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Rear Screens Were a Flagship Trick, so Honor Put One on a Budget Phone

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Secondary rear displays have been a flagship trick for a while, the kind of feature that premium phones use to justify their price tags. The Honor Play20A throws that logic out. It’s an entry-level 4G phone with a 6.9-inch main screen, a 6,000mAh battery, and a small secondary display built into the camera module on the back, at a price that isn’t anywhere near flagship territory.

The rear screen isn’t just decorative. It shows the time, incoming call details, and what’s currently playing, so you can pause or skip tracks without flipping the phone over. It also works as a viewfinder, letting you frame shots with the 13MP rear camera rather than the 5MP front camera inside the notch. In practice, that means group photos taken with the better lens rather than settling for the weaker front sensor.

Designer: Honor

That 13MP rear camera is the only functional one despite the module’s appearance. There’s no telephoto, no depth sensor, no second anything hiding behind the glass. It’s a single lens, and the design leans into the secondary screen to make up for the hardware economy. For everyday shooting, the combination works reasonably well, and it sidesteps the common frustration of front cameras that can’t match the quality of the back.

The main screen is a 6.9-inch IPS LCD running at 90Hz with an HD+ resolution of 1600×720. It’s a big panel with slim bezels and a waterdrop notch, and 90Hz makes scrolling feel noticeably smoother than phones still running at 60Hz. That refresh rate isn’t guaranteed at this price point, which makes its inclusion here more meaningful than it might look on a spec sheet.

The 6,000mAh battery is the other headliner. It charges at 15W via USB-C, which is modest given the capacity, so filling it up from empty takes some patience. The trade-off is that you’re unlikely to drain it before the day is done under normal circumstances. A battery this size in a budget phone tends to last considerably longer than comparable handsets that prioritize thinness over endurance.

Running all of this is the MediaTek Helio G81, an octa-core chip built on a 12nm process. It handles messaging, browsing, video streaming, and social media without issue. Intensive tasks aren’t what this phone is built for, and the chip doesn’t pretend otherwise. Paired with 4GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage, expandable to 1TB via microSD, the Honor Play20A is configured for people who need a phone to do a lot of everyday things reliably.

Connectivity stays at 4G, with no 5G on board, which fits a budget positioning but is worth noting for anyone in a market where 5G coverage has become the practical standard. The triple tray accommodates two SIM cards and a microSD card at the same time, without asking you to choose between extra storage and a second line. The secondary rear display is the feature that makes this phone worth talking about, but the battery and the large screen are what most buyers will end up living with daily.

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Honor Pad 20 Pro Has a Version That Feels Like Paper, Not Glass

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Android tablets have spent years trying to establish themselves as serious productivity tools rather than large phones with expanded app drawers. The gap has closed considerably, especially as the software that matters most, document editors, video conferencing, creative apps, caught up with the hardware. The remaining friction, for many users, tends to be more physical: the glass surface of most tablet displays is smooth and reflective in ways that neither paper nor a dedicated monitor usually is.

The Honor Pad 20 Pro arrives with that tension already baked into its lineup. The standard version is a straightforward performance upgrade over its predecessor, while the Paperlike Edition adds a micro-textured anti-glare coating to the same display that changes the surface experience entirely. Both tablets run identical hardware, so the choice between them is essentially a question of what you’re actually going to do with the device most of the time.

Designer: Honor

The screen that both variants share is a 12.1-inch IPS LCD panel running at 3,000×1,872 resolution with a 165 Hz refresh rate. IMAX Enhanced certification and DCI-P3 wide color coverage give it enough visual credibility for media consumption, while hardware-level eye-care features, including anti-flicker and low blue light reduction, make longer reading or working sessions more manageable. Peak brightness tops out at 700 nits, adequate for indoor use under most ordinary conditions.

Power comes from the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which covers the multitasking loads most tablet users will throw at it: running several browser tabs alongside a document editor, switching between a video call and a note-taking app, or handling light creative work. The six-speaker audio system with DTS:X Ultra makes the same device worth watching a film on at the end of the day.

The Paperlike Edition’s micro-textured coating isn’t just an aesthetic choice. Anyone who has tried to sketch or annotate seriously on a glossy glass display has felt the issue: the stylus slides too freely, and the surface reflects ambient light at exactly the wrong moment. The textured finish introduces enough friction to make strokes feel more deliberate and controlled, and reduces reflections in a way that makes extended reading or annotating sessions considerably more comfortable without sacrificing color accuracy.

Both variants support the Honor Magic-Pencil 4s stylus and run MagicOS 10.0 on Android 16. The software includes a PC Mode that offers desktop-style window management, letting the device behave more like a laptop when connected to a keyboard. For users who split their time between a tablet and a proper workstation, the cross-device features let the Honor Pad 20 Pro connect to a PC ecosystem without leaving the Android environment.

The 10,100mAh battery with 66W fast charging is the kind of spec that stops most conversation about battery anxiety in tablet form. A full day of heavy use doesn’t reach the kind of drain that makes you start watching the percentage. The metal chassis, at 6.29mm thin and 537g, puts it in a weight class that works for holding in hand, not just setting on a desk.

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Honor Robot Phone Hands-on: Bold Phone With A Moving Camera Few Can Buy

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After many teasers and demos, the Honor Robot Phone has finally and officially launched in China. It is also staying exclusive to the Chinese market for now, with Honor not planning an international release at this stage. That alone will make it a frustratingly out-of-reach device for many, because this is one of the rare smartphones that feels genuinely different at first glance.

Part of the reason the launch has drawn so much interest is that Honor first revealed the Robot Phone at MWC earlier this year, where it quickly became one of the event’s biggest conversation pieces. Even in a show packed with concept hardware and camera claims, this was the device that made people stop, stare, and ask how it actually worked. Now that it has moved from trade show reveal to commercial launch, the Robot Phone still feels just as unusual.

