HONOR 600 Pro Full Review: Still Very iPhone-ish, Still Very Good

A week ago I said this phone looks familiar. Spending more time with it hasn’t changed that. What has changed is my respect for what HONOR actually built here.

When I shared my first impressions of the HONOR 600 Pro a week ago, I flagged the obvious. The design borrows heavily from Apple’s playbook. The software has moments that feel less like Android and more like iOS in a trench coat. And yet the hardware felt premium enough to demand a proper second look.

So I gave it one.

I’ve been using the HONOR 600 Pro as my daily driver, and after proper time with it, the honest verdict is this: HONOR has built one of the better Android flagship experiences you can buy in South Africa right now. It’s not without caveats and there’s some things that genuinely need to be called out. But genuinely impressive where it counts.

Let’s get into it.

Design: We’ve Had This Conversation Before

If you read the first impressions piece, you know where I stand on the aesthetic. The flat edges, the polished frame, the camera plateau, the ultra-slim bezels. The HONOR 600 Pro has a very particular kind of confidence in its design language. The kind that walks into a room wearing someone else’s outfit and somehow still pulls it off.

My review unit was the Golden White version, but the Orange colourway is the one to get. In a category drowning in black glass and forgettable silver, Orange makes a statement. It makes you want to leave the phone screen-down just so people notice the back.

Build quality is legitimately good. IP69K water resistance adds real-world peace of mind, and the SGS durability certification means this isn’t just a pretty device that flinches at the first raindrop. It feels like something that can take daily life.

Whether the design similarity to Apple bothers you is a personal call. What isn’t debatable is the execution. HONOR didn’t just borrow the aesthetic, they built it properly.

The Display: One of the Best Reasons to Buy This Phone

This is where the 600 Pro earns serious points.

The AMOLED panel is outstanding. Bright, sharp, genuinely vibrant without crossing into the cartoonish oversaturation some Android phones think looks premium. The 120Hz refresh rate makes everything feel smooth and intentional rather than choppy. HONOR’s eye-comfort features also do more than their name suggests. Extended use genuinely feels less fatiguing, and that matters for a device you’re picking up dozens of times a day.

Outdoor visibility is also excellent. Colours hold up in direct sunlight and the overall experience is the kind that makes you forget you’re evaluating a screen and just start enjoying what’s on it.

This is a display you want to watch things on.

Performance: Flagship Grade, Real World Tested

The Snapdragon 8 Elite inside this device, although not the latest is also not messing around, and HONOR hasn’t neutered it with aggressive thermal throttling the way some brands do when they’re chasing thin bezels over sustained performance.

Apps open fast. Gaming handles without the phone turning into a heater and multitasking feels effortless. The 600 Pro doesn’t chase benchmark numbers at the expense of everyday consistency, and that balance is actually the right call for most people.

Here’s the honest take: unless you are legitimately stress-testing your phone for a living, this device has more processing headroom than you will ever need. The ceiling is effectively invisible in normal use.

Battery Life: The Feature That Earns Its Hype

Twenty years in the smartphone industry taught me to be sceptical of battery marketing. Everyone claims class-leading battery life. Very few phones actually deliver it.

The 7000 mAh battery in the HONOR 600 Pro delivers it.

I ran this phone hard. Camera sessions, navigation, extended social media, video calls, gaming. Days where I genuinely expected to reach for a charger by late afternoon. The 600 Pro just kept going. Multiple times I plugged in at night with battery to spare after a day that would have dropped most flagship competitors into the red.

And the charging speed is absurd in the best way. Once you live with this level of fast charging, going back to the sluggish speeds still considered acceptable by certain legacy brands feels borderline offensive.

Battery life is quietly the most underrated reason to buy this phone.

Cameras: Excellent for Content, Thoughtful for Photography

The 200MP main sensor is very good at what it’s designed to do.

HONOR has built a camera system for the social media era. Portraits come out flattering and low-light performance is solid. The telephoto performs well beyond what you’d expect at this price. Colours are punchy and images look great on Instagram, TikTok, and in WhatsApp previews without any post-processing.

