<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>100x Digital Crop<\/p>\n

The selfie camera handles itself pretty well, even able to throw in some bokeh effects in portrait mode.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Battery and Charging<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a massive 7,000mAh Lithium-Ion battery inside the Honor 600 Pro \u2013 a pretty decent feat given the 7.8mm thin frame of the phone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Honor promises \u2018All-Day Power\u2019 on the phone and it delivers in spades. As a fairly heavy mobile user, the phone lasts well into the second day, it\u2019s very impressive.<\/p>\n

On the charging front, the phone supports 80W HONOR SuperCharge or 50W Wireless charging.<\/p>\n

The Honor 600 Pro has the option to charge other devices, offering 27W wired, and 7.5W wireless\u00a0 reverse charging.<\/p>\n

The battery is designed to be long-lasting. Honor says it guarantees long-term battery health, with the battery rated for up to 1,600 charge cycles \u2013 that\u2019s five years of use with no degradation. Impressive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, like most manufacturers these days, Honor doesn\u2019t include the charger in the box, and they still don\u2019t sell their wired or wireless chargers in Australia. You can use any USB Type-C charger capable of 20V\/4A for SuperCharge, or variations down from that for slightly less fast charging.<\/p>\n

Using a compatible (140W) USB Type-C charger, I was able to get some decent charging speeds with the phone full in 77 minutes from dead flat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Software<\/p>\n

Android and Magic OS<\/p>\n

Running MagicOS 10 based on Android 16, the phone comes out of the box running the April 2026 security update. It has an immediate Over-the-Air (OTA) update for MagicOS which includes the June 2026 security patch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Honor has committed to two major OS updates and three years of security updates on the Honor 600 Series in Australia \u2013 a far cry from the six years of OS and security updates being offered on European models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Apps<\/p>\n

There is a smattering of pre-installed apps on the phone. The apps range from Honor utilities including Recorder, Gallery, Notes, Music Player, Files app and even a Mirror.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a fair amount of pre-installed third-party apps\u2026.bloatware. Apps range from social media apps TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Reel Short, travel apps Agoda, Trip.com<\/a> and Booking.com<\/a> and of course LinkedIn. There\u2019s also some games including Tile Explorer, Mahjong and Brick Blast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most of these third-party apps appear to be installed through the Honor App Market, their Google Play competitor. You can uninstall any of these apps by a simple long-press on their app icon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI<\/p>\n

A key feature of the Honor 600 Pro is the AI Key on the side of the phone. The AI Key can be configured to react to short, double, or long presses, activating features, functions or apps \u2013 which you can configure to your liking.<\/p>\n

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One of the launch features for the Honor 600 Pro is the AI Key giving you fast access to AI generated videos. Honor\u2019s AI Image to Video 2.0, lets you create videos from images in your gallery. You can add three images and a description for a high-quality cinematic style video to be generated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The service is free initially \u2013 but will use cloud based AI to generate the video and after an initial limited free access, you will have to pay for it down the track. How much? We asked Honor who advised\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause generating high-quality AI video requires heavy cloud computing power, we\u2019ve designed a flexible model that doesn\u2019t tie users into any ongoing subscriptions. First, every Australian customer gets a free trial. If you activate your HONOR 600 on or before August 31, 2026, you\u2019ll get 10 free video generations a day for the first 76 days, and then 10 free generations a month for the following 9 months. If you activate from August 1 onwards, you\u2019ll get 10 free generations a month for 9 months. Second, there is no subscription required, so there are no recurring monthly bills or cancellation fees. Once you use up your free quota, you only pay for what you actually generate. Until December 31, 2026, we have a promotional rate of AUD $0.63 for a 3-second video, and AUD $1.00 for a 5-second video.\u201c<\/p>\n

Final Thoughts<\/p>\n

The Honor 600 Pro offers a lot when it comes to performance, with great photography chops, as well as a long-lasting battery that you can recharge in almost no time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The downside is definitely the limited software support, with only two OS updates very much behind the competition at this end of the range.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At $1,499, the HONOR 600 Pro brings a lot to the table, but with competition from Google with the Pixel 10 (soon to be 11), Galaxy S26 and OPPO\u2019s Reno16 Pro also in the same price bracket \u2013 and offering similarly great camera, durability and power \u2013 but with longer software support being offered by those manufacturers, Honor has some work to do.<\/p>\n

Overall though, the HONOR 600 Pro is a fantastic phone that\u2019s hard to go past, and with it now on-sale at JB Hifi, you can walk into a store and check it out for yourself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Daniel has been talking about, learning about and using tech since he was able to toggle switches and push buttons. If it flashes, turns on or off or connects he wants to use it, talk about it and learn more about it. Like this article? Buy me a coffee!<\/a><\/p>\n

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