Designer: HONOR

Rather than chasing attention with another familiar camera bump or an incremental spec upgrade, Honor has built a robotic gimbal directly into the phone itself. The result is a camera system that can physically move, track, tilt, and stabilize in ways a conventional flagship simply cannot. After spending time with the device, it is clear the Robot Phone is not just trying to be another premium handset with a long feature list. It is trying to pitch a new idea for what a creator-focused smartphone can be.

The big story is movement, not just megapixels

The core pitch behind the Honor Robot Phone is easy to understand once you see it in person. Honor has integrated what it calls a 4DoF Titanium Agile Gimbal into the phone, effectively turning the camera into an active moving system rather than a static sensor setup. The company says the module is 65 percent smaller than traditional gimbal solutions while also offering a 200 percent increase in structural strength, allowing it to fit inside a premium smartphone body without turning the device into a bulky experiment.

That change in hardware philosophy is what makes the Robot Phone immediately stand out. In practice, the moving camera module is meant to deliver smoother stabilization and more dynamic motion than a normal smartphone can manage on its own. Honor is also building in multiple movement modes, including Tilt Lock, First Person View, FPV Vertical, and AI SpinShot, all of which are designed to make mobile footage look more deliberate and more cinematic.

Honor is aiming this squarely at creators

The second half of the launch story is imaging. Honor says the Robot Phone is the first major product from its Cinematic Imaging Partnership with ARRI, bringing selected elements of ARRI Image Science and professional cinema workflow ideas into a smartphone. That includes ARRI LogC3 recording in ARRI CINEMA mode on the main gimbal camera, alongside ARRI Wide Gamut 3 and ARRI Looks.

On paper, the camera hardware is also extremely ambitious. The rear setup pairs a 200MP Agile Gimbal Main Camera with a 1/1.28-inch sensor and F1.6 aperture with a 200MP periscope telephoto camera using a 1/1.4-inch sensor and 2.7x optical zoom. A 50MP ultra-wide camera completes the setup. Honor is also claiming AI noise reduction improvements, up to 14 stops of dynamic range, and a video pipeline designed to preserve more usable information for post-production.

That is a lot of technical language, but the broader message is straightforward. Honor does not want the Robot Phone to be seen as a novelty. It wants this to be taken seriously as a compact filmmaking and creator tool.

Hands-on: The Honor Robot Phone feels different right away

The most striking thing about the Robot Phone in person is that its main feature is visible. So many smartphone launches revolve around internal improvements that are difficult to appreciate without extensive testing. Here, the big idea is immediately obvious. The camera module moves. It tracks. It gives the phone a sense of physical intention that most handsets simply do not have.

That makes the Robot Phone more memorable than most new flagships before you even get into image quality. Instead of relying entirely on software stabilization and fixed hardware, Honor is trying to introduce actual camera movement into the smartphone experience. In a short hands-on session, that makes the device feel less like a standard phone with a flashy camera and more like a compact production tool that happens to fit in your pocket.

The tracking and movement features are also easier to appreciate in person than they are on a spec sheet. AI Live-Tracking, gesture controls, and voice-directed movement all sound abstract on paper. Once you see the phone physically following a subject or repositioning itself, the concept becomes much easier to understand. Whether that turns into something essential in everyday use is a bigger question, but as a first impression, the idea lands more convincingly than I expected.

Using the on-screen virtual joystick, I was able to adjust the gimbal with surprising precision. The interface crams in a lot of features, so it does take some time to learn. Even so, the gimbal feels very responsive, which helps the controls feel more intuitive once you settle in.

There is still a full flagship wrapped around the concept

Outside the headline camera hardware, Honor is still treating the Robot Phone like a proper premium device. It is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, backed by a custom cooling system that is meant to keep performance stable during longer recording sessions. There is also a 7060mAh silicon-carbon battery, with support for 120W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.

The rest of the hardware sounds suitably high-end too. Honor is using an all-metal unibody design paired with a 6.31-inch LTPO OLED display, an adaptive 1 to 120Hz refresh rate, and a claimed peak brightness of 6800 nits. On paper at least, this is not a concept phone built around one attention-grabbing trick. Honor is trying to package an experimental camera idea inside a full flagship experience.

China-only for now, and that is a shame

For now, the Honor Robot Phone is launching only in China, where it might be staying indefinitely. Honor is not planning to release the device outside China at this stage, which means this unusually creator-focused phone is set to remain a domestic-market curiosity rather than a broader global play.

That is disappointing, because the Robot Phone feels like exactly the kind of launch the smartphone market needs more of. It may not be for everyone, and there are obvious questions about durability, long-term usefulness, and whether creators will trust a built-in robotic camera system over dedicated gear. Even so, it is difficult to dismiss because the concept is so easy to understand once you see it in action.

Early thoughts

After a brief hands-on, my early take is that the Honor Robot Phone feels niche but genuinely fresh. The robotic gimbal is not just a visual gimmick for launch-day headlines. It changes the way the device presents itself, and potentially the way some people shoot with it. Whether that translates into a truly great camera phone will need more time to answer, but as a statement of intent, Honor has made one of the boldest smartphone moves of the year.

The bigger frustration is that, for now, it is a bold move that most of the world will only be able to watch from a distance. First teased at MWC earlier this year and now officially on sale in China, the Robot Phone is not about to become the next mainstream global flagship. Still, even as a limited-market release, it stands out as one of the most unusual and ambitious smartphones to arrive this year.