The nuance is in the approach. HONOR leans heavily into AI processing and computational photography, which means the camera makes a lot of decisions for you. The results are consistently impressive but also occasionally too polished. There’s a version of these images where the AI has smoothed and enhanced and saturated until the photo looks more like a render than a capture.

For most people, that won’t be a complaint but rather a feature.

The ultra-wide lags behind the main sensor, particularly in difficult light, which is worth knowing going in. And the detail work on the telephoto, while better than expected, doesn’t quite match what Samsung and Google are doing at similar price points.

But for everyday users, content creators, and anyone who wants their phone to make their photography look consistently good? This camera system absolutely delivers.

AI Image-to-Video 2.0: Impressive Tech, Incomplete Transparency

This is the headline feature. This is what HONOR wants everyone talking about. And honestly, it warrants the attention.

AI Image-to-Video 2.0 lets you take static photos and generate short video clips from them. Add a prompt, pick a template, apply motion effects. Combine multiple images into something that looks almost cinematic. The results are genuinely surprising and perhaps slightly uncanny. It’s even occasionally emotional in a way that feels odd given they’re AI-generated sequences of moments that didn’t happen that way.

It’s the kind of feature that makes people at a dinner table grab your phone to see it for themselves.

But I have to be direct about something HONOR isn’t.

This feature runs on a freemium usage model. You get a limited number of free generations. After that, you’re paying for more. That’s not disclosed prominently in the marketing, and it should be.

Because there’s a difference between an AI feature built into your phone and an AI subscription service living inside your camera app. The 600 Pro has the latter. And at R19,999, buyers deserve to know that upfront rather than discovering it after they’ve fallen in love with the feature.

There’s also the harder question underneath all of this. When AI can generate a convincing video of a moment that didn’t unfold the way it looks, what are we actually doing with our memories? Are we preserving them or manufacturing them? I don’t think that question has a clean answer yet. But it’s worth sitting with, especially as features like this become more common and more convincing.

The technology is impressive but the transparency around how it works needs to catch up.

MagicOS: Smoother, But Still Searching

MagicOS has improved meaningfully. Animations are fluid an the overall software experience feels polished and intentional. Performance is consistent throughout.

But the iOS inspiration is still very present. There are moments in the UI where you genuinely have to remind yourself you’re on Android. For users moving from iPhone, that familiarity is probably a feature. For Android loyalists, it may feel like the software hasn’t quite figured out who it is yet.

The bloatware situation also still doesn’t match the premium hardware experience. Pre-installed apps that add no value to a R19,999 device are a friction point that should have been resolved at this price tier. It’s a minor thing in isolation, but in the context of everything else the phone does well, it stands out more than it should.

Final Verdict

The HONOR 600 Pro is a genuinely excellent smartphone that understands something many manufacturers overcomplicate.

Most people don’t want to fight their phone. They want it to be fast, beautiful, reliable, and capable of making them look good on camera. They want to pick it up and have it work. The HONOR 600 Pro does all of that, consistently, and in a package that feels like it costs more than it does.

The Apple design comparisons won’t go away, and HONOR probably doesn’t want them to. The AI Image-to-Video feature is impressive but needs more honest communication around its freemium model. MagicOS still has some identity work to do. And the ultra-wide camera is a clear step behind everything else on offer.

But none of those things undo what the 600 Pro gets right.

At R19,999, HONOR is no longer the automatic value play it used to be. This is real money asking for real consideration. Against the R30,000-plus pricing now standard for Samsung and Apple’s top-tier devices and even HONOR’s own Magic series, though, the 600 Pro makes a compelling case. You’re getting flagship hardware, exceptional battery life, a standout display, and a camera system that will make most people genuinely happy with their shots.

It’s an Android phone that occasionally forgets it’s an Android phone.

And somehow, that ends up being one of the more interesting things about it.

HONOR 600 Pro | R19,999 | Available in Golden White and Orange 
Review unit provided by HONOR South Africa.