Honor 600 Pro Review: Pro Max Power, iPhone 17 Price

By Stefan @ WeDoTech

The Phone That Shouldn't Exist at This Price

From across the room, you would probably mistake it for an iPhone.

That is not an accident. Honor looked at what the market wants and apparently arrived at the same answer Apple did. The shape, the camera island, even the color options carry a familiar energy. But here is the thing about the Honor 600 Pro: Apple should not be worried about the copied design. What should actually concern them is that this phone does not feel like a competitor to the iPhone 17. It feels like a competitor to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, at a fraction of the asking price.

So what exactly is Honor doing here, and should you care?

What Honor Actually Built

Let us start with the design, because it sets the tone for everything else.

Pick up the Honor 600 Pro and you will find all the right ingredients. Aluminium frame, glass back, solid build quality. The execution, though, sits closer to the standard iPhone 17 than the Pro Max. Where Apple blends the aluminium and glass into something that almost feels like a single piece, the Honor 600 Pro takes a more conventional approach. It is well built, just not quite as seamless in the hand. Considering the price, that is a completely fair trade-off.

The screen tells a similar story. You are getting a 6.57-inch 1.5K AMOLED display running at 120Hz. Not 4K, not anything extreme, but noticeably sharper than standard Full HD and genuinely crisp in everyday use. Side by side with the iPhone 17, it holds its own far more than you would expect at this price.

Under the hood, the Honor 600 Pro runs on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The base model comes with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, while the step-up configuration bumps RAM to 16GB and storage to 1TB. That top-end configuration essentially doubles what you get from the best version of the standard iPhone 17. Everything feels fast, gaming runs smoothly with demanding titles sitting comfortably at 60fps with minimal heat, and unless you are the kind of person who spends weekends benchmarking phones, you will not feel any meaningful limitations.

The Camera That Changes the Conversation

This is where things get genuinely interesting.

The Honor 600 Pro ships with a 200MP main camera using a 1/1.4-inch sensor, a 50MP telephoto with 3.5x optical zoom, and a 12MP ultrawide. On paper those numbers look impressive. In practice, the main camera is the real story here, and it delivers results that are far closer to the iPhone 17 Pro Max than they have any right to be at this price point.

Honor has also built in a dedicated Color Spectrum sensor that reads ambient lighting conditions independently of the main camera. Instead of guessing at color accuracy based solely on the image data, the phone uses real environmental light readings to get colors right. It makes a noticeable difference in mixed lighting situations, and honestly, it is a feature Apple could learn from given how inconsistently the Pro Max handles color across multiple takes in the same scene.

The honest caveat: the ultrawide and telephoto do not quite match the main camera's quality. If ProRes video or 4K slow motion are non-negotiable for you, this is not your phone. But for the vast majority of what most people shoot, the Honor 600 Pro holds up in ways that simply should not be possible at this price.

Where It Falls Short

No phone at this price gets everything right, and the Honor 600 Pro has some friction worth mentioning.

The build quality, while solid, lacks the premium feel of Apple's flagship. MagicOS 10 runs on top of Android 16 and leans heavily into Apple-style design language with a liquid glass aesthetic, but it comes with quirks. The always-on display does not always behave as expected, and haptic feedback on the keyboard is switched off by default for reasons that are genuinely unclear. These are not dealbreakers, but they are the kinds of small inconsistencies that remind you this is not an Apple product.

Software long-term support is also worth keeping in mind. Honor is improving in this area, but it does not yet match the years of guaranteed updates Apple provides.

Honor 600 Pro vs. iPhone 17

At around $449, the Honor 600 Pro undercuts the iPhone 17 considerably, while the iPhone 17 Pro Max pushes well past $1,199. That gap matters because in several key areas, the Honor 600 Pro is punching at Pro Max level rather than standard iPhone 17 level.

The main camera legitimately competes. The battery capacity is nearly double at 7,000mAh, with 80W wired, 50W wireless, and 27W reverse wireless charging versus Apple's far slower charging speeds. Storage goes further. Performance is comparable for real-world tasks.

Where the iPhone 17 wins: build quality and finish, software polish, long-term update support, ProRes video, and ecosystem integration. If you are already deep in Apple's world, none of this changes your calculation. But if you are weighing your options independently, the Honor 600 Pro makes that comparison genuinely uncomfortable for Apple.

Final Thoughts

The Honor 600 Pro is a phone with a bit of an identity crisis. It borrows Apple's look, competes with the standard iPhone 17 on price, and yet delivers features that push it closer to the Pro Max in more than just aesthetics.

Once you stop trying to figure out what it is pretending to be and just use the phone, the picture becomes much clearer. The battery life is excellent. The main camera is impressive enough to genuinely surprise you. The performance is smooth and should stay that way for a few years. And at around $900, it is hard to argue with the value on offer.

It is not as polished as Apple's flagship. But for the money, it does not need to be.

If flagship-level performance at a mid-range price interests you, also check out our look at the ROG NUC 16: The Tiny PC With RTX 5090 Power, another product proving that premium performance does not always have to come with a premium price tag.