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HONOR packed a 35-day battery into a 41g smartwatch – and nothing else comes close

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Every smartwatch eventually comes off. The reasons vary: the charge ran out, the case dug in, the weight got old. Battery anxiety and wrist fatigue are the two great enemies of wearable compliance, and the industry has spent years solving one at the expense of the other. HONOR has taken a different approach with the Watch 6.

The case weighs 41 grams, which puts it in the same neighborhood as a set of car keys. The battery inside it is 980mAh, a capacity that delivers up to 35 days of use and has no comparable precedent in a smartwatch this light. HONOR achieved it through a sandblasted aluminium alloy construction, designed around a Racing Dashboard aesthetic that borrows visual tension from high-performance automotive design. The Watch 6 is built to stay on. And at 41 grams, there is very little reason to take it off.

Designer: HONOR

The wearable industry’s battery problem has always been architectural. Garmin solved it by making watches thick enough to house serious cells, producing devices that track ultramarathons flawlessly but look faintly ridiculous at a dinner table. Apple went the opposite direction, keeping the Watch Series ultra-slim and ultra-light while accepting that you will charge it every night like a phone. The Apple Watch Ultra 3 splits the difference with a 599mAh battery in a titanium case, and while that is genuinely impressive engineering, it still asks you to charge weekly and costs north of $700 for the privilege. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7 lands closer to HONOR’s price bracket but tops out around 425mAh, delivering maybe three days of real-world use. HONOR’s Watch 6 arrives at 980mAh and 41 grams, and neither of those numbers should coexist in the same sentence.

The secret is in the surface. HONOR’s construction process runs the aluminium alloy case through a precision sandblasting treatment that produces a finish comparable to titanium in texture and perceived premium-ness, without titanium’s weight penalty. This is the same category of material intelligence that made the Watch 5 Ultra’s grade 5 titanium case feel like such a statement at MWC 2025, except here HONOR is pulling the trick in reverse, making aluminium feel like it punches upward. The beveled edges add a three-dimensional quality to the 46.5mm round case that photographs well and catches light differently depending on angle, borrowing visual language from automotive air intakes in a way that feels considered rather than decorative. At 317 PPI on a 1.46-inch AMOLED panel hitting 3,000 nits of peak brightness, the display holds up in direct sunlight in a way that cheaper panels simply cannot.

Where the Watch 6 earns its credibility beyond the spec sheet is in the specificity of its sports intelligence. HONOR’s badminton mode tracks smash speeds, rally counts, and shot distribution in a way that goes well beyond the generic “racket sport” detection most smartwatches offer. The football mode generates heat maps and trajectory data that a Sunday league player will find genuinely useful, not just flattering. Trail running gets an AI coaching layer on top of dual-band six-star GPS, with route deviation alerts that matter when you are actually in the hills. These are features borrowed in spirit from Garmin’s sport-specific playbook, delivered at a price point Garmin has never seriously entertained.

The one honest caveat is software. HONOR’s proprietary MagicOS ecosystem has historically been the ceiling on what their hardware could achieve, and the Watch 5 Ultra illustrated that tension clearly when reviewers found the tracking data compelling but the platform limiting. The Watch 6 inherits that same closed loop, meaning your 35 days of biometric data lives inside the Honor Health app and nowhere else. For athletes already inside that ecosystem, that is fine. For anyone hoping to pipe data to Strava, Garmin Connect, or Apple Health with any consistency, it remains a friction point worth knowing about before you buy.

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Honor Magic V6 Review: Big battery, slim body, refined experience

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PROS:


  • Slim and comfortable design

  • Bright and crisp internal and external displays

  • Outstanding battery capacity, backed by fast wired and wireless charging

  • Great main and telephoto camera for a foldable

CONS:


  • Feels more like a small upgrade over the Magic V5 than a major generational leap

  • Ultrawide camera is decent, but not as impressive as the main and telephoto cameras</li?

RATINGS:

AESTHETICS
ERGONOMICS
PERFORMANCE
SUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITY
VALUE FOR MONEY

EDITOR'S QUOTE:

Honor may not have radically changed the formula, but the Magic V6 shows just how far thoughtful refinement can go.

Honor unveiled its latest foldable, the Honor Magic V6, at MWC 2026 back in March. Now, three months later, the phone is starting its global rollout in Malaysia and Singapore. That shift from launch event to retail availability is where the real test begins, because foldables have reached a point where being thin or flashy is no longer enough on its own.

The Magic V6 does not completely rethink what Honor has already been doing with its book-style foldables. Instead, it builds on a formula that already worked well, pushing it further with a bigger battery, a slim and comfortable design, and a hardware package that feels unusually complete for a foldable. After spending time with it, the Honor Magic V6 feels less like a dramatic reinvention and more like a careful refinement of what Honor already got right.

Designer: HONOR

Aesthetics

Foldables still have a habit of looking oddly cautious. For devices built around one of the most dramatic ideas in modern consumer tech, they often arrive in the safest shades possible. Black, grey, silver, maybe a muted blue if a brand is feeling adventurous. The color choice itself is usually limited, which can make many foldables feel more sterile than stylish. Honor is one of the few brands that has tried to bring a little more personality into the category, and the Magic V6 sticks with that idea.

At first glance, the Magic V6 looks very similar to the Magic V5. The overall silhouette is familiar, the octagonal camera module is still there, and even the color direction feels like a continuation rather than a reset. This is clearly not a redesign for the sake of it. Honor seems comfortable with the look it has established for the Magic V line, so the V6 feels more like a polished follow-up than a fresh visual statement.

The finishes do a lot of the work in giving the phone its character. Honor offers the Magic V6 in four colors, and they feel more thought-through than the usual selection in this category. The red version I received is the most striking, with a soft-touch finish, a subtle hairline pattern, a gold frame, and a matching gold camera ring that make it feel a little warmer and more expressive than most foldables. The gold version goes in a different direction with a crisscross pattern that gives the back more texture and a slightly dressier look. If you want something more restrained, the white and black versions are there too.

