This $200 smartphone looks like a shockingly good deal

By Bryan M. Wolfe June 24, 2024

Honor Play 60 Plus smartphone. — Honor

Honor has introduced a new budget phone, the Honor Play 60 Plus, for the Chinese market. This phone is only $200, and you won’t believe the mostly impressive specs. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly never be released in the U.S. market.

The Honor Play 60 Plus features a 6.77-inch LCD panel with HD+ resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. It has a Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 chipset and boasts a massive 6,000 mAh battery with 35-watt fast charging. Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 in August 2023 as an affordable mobile processor. As the first 4nm chip in the 4-series, it offers improved efficiency compared to previous generations.

The display’s peak brightness is only 850 nits, but it can be adjusted to as low as 2 nits in dim light. For cameras, the Play 60 Plus includes a 50-megapixel primary camera with an f/1.8 aperture, a 2MP depth sensor, and a 5MP front-facing camera.

You’ll find 12GB of RAM and 512GB of onboard storage inside. The phone is IP64-rated for dust and water resistance. The phone comes in Fairy Green, Magic Night Black, and Moon Shadow White.

The Honor Play 60 looks like an excellent choice for people seeking a cheap smartphone with a large display, long battery life, and a good camera. However, and not surprising at its price point, the phone’s processor is not the most powerful, and its display is only HD+ with a low peak brightness. Still, it’s an impressive-looking piece of kit at a great price.

For those who can’t buy an Honor Play 60 Plus (which is most of us), many budget-friendly smartphones are available worldwide. And yes, many of these are available for less than $250, including the OnePlus Nord N300 5G and Samsung Galaxy A14 5G. Motorola also specializes in lower-priced handsets, including the recent Moto G Stylus 5G (2024).

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Bryan M. Wolfe has over a decade of experience as a technology writer. He writes about mobile.

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