Toy Story in your pocket — I tested AI Image to Video 2.0 on the Honor 600 series, and it made me question what a photo is

The Honor 600 and 600 Pro are launching soon, and while we’re testing them for reviews and camera face-offs real soon, I can tell you about one feature I’ve been having fun with — AI Image to Video 2.0.

In the words of an infamous U.K. Ronseal advert (ask your British mates), it does exactly what it says on the tin: you take your pictures, throw them into a multi-modal video generation model with a prompt and the picture is turned into a small clip up to 8 seconds long.

And after testing this feature for myself, it’s fair to say the second generation of this model vastly improves the contextual understanding of vague prompts, and made me ask a question: what even is a photo anymore in 2026? Not in a bad way…let me explain.

The key upgrades

So with this new multi-modal model, the 600 Series is able to take a deep semantic understanding of what it reads from your prompt and what it sees from your picture. It will tie the two together to make sense of what kind of video you want to see, fire it over to a data center to do the heavy lifting and give you an end result in about two minutes.

For the second generation, Honor’s bringing some fun new ways to get creative to the table:

• Image + Instruction to Video: Instead of just giving it a picture and not being able to direct the scene, you can now upload multiple reference photos and add text commands to dictate exactly what happens.
• First-and-Last Frame: You can add a before and after picture, and watch a smooth transition between the two scenes — be it people walking between two locations or morphing entirely into other characters.
• Preset templates, effects and camera movements: There’s a massive selection of camera templates here that you can insert into the prompt, from stylizations and color grading to camera movements like the classic Hitchcock zoom.

And through all of these (as you’re about to see), the visual consistency here is impressive. There are some moments where it can stutter a little bit, but on the whole, this is just pure fun.

Bringing it to life

So at the preview event I attended, Honor set up a couple of small model demonstrations for us to take quick snaps of with that impressive 200MP main camera to see what we could generate.

First, this cute little Panda in a park setting. I snapped it, opened the create tab in the gallery app and simply said “the Panda skips through the grass.” And the result was rather adorable — introducing character movement and almost giving it a Toy Story-esque feel of whimsy. The model had identified it as toys and adapted accordingly.

Image 1 of 2

Next, the Subbuteo set (shout out to any fans). I wanted to really put it to a test with a super vague prompt and a photo that may make it hallucinate. So I picked the angle where the goalkeeper was hard to see leaning back in the net and prompted saying “the ball is saved.”

Image 1 of 2

You can tell the 600 Pro had a bit of a hard time figuring out what I meant here with the ball having a life of its own, but it did make some logical creative decisions to arrive at what I was saying — adding an entirely new goalkeeper.

Sound effects are a little weird on both, but purely for the sake of a quick video meme to share with your friends and family, this is really rather good.

Outlook

Yes, I know I’m the person on the Tom’s Guide team warning about the AI bubble, and actively hoping it bursts so we can all finally get affordable tech again. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it when it’s implemented in a fun way, which is exactly what Honor has done.

With it seamlessly added into the flow of your built-in gallery app (or even with the dedicated AI side button), the 600 Series does solid work at bringing you beefy camera hardware and allowing you to play around with it in new ways.

Is it a gimmick? Sure. But a gimmick can still make you smile.

Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok.

More from Tom's Guide

• iPhone Fold predicted to own nearly 50% of the foldable market in very first year — here's why I doubt that
• Samsung just hiked the price of even more phones and tablets — including Galaxy Z Flip 7
• Freecash promised you could earn money playing mobile games, but Apple just removed it from the App Store for deception