Review of HONOR 600 Pro: Now It Has an Extra Gear!
The mid-high range of the mobile sector has two new protagonists: HONOR 600 and HONOR 600 Pro
We tested and stressed these two smartphones for several days. In this review, we will mainly focus on the more powerful version, the HONOR 600 Pro, along with all its outstanding specifications. Among them, the company places great emphasis on a new and exclusive feature of this series: Image to Video 2.0, an evolution of what was seen last year in the HONOR 400 series.
From left to right: HONOR 600 and HONOR 600 Pro
Testing a device that focuses entirely on visual creativity requires a scenario that can offer sharp contrasts, vibrant colors, and significant architectural challenges. For this reason, we took the HONOR 600 Pro through the alleys of Naples, transforming the capital of Campania into an open-air photo set. Our trial began in the depths of the Bourbon Gallery, a place where light is a privilege and shadows put any sensor to the test. We then explored the city through its historic center, where the harmonious chaos of the decumani provided the ideal context to test the system's operational speed.
The test continued on the island of Procida, a mosaic of colorful houses reflecting on the sea, offering a perfect color palette to verify color fidelity. Here we visited the former prison of the island, an imposing and austere structure that dominates the town. Among its historically rich walls and breathtaking views of the Gulf, we tried to understand if the technical promises of this smartphone could translate into a real and satisfying user experience.
The device boasts the thinnest frame in the industry, only 0.98 mm, a detail that minimizes visual distractions during use.
Design and User Experience
Looking at the device, the structure is based on a unibody carving process, a technique that allows for sculpting the entire body of the phone into a smooth shape without visible joints.
The translucent composite fiber back panel provides a special feeling to the touch: it maintains the visual clarity of glass but is lighter and warmer. The satin matte metal central frame creates an elegant contrast with the back finish. Without hiding behind a finger, the camera island resembles that of the iPhone 17 Pro series, just like the orange coloring we find on the standard model.
With dimensions of 156.0 x 74.7 x 7.8 mm, it is a well-proportioned smartphone, capable of balancing a large interaction surface with a slim profile. Contributing to the aesthetics are the record-thin bezels, allowing the screen to almost fully occupy the front, maximizing user immersion.
An element that profoundly impacts the user experience is durability. The device is designed to withstand not only accidental incidents but also the most aggressive external agents. The triple certification of IP68, IP69, and IP69K ensures total protection against prolonged immersion, high-pressure water jets, and dust. Furthermore, its construction quality has received the highest recognition from SGS for drop and impact resistance, a factor that allows using the smartphone with greater peace of mind without necessarily resorting to bulky covers that would hide its refined lines.
In addition to the usual power and volume buttons, the lower right side features a dedicated AI physical button, which provides immediate access to functions that simplify routine tasks. During our travels between Naples and Procida, this physical shortcut proved useful to call up contextual functions without having to navigate through menus.
Software and Performance
The operational heart of the HONOR 600 Pro is entrusted to the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, a platform made with a 3 nm process that guarantees a remarkable performance leap compared to the previous generation. Internal data reflects a 45% increase for the CPU and a 44% increase for the GPU, translating into immediate responsiveness in every scenario, from extreme multitasking with more than ten apps open simultaneously to the most graphically demanding games.
This technical foundation is crucial to sustain the numerous functions regulated by artificial intelligence, which permeate every aspect of the interface. The most representative function of this approach is undoubtedly AI Image to Video 2.0. It is based on the industry's first unified multimodal video generation model, capable of integrating creation, editing, and content understanding in a single linear process. Users can now provide images or simple text commands as input, and the system generates short cinematic clips lasting between 3 and 8 seconds, with precise control over rhythm and visual coherence. Up to 3 images can be attached.
Digital assistance extends to managing static content through the AI Photography Agent, a tool that allows for complex edits using natural language: simply describe the action, like "remove background" or "change the background to a sunset," and the algorithm executes it instantly. But many other image modifications can be performed, from AI expansion to Magic Color, removing passersby, and much more. It probably offers the best proprietary photo editor we have tried so far.
Daily interactions are managed by the HONOR AI Agent, a centralized assistant coordinating device settings and third-party services. By pressing the side AI button, the system activates screen recognition with “AI Memories,” a function that identifies what is being displayed to suggest relevant actions without forcing the user to switch applications.
The integration with the Apple ecosystem is another strong point of the software: with One Tap, it is possible to synchronize notifications between HONOR and iPhone, instantly share documents on Mac, and even manage phone notes directly from the Apple computer, treating them as local files.
Display
The panel installed on the HONOR 600 Pro represents a new benchmark for this category, thanks to a combination of extreme brightness and technologies dedicated to visual well-being. It is a 6.57-inch AMOLED display with a resolution that guarantees a density of 458 ppi, offering sharp images and color reproduction that covers 1.07 billion colors. The immediately noticeable characteristic is peak brightness, which reaches an incredible value of 8,000 nits. Although this figure is a theoretical maximum, it translates to exceptional readability in all environmental conditions. The Sunlight mode has been designed to manage the most intense direct sunlight situations, like those encountered during our walks along the seafront of Procida.
Beyond pure power, great importance is also given to fluidity and eye protection. The 120 Hz refresh rate makes every scroll and animation extremely smooth, while the 3,840 Hz PWM dimming eliminates flickering, drastically reducing eye strain, especially when using the device in low ambient light.
HONOR's Eye Comfort Display constantly optimizes color balancing and light calibration based on use, ensuring superior visual comfort during reading sessions or viewing multimedia content.
Our Lab Test
The display analysis was conducted using the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter and HCFR software suite, after calibrating the tool using the X-Rite i1 Pro 2 spectrophotometer. The panel is identical on both models; the test graphs refer to the HONOR 600 Pro, unless otherwise specified.
The AMOLED panel of the HONOR 600 Pro reaches 5,403 nits at peak (measured at APL 15%, the condition in which the display delivers maximum brightness on a reduced portion of the screen), while in the fully white screen (APL 100%) it stands at 1,772 nits. The values for the HONOR 600 are nearly identical: 5,453 nits peak and 1,779 nits full screen. Numbers that place both devices among the brightest panels in the category, with ample margin for readability even under direct sunlight. In the mid-range, in particular, there is little competition, with the two new HONOR models having virtually no rivals in this metric.
On the contrast front, AMOLED technology means that each pixel is self-illuminating and can be turned off individually. This results in absolute blacks producing a theoretically infinite contrast ratio, as there is no residual backlighting to