Honor has also paid attention to the accessories. Each color comes with a matching case with a built-in kickstand, while the optional Special Edition case adds a bit more flair. Designed with Yoni Alter, it uses red aramid fiber and a colorful mosaic-style horse motif, while also adding built-in magnetic support. It is a small detail overall, but it suits the phone. The Magic V6 may not change Honor’s foldable design language, but it does show that the company is still putting real thought into how this series looks and feels.

Ergonomics

The ergonomics feel more like a refinement of the previous model, and I think that is a good thing. To me, the Magic V5 was already the most ergonomic book-style foldable around, so Honor did not really need to rethink the formula. What it has done instead is rework the internal architecture to fit what is currently the biggest battery in a foldable phone while still keeping the Magic V6 among the thinnest in the category.

There are slight differences depending on the color. The white version is the thinnest and lightest, measuring 156.7 x 74.5 x 8.75 mm when folded and just 4.0 mm when unfolded, with a weight of 219g. The other color variants are slightly thicker at 9.0 mm folded and 4.1 mm unfolded, and they weigh 224g.

In use, the Magic V6 still feels like one of the most comfortable foldables around. The hinge feels secure and firm, and opening and closing it feels fluid and well-judged. The frame is now flat, but the edges are ever so slightly curved, so it does not dig into your hand. The volume rocker and the power button, which also doubles as the fingerprint scanner, are placed where they are easy to reach. You can also customize the double press on the power button, which is a nice little touch in daily use.

What I like most is that the Magic V6 does not really feel like a typical large book-style foldable when it is closed. Folded shut, it feels surprisingly close to a regular slab phone, which makes it much easier to use casually throughout the day. It is this kind of refinement that makes the Magic V6 so easy to live with day to day.

Performance

The Magic V6 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which puts it right where a flagship should be in 2026. It is paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, although other configurations are available depending on the market. There is no real issue here with multitasking or with playing demanding AAA titles. Apps open quickly, moving between tasks feels smooth, and the phone has the kind of power that lets the larger display feel properly useful rather than overambitious.

Software is often where foldables either come together or start to feel more awkward than they should. The Magic V6 runs MagicOS 10 based on Android 16, and as with Honor’s recent devices, the focus seems to be on giving users plenty of AI features and cross-platform connectivity. Honor is leaning quite hard into interconnectivity with Apple devices. Using Honor Connect, the Magic V6 supports two-way notification sync with iPhones and iPads, while an Apple Watch can display messages and notifications from both devices. Through Honor WorkStation, the phone can also connect to a Mac and act as an extension of the desktop environment, with support for wireless screen casting, content transfer, and one-tap file sharing, including original-format Moving Photo.

On a foldable, though, the more important question is whether the software makes good use of the larger screen, and here the Magic V6 feels well equipped. Multitasking on the V6 is solid. The inner display gives you enough room to run apps side by side without things feeling cramped, and the phone has more than enough power to keep everything moving smoothly. On a device like this, that matters just as much as raw specs, because a foldable only really makes sense if the larger screen feels genuinely useful in everyday use.

Honor has equipped the Magic V6 with a 6.52-inch 2420 x 1080 AMOLED outer screen and a 7.95-inch 2352 x 2172 AMOLED inner display, and both are vivid, sharp, and fluid. Both panels support a 1 to 120Hz LTPO refresh rate, with up to 5,000 nits on the inner display and 6,000 nits on the outer, alongside eye comfort features such as 4320Hz PWM dimming. In use, the displays are excellent. The crease is barely noticeable, though not quite as invisible as on Oppo’s Find N6. The stereo speakers are also plenty loud and punchy, which suits the phone well for video and games.

The Magic V6 comes with a 50MP main camera with an f/1.6 aperture and OIS, a 64MP telephoto camera with an f/2.5 aperture, a 1/2-inch sensor, and OIS, and a 50MP ultrawide. On paper, that is a solid setup for a foldable, especially in a category where cameras have often felt like one of the first compromises.

In practice, the main and telephoto cameras are both strong for a foldable. Images come out sharp, colors are pleasing, and the overall look tends to lean a little on the brighter side. The ultrawide is satisfactory, though it does not stand out in quite the same way as the other two cameras.

Battery life is one of the Magic V6’s biggest selling points. Honor has managed to fit a 6,660mAh silicon-carbon battery into a foldable that is still among the thinnest in its class, while the 1TB version in China goes even further with a 7,150mAh battery. That is a huge battery even by slab flagship standards, never mind in a foldable.

Charging is strong too, with support for 80W wired and 66W wireless charging on the global model. A foldable this slim with this much battery capacity and this level of charging support is still unusual, and it is a big part of what makes the Magic V6 feel so easy to trust as an everyday device.

Sustainability

When it comes to foldables, durability can still be a concern for some people. Honor is clearly aware of that. The outer screen uses silicon nitride-based Nano Crystal Shield glass with up to 5,600 ultra-precise coating layers, while the inner display uses UTG flexible glass and is said to be 33 percent more impact resistant than the Magic V5. It is also rated for 500,000 folds.

The Magic V6 also comes with IP68 and IP69 ratings, which is the kind of protection you would more often expect from a slab flagship than a foldable. Honor is also promising seven major OS updates, which helps strengthen the long-term ownership story. What would make that sustainability angle more complete is greater use of sustainable materials, which is still an area where Honor could do more.

