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- Six years of software support
- Bright, accurate display
- Strong performance and stamina
- Limited colour options
- MagicOS still isn’t the best
- No Gorilla Glass protection
The Honor 400 Pro is only the second Pro model in this particular lineup to make it over to the UK. Despite competing with some of the best smartphones around, last year’s Honor 200 Pro made for an impressive debut, thanks in most part to its excellent performance and versatile camera suite.
Here we see Honor take that successful formula another step further, bumping up many of the key specs and making some minor tweaks to the already impressive camera system. The result is an extremely well-rounded handset that makes very few mistakes. There are phones that perform better in individual areas but you’ll struggle to find many that excel across the board like the Honor 400 Pro.
Honor 400 Pro review: What you need to know
Compared to last year’s 200 Pro, the Honor 400 Pro has changed quite a bit. The display is a slightly smaller 6.7in AMOLED panel with roughly the same resolution, at 2,800 x 1,280, and again a 120Hz refresh rate.
The main camera has ballooned from a 50-megapixel sensor to a massive 200-megapixel unit, once again with an f/1.9 aperture. The other cameras are the same as before, however, with a 50-megapixel (f/2.4) 3x telephoto and 12-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide joining the main camera on the rear and a 50-megapixel (f/2.1) selfie shooter complemented by a 2-megapixel depth sensor over on the front.
Powering the whole thing is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, backed up by 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space. The battery is slightly larger (5,300mAh, up from 5,200mAh) but charging remains the same, at 100W wired and 80W wireless.
Price and competition
There’s only one model of the Honor 400 Pro and it’ll cost you £699. That’s straddling the line between what we’d consider a mid-range phone and a full-blown flagship, and there’s no shortage of competition.
My favourite phone in this category is the Xiaomi 14T Pro – though it’s been discounted down to an even more tempting £499 since releasing last year – which offers better performance but lacks the Honor’s extensive software support.
Speaking of which, the Google Pixel 9 is also around this price (£699 for the 256GB model) and is promised seven years of software support. We also have the iPhone 16e for Apple fans, with the 256GB version at that same £699 – though the 512GB will run you £899. Both are decent rivals but lack the telephoto camera offered by the rest of the competition here.
Rounding out the pack is the new Oppo Reno 13 Pro (currently £649), which did particularly well in my stamina tests, landing on our best phone battery life ranking. There’s a solid telephoto camera here, too, but performance is only okay for the price and once again, Honor has the edge on software support.
Design and key features
I thought that Honor was onto a winner last year with the 200 Pro’s elegant oval camera housing so it’s a shame to see yet another plate of design spaghetti thrown at the wall instead of some commitment to a cohesive style. Still, the rounded trapezoid camera module here is interesting enough and certainly doesn’t detract from the overall look of the phone.
The rest of the build is decent, with a matte aluminium frame and belt-and-braces IP68/IP69 dust and water resistance. There’s no officially named protective glass (Gorilla or otherwise) over the display but Honor claims that the glass is “deeply reinforced”.
That may be fine enough but it doesn’t feel as reliable as a named and rated protective glass – the similarly priced Xiaomi 14T Pro and Oppo Reno 13 Pro, for instance, both wear Gorilla Glass (5 and 7i, respectively) over their displays, and that just feels a little more secure than vaguely defined reinforced glass.
Colour options are quite limited too, with only the Midnight Black pictured here and a Lunar Grey variant on offer.
Oddly, Honor has decided not to add the Honor 400 Lite’s dedicated camera button to either the Honor 400 Pro or the middle-of-the-pack Honor 400, despite both having a more complete camera offering than the junior Lite variant. I didn’t use the button much outside of dedicated testing, so I don’t particularly miss it here, but it’s a bizarre design strategy.
Software is usually a sticking point for Honor phones but things are different this time around. MagicOS 9 still has some quirks I don’t love – such as the lack of an app drawer as standard – and too many preinstalled apps upon boot, but Honor has countered this by upping software support to six years, for both OS updates and security patches.
As usual, there’s a smattering of AI features here, too, including the usual grab-bag of productivity tools (translation, summarisation, transcribing and the like), some camera tricks that we’ll get into below and Honor’s home-cooked AI deep-fake detection tool.
This one is a little tricky to test, so take the claims with a grain of salt, but the idea is that it will be able to tell you if you’re having a video call with a real person or a digitally created facsimile. That doesn’t sound like a situation most people are likely to encounter often but it’s handy enough to have in the back pocket.
Display
The 6.7in AMOLED display has the near-perfect black and contrast levels we expect of OLED panels, as well as a sharp 2,800 x 1,280 resolution and a peak refresh rate of 120Hz. Overall brightness is a little lower than the Honor 200 Pro, peaking at 534cd/m2 in manual mode and 790cd/m2 on adaptive brightness with a torch shining on the light sensor. It brought it back with HDR content though, hitting a much stronger 1,444cd/m2.
