I’ve spent a week with the Honor 600, and honestly? I’m starting to wonder why anyone still pays four figures for a flagship

Honor's mid-range stars are changing things up a bit this year, and while the company is still offering two versions of its latest Honor 600 series, it seems the company is focused more on the base model this year than the Pro version. As such, no matter where you live, it's more likely you'll be able to find an Honor 600 instead of the more expensive Honor 600 Pro.

But given my experience with the Honor 600 over the past week, there are a few reasons you'd probably want to spend more, anyway. Despite a lower cost, the Honor 600 uses the same near-bezelless 8,000 nit OLED display as the Pro model, the same giant battery, and a near-identical design and build (complete with IP69K resistance).

So this year, I'm focusing on the most affordable model, especially in light of the ludicrous price increases on electronics. Many people might hold on to their current phones for a bit longer because of these prices, but if you're in the market for a new mid-range option, Honor offers something compelling that might just sway you.

Honor is outclassing not only every mid-range phone with this build quality and design highlights, but the company has somehow eclipsed every flagship phone in certain areas, as well. As has become expected from the company these days, the Honor 600 sports an IP69K build that's drop and crush-resistant, so this phone should last you a good long time and still look good.

An AI button can be found on the right side under the power button, and its functions are not only customizable, but it also acts as a camera shutter button. The overall look is decidedly iPhone 17, without a doubt, but Honor trades out Apple's industrial look for something far more elegant, and I really appreciate that, despite enjoying Apple's design this time around.

The raised camera housing is made of a different composite material than the back and features a transparent, pearlescent sheen that complements the matte back. I dislike the flat sides of the phone, but the brushed aluminum feeling is at least great. Lastly, this is a smaller phone than I'm used to using, which, quite frankly, was weird at first but, ultimately, a breath of fresh air.

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And while all of that is nice, the real star of the design is the near-bezelless display, which sports the world's first bezel sub-1mm. It's weird to think a mid-range phone would be the first to achieve this, and it's even a uniform 0.98mm bezel the entire way around the phone, too!

That display is simply gorgeous, sporting a true 10-bit panel with no temporal dithering and wonderful eye-friendly features like DC dimming and 3840Hz PWM dimming, plus most of Honor's Eye Comfort Display system, including motion sickness relief, defocus eyecare, and a personalized contrast test. Honor also offers a full suite of color adjustment options, though, including saturation, contrast, and many other properties that most smartphone companies omit.

Honor says the peak brightness output of this display is 8,000 nits, but that's usually in a small portion of the display. I measured the actual normal brightness output to peak around 3,000 nits during HDR playback, which is phenomenal for any class of phone, particularly a mid-range one. Even Samsung's best flagship phones peak at 2,600 nits.

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The Honor 600 also offers far more competitive performance than last year's Honor 400, delivering 40% better performance than that phone in Geekbench and 3DMark tests.

Despite the phone's small size and meager 190g weight, it packs a massive 6,800mAh (7,000mAh in China) battery that lasts for days and days on a single charge. I don't think I've ever had a phone with battery life like this, and it's also nice that it supports 60W charging, too.

Now, not everything about the build is rosy. As is unfortunately the case with most Honor phones, the haptics in this one are pure junk. It's honestly better to just turn them off since they're so bad. Thankfully, that's the worst part of the experience, which is pretty minimal.

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As is the case these days, Honor is playing up its new AI features as a big selling point of the phone. The company's AI key on the right side is well-designed and great to use, with quick on-screen AI context buttons that appear when long-pressing the key. This surfaces the most common AI features for what's on screen, including saving a screenshot to the AI memories automatic note-taking software.

This time around, most of the new AI features are found in Honor's Gallery app. The AI Photo to Video feature Honor launched last year got a big upgrade on this phone with the launch of V2.0, including the ability to add up to 3 pictures and a prompt to create a 3-8 second video clip of a moment that never happened. The video below was created by the Honor 600 using three pictures of my cat.

And that brings me to question the point of these types of features. Sure, it's fun to try it out and make a fake video from pictures you actually took, but I don't forsee any situation where I actually want to make a video from a photo and use it. I prefer authenticity in my image and video capturing, and this doesn't follow that. It's very cool and works well, though, so if this concept is appealing, this is the way to do it.

Now, the other two new AI features are far more useful, in my estimation. Moving Photo Eraser upgrades the magic eraser tool to preserve moving photos while still removing people or objects from them. It works as well as any other magic eraser-style tool, but the addition of motion photo capabilities is astounding.

Moving Photo Breakout Collage is another amazing feature that creates a collage of a bunch of photos and even includes motion photos in the collage. This way, you can have still images and motion photos side by side in a very social media-friendly photo collage, and it works simply brilliantly.

The camera itself is pretty darn good, too. The main 200MP sensor captures crisp photos with great dynamic range and accurate colors. Zooming in leaves quite a bit to be desired, but Honor's AI enhancement for photos taken beyond 6x zoom works impressively well and legitimately helps replace a physical 2x telephoto camera in many situations.

My biggest problem with this mode is that it's not always available, and there's no way to force it on, either. Thankfully, if you hate the look, you can disable the feature entirely.

Overall photo quality is among the best in this segment, including very good motion capture quality. Flagship Honor phones still do a better job of capturing moving objects, but the Honor 600 will do it better than the vast majority of phones in its price range.

The Honor 600 is an excellent follow-up to the Honor 400 series and, so long as there's not a massive price increase after launch, it remains one of the best values in the segment. Honor offers better displays, build quality, and battery size than other phones in this price range. Google, Nothing, and Samsung are the company's biggest competitors, but I find that I would choose Honor over these other options because Honor nails the basics best.

Samsung and Google offer more lifetime software upgrades than Honor by a year, but I don't think that genuinely adds more value at this price point. This is a solid phone with great support and plenty of reasons to choose it over the competition, especially if battery life, charging speed, build quality, and display quality (and comfort) are your top reasons for choosing a phone.