Value

Value is always a tricky part of the conversation with foldables because these devices are expensive by nature. No one is buying something like the Magic V6 because it is a bargain. Honor is beginning its wider rollout in Malaysia and Singapore. In Malaysia, the Magic V6 is priced at RM 7,699 for the 16GB RAM and 512GB storage version, which works out to roughly US$1,920 at a simple direct conversion. At that price, it is still very much a premium purchase, but the hardware does a lot to justify it. You are getting a slim and comfortable design, strong performance, large and bright displays, a huge battery, fast charging, and a durability story that feels more complete than what many foldables have offered in the past.

Value still depends on what you want from a foldable. If battery life, ergonomics, and high-end hardware matter most to you, the Magic V6 makes a very strong case for itself. If software polish is your top priority, some rivals may still feel a little more mature. Even so, the Magic V6 feels like a foldable that gives you a lot of substance for the money, not just novelty.

Verdict

The Magic V6 feels like Honor refining a formula that was already working well. It does not try to reinvent the book-style foldable, but it improves on the parts that matter most. The design still has personality, the ergonomics are excellent, the displays are strong, and the battery is genuinely standout for this category. The main and telephoto cameras are also better than what many people might expect from a foldable, which helps round out the overall package.

It is not without a few caveats, though. The software still does not feel quite as polished as the very best in the category, and the price places it firmly in ultra-premium territory. Even so, the bigger picture is very easy to like. If you want a foldable that feels slim, practical, powerful, and unusually easy to live with, the Magic V6 makes a very convincing case for itself.

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Honor launched a $193 Kid-focused iPad Alternative with 22 Hours of Battery and Parental Controls Already Set Up

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Setting up an iPad for a child costs $350 and about forty-five minutes of your life. You disable iCloud so your camera roll stays off their screen, lock down the App Store so in-app purchases don’t silently drain your card, configure Screen Time, and then spend the next six months re-configuring it every time an iOS update quietly resets something. Apple makes extraordinary tablets, but the parental infrastructure is clearly designed for adults who already know where to look. HONOR looked at that friction and built a tablet where none of that setup exists, because the kids-first architecture is the factory state, not a layer you construct yourself.

The Pad X8b Kids Edition starts at $193, landing it well under the entry iPad, and arrives with a dedicated Honor Kids OS environment, SGS 5-star drop resistance, a built-in kickstand handle, an integrated stylus silo, and a 10,100mAh battery that makes weekly charging a realistic schedule rather than an aspiration. The value proposition assembles itself pretty quickly.

Designer: HONOR

The blue silicone case with its lime-green handle does double duty as a carry grip and kickstand, which maps directly to how children actually use tablets: they’re either holding it or propping it against something. No separate folding stand, no accessory that gets left in a drawer. The handle is the stand. The Doodle Pen slots into a silo built into the case back so it travels with the device rather than disappearing within 48 hours of unboxing. FDA food-grade silicone throughout, SGS 5-star drop and crush resistance certification, and a construction that has clearly been tested against the kind of physical punishment children deliver with remarkable consistency and zero remorse.

The 11-inch panel runs at 1920×1200 with a 90Hz refresh rate, 500 nits of brightness, and carries TÜV Rheinland certifications for both low blue light and flicker-free performance. On a kids device those certifications carry more weight than on an adult one, given how close children hold screens and how many hours they log. The eye protection goes further than badges, though. Distance alerts, posture monitoring, brightness adjustments, and bumpy road detection that nudges kids away from reading in a moving car all run continuously without a parent needing to remember to enable anything.

The Honor Kids OS runs as a fully separate environment rather than a locked launcher sitting on top of the standard interface. The home screen uses cartoon island-style icons for Camera, Recorder, Kids Painting, and Multimedia, and parents manage the whole thing remotely through the HONOR Parental Assistant app, setting time slots and reviewing activity through visual charts. One tap activates Kids Mode, and getting back out requires authentication. None of this requires a Saturday afternoon in Settings.

The 10,100mAh battery is the unsung hero of the package. Twenty-two hours of continuous video playback means roughly eleven days of two-hour screen time sessions before a charge becomes urgent, and the 97-day standby figure means a tablet left on a shelf over a school break actually comes back to life when you pick it up. For a device category where battery anxiety is a genuine daily friction point, those numbers change the ownership experience in a way that a spec sheet undersells.

At $193, the Pad X8b Kids Edition sits in a position where competing options either underdeliver on hardware or ask parents to retrofit a general-purpose tablet for child use on their own time. HONOR made the child-safe design brief the starting point, and the result is a device that earns its price before you’ve even opened the box.

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Honor Is Building a 12,000mAh Phone That Proves the Battery-vs-Thinness Tradeoff Was Always a Lie

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Seven years ago, Energizer walked into MWC 2019 with a phone that weighed as much as a small paperback novel and measured 18mm thick, all in service of an 18,000mAh battery. The P18K Pop became a symbol of the era’s battery ceiling: raw capacity was possible, but only at the cost of a device that felt like a punishment to carry. The engineering logic was blunt and honest. Lithium-ion cells have a fixed energy density, so the only way to scale up capacity was to scale up size. Energizer took that math to its logical extreme, produced a certified brick, and quietly cancelled the phone before it ever hit shelves. The tradeoff felt fundamental, almost physical, like a law of nature. Then silicon-carbon chemistry started rewriting the rulebook.

At MWC 2026, we went hands-on with Honor’s Magic V6 foldable and found ourselves staring at battery layers measuring 0.15mm thick, a silicon content of 32%, and a cell that delivered 6,660mAh inside one of the slimmest foldable phones on the market. That same materials platform is reportedly now scaling toward something significantly larger. A new leak on Weibo suggests Honor is testing a phone with a 12,000mAh battery, a figure that would set a new high-water mark for mainstream smartphones, as part of a pipeline that will reportedly expand the company’s 10,000mAh-plus lineup to seven devices total. The Energizer P18K Pop needed 18mm of thickness to reach 18,000mAh. Honor is apparently aiming for 12,000mAh in a phone you would actually want to carry.