As with most phones, we’ve got two colour profiles to choose from, with Vivid dialling the saturation up to make movies and games pop more and Natural aiming for authentic sRGB colours. On the latter, I recorded a gamut coverage of 97% with a volume of 99%, with the average Delta E colour variance score coming back at 1.05. We’re looking for 1 or under here, so that translates to excellent colour accuracy.
Performance and battery life
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was the processor of choice for last year’s top-end phones so, unsurprisingly, performance is massively improved over the Honor 200 Pro’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset. The Honor 400 Pro pulled 33% ahead of its predecessor in the single-core benchmarks and 34% in the multi-core.
The Xiaomi 14T Pro and iPhone 16e are still faster, leading the Honor in the multi-core test by 15% and 30%, respectively, but this is still a great result.
I was particularly impressed with the gaming performance of the Honor 400 Pro, running Genshin: Impact at the highest graphical settings without any stuttering or dramatic overheating.
You can see below how much it improved over its predecessor in the GFXBench Car Chase test (the on-screen results were capped at 61fps for both, so the off-screen is more of an accurate benchmark) and it rivals the excellent Xiaomi 14T Pro for gaming prowess.
The larger 5,300mAh battery helped the Honor 400 Pro last for 28hrs 49mins in our looping video test – a good two hours longer than its predecessor. Only the Oppo Reno 13 Pro does any better here, so suffice to say that the Honor 400 Pro is a great pick for stamina.
Once depleted, the Honor 400 Pro supports nippy 100W charging that brought it back up to 50% in 17mins in my testing and on to full in around 40. That’s not quite nippy enough to rank on our fastest charging phones list but a full charge in 40 minutes is still fantastic and plenty fast for most people.
Cameras
As mentioned, the camera suite has a couple of new AI-powered tricks to play with, including AI Outpainting, which expands the borders of your image with AI generation, and Image to Video, which turns any photo in your gallery into a five-second video. Some of the generation is a bit iffy but, for the most part, the results are scarily effective.
As for the cameras themselves, the biggest strength of the massive 200-megapixel (f/1.9) main camera is naturally the detail produced. As standard, images are 16-in-1 pixel-binned to 12.5-megapixel images that are packed with razor-sharp detail.
The dynamic range is particularly strong here, too, with clear distinction in the shadowy area beneath the trees in the shot below. The only criticism I have of this lens is that it’s prone to blowing out the highlights on particularly bright days, leaving some images looking a little washed out.
Night mode always slightly annoys me on Honor phones, because you still need to manually select it, where most other brands automatically detect the low-light and adjust the shutter speed accordingly.
Even still, the Honor 400 Pro does well enough after dark; the main lens supports optical image stabilisation, which helps keep the shot steady for better detail retention, and the colour grading is nicely natural.
The 50-megapixel (f/2.4) 3x telephoto camera also pixel-bins to 12.5-megapixel shots (4-in-1 in this case) and again is supported by OIS. As before, this lens is best suited to honing in on a single subject, like the below shot of some flowers. Detail capture is excellent and the sharp focus is even further emphasised by the buttery smooth bokeh in the background.
The hybrid zoom goes all the way up to 50x but the quality drops off fairly dramatically past the 10x point. As we saw on the Honor 400 and the Honor Magic 7 Pro, zooms past 30x can make use of the AI Super Zoom enhancement.
This was very hit and miss in my testing – it effectively sharpens details, making it particularly useful if you have a clear view of your subject, but it gets easily confused by foreground objects overlapping with the background, and there’s a certain plasticky sheen over the final image that all but screams AI interference.
The 12-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide camera does a decent enough job of matching the colour tone of the main camera but detail is (understandably) much less impressive. Contrast feels more washed out too, which can make some images feel a little flat.
The 50-megapixel (f/2.0) front-facing shooter and 2-megapixel depth sensor combo is roughly identical to last year, and once again captures crisp selfies with natural skin tones. Video, meanwhile, gets a minor upgrade, now allowing for 4K recording up to 60fps.
Honor 400 Pro review: Verdict
In short, the Honor 400 Pro sees upgrades across the board while managing to retain the same affordability as its predecessor. That’s a clear algorithm for success. The six years of software support makes it one of the best investments in its price range, video finally gets 4K/60fps and improvements to performance and battery life keep it competitive with its biggest rivals.
In fact, I’ve struggled to find meaningful areas in which the Honor 400 Pro falls down. Some of the image processing in the cameras isn’t optimal and the lack of official protective glass leaves me questioning if it’s as scratch-resistant as some competitors but otherwise, there’s very little wrong here. The Honor 400 Pro is a jack of all trades that offers near-flagship quality at a much more manageable price.
