Honor 600 review

MagicOS 10 with Android 16

The Honor 600 runs on the latest MagicOS 10 on top of Android 16. That combo is already running on a number of Honor smartphones, including the Magic8 Pro, so it's not the first time we get to see the new Android overlay.

Honor promises 6 years of major OS upgrades and security patches, which is just one year short of the flagship Honor Magic series. That's one solid commitment on Honor's behalf for a phone that's not a flagship.

From a visual standpoint, MagicOS 10 is not much different from the older version. It now implements an iOS-like liquid glass effect, but aside from that, there are no major changes. It looks and feels like before. The main effort, as is the case lately, has been put toward improving the AI experience.

Home screen • Quick toggles • Recent apps

We suggest you check out our Honor 600 Pro review to learn more about MagicOS 10 and its features, including all the AI stuff.

We are happy to report that despite its lower standing, the Honor 600 supports most of the features, including the AI-powered ones. However, you don't get the Air Gestures and the Smart Sensing features with the Honor 600. Those are exclusive to the 600 Pro, at least for now.

Settings menu • AI features

The Air Gestures are pretty self-explanatory, but the Smart Sensing features include keeping the screen on while gazing at it, reducing the ring volume once you peek at the phone, and the AOD turns on when you gaze at the screen.

Benchmark performance

The Honor 600 runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 (4nm) chipset, featuring an updated Kryo CPU with a 1+4+3 configuration. There's a Cortex-A720 prime core clocked @ 2.8GHz, alongside 4x performance Cortex-720 cores @ 2.4GHz and 3x efficiency Cortex-520 cores @ 1.8GHz. Qualcomm claims 27% faster CPU performance over the SD 7 Gen 3.

The Adreno 722 GPU gets a 30% boost compared to the previous-gen chip. Qualcomm is also bringing select Snapdragon Elite Gaming features, including its Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0. The GPU also supports the HDR10, HDR10+, HDR Vivid and HLG codecs.

The updated Hexagon NPU inside the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 offers a 65% boost in AI tasks with the ability to run Stable Diffusion 1.5 locally.

The handset's base memory configuration is 8GB/128GB, which is a bit low for a 2026 phone in this class, but we found this to be a rare sighting. In most markets, particularly the European one, the 8GB/256GB variant is much easier to find. We have an 8GB/512GB review unit.

While the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is a perfectly fine mid-range chipset, we think it's not at the level needed in the Honor 600's price category. In the €500-€600 bracket, the SD 7 Gen 4 trails behind many of the competing alternatives. We have the OnePlus 15R running on the much more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, the Xiaomi 15T Pro with the DImensity 9400+ and the Samsung Galaxy S25 FE rocking an Exynos 2400. Even the vanilla Xiaomi 15T shows a better performance overall with a Dimensity 8400 SoC.

It's clear that the Honor 600's raw performance isn't its strongest suit, so if you are looking for a stronger performer, in case you play games often, then your money will be better spent somewhere else.

Sustained performance

Since the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 isn't all that demanding, it's no surprise that the phone did very well in our CPU and GPU stress tests.

CPU and GPU stress tests

In the CPU workload, the chipset maintained high performance for the majority of the tests before scaling back a little. In the GPU-intensive test, the silicon maintained practically full performance.