Designer: HONOR

Three of the four existing 10,000mAh-class smartphones on the market already belong to Honor, with the only outsider being Vivo’s Y600 Pro at 10,200mAh. The leak doesn’t confirm product names, but rumors point toward the Honor X80, Honor Power 3, and a new WIN 2 series as likely homes for these big-battery ambitions. Oppo, Xiaomi, and Huawei are all reportedly working on their own large-capacity devices, but the approach is measured, one model each, released cautiously to test market appetite. Honor’s strategy reads differently. Seven phones in a single category is a portfolio play, a deliberate push to own the mental real estate around battery life the way Hasselblad owns it around mobile photography.

The 12,000mAh figure carries one genuinely hard engineering question: fast charging. A 10,000mAh cell already strains conventional thermal management at 65W or above, and 120W on a cell that size has historically meant a phone that doubles as a hand warmer. The dual-cell design reportedly being tested on a separate 10,000mAh model in this same pipeline is Honor’s likely answer to that problem, splitting the load across two cells to manage heat and charging efficiency simultaneously. Whether that architecture migrates to the 12,000mAh device as well remains unconfirmed, but the fact that Honor is testing both configurations in parallel suggests the company has thought carefully about the thermal math rather than just chasing the headline number. The Energizer P18K Pop chased the number. Honor appears to be chasing the phone.

The post Honor Is Building a 12,000mAh Phone That Proves the Battery-vs-Thinness Tradeoff Was Always a Lie first appeared on Yanko Design.

HONOR 600 Review: Looks Premium, Lasts all day, and Doesn’t Cost a Fortune

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PROS:


  • Beautiful, minimalist design

  • Gorgeous screen with narrow bezels

  • Strong hardware performance and battery life

  • Impressive 200MP camera

CONS:


  • 12MP ultra-wide and no telephoto camera

  • No wireless charging

RATINGS:

AESTHETICS
ERGONOMICS
PERFORMANCE
SUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITY
VALUE FOR MONEY

EDITOR'S QUOTE:

The HONOR 600 is quietly refined, impressively enduring, and priced like it knows exactly what it's doing.

Smartphones are starting to look increasingly alike. The flat-edged aluminum frame, the polished glass back, the minimal bezels; these have become the default visual language of every phone that wants to be taken seriously. The differences between competing designs are getting harder to spot, and choosing between them often comes down to specs rather than any genuine sense of aesthetic preference. That leaves a lot of phones feeling pretty forgettable.

HONOR’s response to that trend with the HONOR 600 is to squeeze as much premium character as possible into a phone that doesn’t demand a premium sacrifice from your wallet. On paper, it looks like a solid upper-midrange device. In person, though, it carries a kind of quiet refinement that feels well above its price class, and that difference is worth paying attention to. Read on to learn why.

Designer: HONOR

Ida Torres contributed to this review.

Aesthetics

The HONOR 600 will draw inevitable comparisons to Apple’s current design direction, and that’s not an accident. The overall silhouette, the straight display, and the deliberately restrained detailing all read from the same design vocabulary. But where Apple tends to keep things cool and clinical, the HONOR 600 manages to feel warmer and somehow more luxurious, which is a rather ironic achievement for a phone that costs this much less.

A lot of that warmth comes from the back panel, which is made from a translucent composite fiber material that looks remarkably like frosted glass. It has a clean, understated quality that doesn’t try too hard. The matte metal frame features a satin-like finish that shifts subtly under light. And it’s available in Black, Orange, and Golden White (our review unit), all of which feel right for this design. It’s a design that doesn’t scream for attention but still manages to make you look twice either way.

Not everything lands quite so elegantly, though. The raised camera module, which houses the 200MP main lens and ultrawide camera, looks a bit like an acrylic plate sitting on top of an otherwise seamless body. It’s only an optical illusion, though, as it really is a unibody structure as advertised. Additionally, that area picks up fingerprints and smudges with remarkable enthusiasm, which shows up even more conspicuously on the glass-like material.

The front of the phone, though, tells a very different story. The display framing is, in a word, stunning. HONOR uses a sub-1mm bezel around the screen that makes the border all but disappear, creating a front face that looks incredibly clean and modern. Certified by TÜV Rheinland as the narrowest black bezel among all global straight-screen phones currently on the market, it gives the phone a near-borderless look that you’d normally expect from something much more expensive.

Ergonomics

Picking up the HONOR 600 for the first time is a small but pleasant surprise. At 185g with a 6,400mAh battery packed inside a 7.8mm body, it feels lighter than you’d expect, without ever feeling cheap or flimsy. There’s a genuinely satisfying substance to it, the kind of weight that communicates quality rather than bulk, and the flat profile makes it comfortable to slip in and out of a pocket.

The flat edges of the aluminum frame, also on par with today’s design trends, have a satin-like finish that adds some texture to your grip. Along with the matte texture of the composite fiber material on its back, the Honor 600 offers a satisfying and confident hold that won’t make you feel like you’re precariously carrying some fragile luxury item.

One-handed use is generally comfortable, though there are a couple of small quirks worth mentioning. The camera bump introduces a slight wobble when the phone rests on a flat surface, which is par for the course with most phones these days. The under-display fingerprint sensor also sits a little lower than feels natural, requiring a small but noticeable stretch that takes a few days to get used to.

Performance

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 at the heart of the HONOR 600 isn’t branded as a flagship-grade processor, though it promises 27% CPU and 30% GPU performance improvements over its predecessor. That said, it handles daily tasks with smooth, unfussy reliability, from jumping between apps to editing photos in a gallery packed with AI tools. Gaming is no issue either, and the phone doesn’t grow unbearably hot during its use.

As mentioned earlier, the display matches the phone’s stunning rear design, boasting a bright 6.57-inch 120Hz AMOLED display with a resolution that sits comfortably above FHD+ resolution. The true test of its brightness comes in its Sunlight mode, pushing it to around the advertised 8,000 nits, allowing you to capture moments and videos even under bright sunlight.

Battery life is where the HONOR 600 makes its most compelling argument. The European review unit packs a 6,400mAh cell, while other regional variants go up to 7,000mAh, and either way, you’re getting genuinely impressive endurance. Heavy days involving a lot of photography, video streaming, and social media don’t bring the battery to its knees before bedtime, and lighter days make two-day stretches perfectly achievable.

Charging comes via an 80W wired HONOR SuperCharge connection that tops the phone up quickly when you need it, though wireless charging isn’t part of the package here. That’s one of the few features reserved for the Pro tier. Disappointing but not all too surprising, given some corners HONOR had to cut to reach this price point. The HONOR 600 does make use of that ample battery for 27W reverse charging, though it’s really unclear who still uses such a feature these days.

Portrait (Studio Harcourt)

The 200MP main camera on a 1/1.4-inch sensor is the standout on the back, delivering 16-in-1 pixel binning with an equivalent 2.24μm super pixel size and 24% greater light sensitivity. CIPA 6.0-certified optical image stabilization keeps handheld night shots sharp in a way that many phones in this category can’t match, almost to the point that a dedicated night mode feels redundant, let alone an AI-enhanced one.

Normal

Night Mode

Night Mode, AI Enhanced

Unsurprisingly, the HONOR 600 performs admirably in this department, producing impressive, vibrant, and detailed shots even without setting anything up. And there are tons of knobs and dials you can turn to tweak your photo to your liking. You can, for example, select between Vibrant, Natural, Authentic “Classic” filters, though the differences are sometimes subtle.

Vibrant (Default)

Natural

Authentic

Beyond that, however, the HONOR 600 descends into the mid-range category. The 12MP ultra-wide shooter is decent but basic. There’s also no dedicated telephoto lens, though, so anyone with a serious interest in zoom photography might notice the gap most. The 50MP front camera, however, is perfect for selfies and vlogs, earmarking the phone for a very specific market.

0.5x (ultra-wide)

1x, 27mm

1x, 35mm

2x

4x

There’s no shortage of AI features, of course, most of which lean towards creative use for generating or editing images. There are also the staples like translation, search, and, with a bit of irony, a feature that detects deepfakes and voice cloning. There’s a dedicated AI Button that can be configured to a range of predefined shortcuts, making frequently used functions easier to reach. Unfortunately, you can’t even set it to launch an app of your choice.

Sustainability

The HONOR 600 isn’t marketed on sustainability credentials, but it’s built to last, which is arguably more meaningful. IP68, IP69, and IP69K water and dust resistance ratings, tested under controlled laboratory conditions, are complemented by an SGS 5-star Premium Performance Certification of Drop and Crush Resistance. More than just stickers on a spec sheet, they represent a phone that can handle the knocks and spills of daily life without drama.

HONOR promises six years of OS updates, which is a meaningful commitment that helps justify holding onto the phone for longer. The rollout timing isn’t always perfectly predictable, but the intention is solid. On the packaging front, there’s no charger in the minimalist and extremely compact box, which has become standard practice across the industry and is unlikely to inconvenience most buyers who already have an 80W-compatible charger at home.

Value

The HONOR 600 starts at €649.90 in Europe (around £549.99 in the UK, or roughly $700 in the US) for the 8GB RAM, 256GB storage configuration. That puts it squarely in premium territory, well above casual midrange pricing and nudging into the lower end of the proper flagship bracket. For context, it’s the kind of money where expectations are high, and compromises get noticed quickly.

Given what you’re getting, though, the asking price holds up well. The combination of premium design, a genuinely impressive main camera, outstanding battery life, a bright and comfortable display, and triple water resistance creates a package that feels more expensive than it costs. For buyers who prioritize how a phone looks and how long it lasts over raw performance or camera versatility, there’s real value here.

The one thing worth factoring in is how close the standard model sits in price to the Pro. The upgrade brings the Snapdragon 8 Elite, marking the first time the N Series featured that Elite-tier chipset, along with a dedicated telephoto lens and wireless charging, with 12GB of RAM as standard. For avid mobile photographers who want optical reach for zoom shots, that gap might feel more significant than the price difference suggests. For everyone else, the standard 600 covers most of what matters.

Verdict

The HONOR 600 is a phone with a clear sense of purpose. It’s slim, refined, and built with the kind of care that tends to show in daily use rather than on a spec sheet. The battery lasts, the display shines, the main camera performs, and the overall package carries itself with a quiet confidence that’s surprisingly rare at this price.

If you’re looking for a beautiful everyday phone with serious battery endurance and a genuinely premium feel that won’t push you into flagship pricing, the HONOR 600 is hard to overlook. The missing telephoto and the lack of wireless charging are worth knowing about beforehand, but they’re far less central to the daily experience than everything this phone gets confidently right.

The post HONOR 600 Review: Looks Premium, Lasts all day, and Doesn’t Cost a Fortune first appeared on Yanko Design.

Honor Just Made Malaysia Its Global Launch Pad for the Honor 600

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Malaysia doesn’t always get to be first. So when HONOR chose Kuala Lumpur as the global stage for the HONOR 600 Series launch, it felt less like a marketing decision and more like a statement. The kind brands make when they actually believe a market is ready, not just willing to buy, but ready to appreciate what’s being offered. I walked into the event expecting a standard product unveiling. What I got was something closer to a creative manifesto.

Ethan Chen, Deputy Country Director of HONOR Malaysia, set the tone early. The brand currently holds the number one spot in Android sales volume in Malaysia, and rather than simply leaning on that achievement, Chen framed it as a responsibility. “Pushing boundaries of what technology can do” wasn’t a tagline on a slide. It was the running thread of everything that followed, including why the device is focusing on its AI-powered features.

Designer: Honor

The design conversation alone was worth showing up for. HONOR used what they’re calling an integrated cold carving process to achieve a flagship-grade matte metal finish on a phone that looks premium but without the expected premium price tag. The bezels measure 0.98mm, an industry first, and they literally compared it to the string of a badminton racket, which is a very Malaysian way to explain precision and I respect it entirely. Holding the device, you feel the difference immediately. It doesn’t feel like a phone built to a budget. It feels like a phone that’s been decided upon.

On the camera front, HONOR Imaging System Expert Dr. Weilong Hou walked through what the 200MP sensor and the 120x telephoto zoom with industry-highest CIPA 6.5 image stabilization actually means in practice. The Pro model can lock onto distant subjects with a steadiness that used to require dedicated camera equipment. For anyone who shoots street photography or travel content without a full kit, that’s a genuinely useful upgrade. The AI Image to Video 2.0 feature lets you combine up to three photos with a text prompt to generate short video sequences, no third-party apps needed. It’s the kind of feature that sounds gimmicky until you see the demo, and the on-stage result looked surprisingly natural.

The moment that stayed with me most, though, wasn’t about megapixels. It was when the conversation turned to one of the reasons why they’re bringing AI into the conversation of transforming creativity. Mr. Harald Neerland, the president of Autism Europe, shared how AI tools like what can be found on the Honor 600 series can help autistic children tell and share their stories through imagery and videos. The line that landed: “True innovation should serve humanity, especially those who communicate differently.” It’s easy to be cynical about corporate purpose statements, but this one felt grounded and specific rather than vague. Whether it fully delivers on that promise over time is the real question, and worth watching.

Back to the specs, because they matter. The 7,000mAh silicon carbon battery was demonstrated through an F1-style simulation that put the HONOR 600 up against an iPhone and a Samsung in an endurance test that was also quite funny, with the Honor car pushing Samsung towards the finish line when it ran out of “gas”. Another standout feature that was highlighted was that the 8,000-nit display with HONOR’s Eye Comfort technology means you can actually use the phone in full Malaysian sun without squinting, while also protecting your eyes during late-night scroll sessions. The IP69K rating, the highest water and dust protection available, means a heavy downpour is genuinely not a concern. Neither is dropping it, thanks to the SGS 5-star Drop and Crush Certification.

With a price range between $650-850, the HONOR 600 Series is pitching itself squarely in the accessible flagship bracket, the space where most people actually shop. It’s not trying to out-premium the ultra-luxury tier. It’s trying to make flagship-level hardware feel normal, attainable, and beautifully designed. Malaysia being the first market for this global launch isn’t just a footnote. It’s a signal. And if the 600 Series performs the way it looks, HONOR may have just made their most compelling argument yet for staying at the top of that Android chart.

Full review of the Honor 600 coming soon!

The post Honor Just Made Malaysia Its Global Launch Pad for the Honor 600 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Leaked Honor 600 Pro looks a lot like the iPhone 17 Pro, but with a much bigger battery

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I have to hand it to Honor, they are consistent. When I wrote about the Magic8 Pro Air and its striking similarity to the iPhone Air, I thought we had seen the peak of their “inspiration.” It turns out that was just the warm-up act. The main event has arrived in the form of the Honor 600 and 600 Pro, and this time they have perfectly mimicked the iPhone 17 Pro. The new renders, courtesy of WinFuture, show a design that lifts every key element from Apple’s latest flagship. The full-width camera bar, the arrangement of the lenses, the flat metal frame, and even the color options are all present and accounted for. It’s a remarkable feat of reverse-engineering that feels both impressive and completely shameless.

What makes this strategy so fascinating is that Honor isn’t just making a cheaper clone. They are using the familiar, market-tested design as a vessel for a totally different philosophy. The Honor 600 is expected to ship with a 200MP camera and a 9,000mAh battery, specs that are practically alien to Apple’s ecosystem. It’s a phone designed to look like an iPhone from a distance but to function like an endurance-focused Android powerhouse up close. Honor is essentially telling the world that you can have Apple’s style without having to accept Apple’s compromises, and that’s a powerful message.

Designer: HONOR

The horizontal camera bar is not just vaguely similar, it’s dimensionally faithful. Both models feature the same raised rectangular module spanning nearly the full width of the device, with lenses, flash, and sensor cutouts arranged in a configuration that directly mirrors Apple’s layout. The standard Honor 600 goes with a dual rear camera setup, with its LED flash and laser autofocus tucked into a separate pill-shaped island below. The Pro model steps it up with a triple-lens arrangement, going all-in on the vertical stack. Even the colorways follow Apple’s playbook closely, with glossy black, metallic gold, and a bright orange finish that lands somewhere between homage and photocopy. Honor’s team clearly studied the iPhone 17 Pro with the intensity of an art student sketching a masterpiece in a museum.

The hardware rumors add even more intrigue to the picture. A 9,000mAh silicon battery in a flagship-tier device is almost unheard of in 2026, delivering the kind of multi-day endurance that the iPhone 17 Pro can only dream about. Both phones also get a 6.57-inch 120Hz OLED display at 1.5K resolution, wireless charging, a 3D ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensor, and a Snapdragon 8 series chipset. There’s even a dedicated camera button on the side, which is, yes, another very Apple-like touch. Honor is effectively saying: if you love how the iPhone looks but wish it prioritized endurance and camera specs over thinness, we built that phone for you. Whether that resonates with buyers remains to be seen, but the logic behind it is hard to argue with.

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