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- Brilliantly accurate display
- Accomplished 200MP camera
- Six years of software support
- MagicOS still not the best
- Performance has flatlined
- Design is solid, but derivative
While the Honor Magic 7 Pro is currently on flagship phone duty, it’s arguably not the brand’s primary smartphone concern. That would be the Honor 400 which, together with the Honor 400 Pro, offers a classy mainstream smartphone package at a price far south of the Galaxy S25s and Pixel 9s of this world.
It’s had to shave off a few luxury items along the way, and Honor’s software continues to be difficult to truly love. But the Honor 400 remains one of those phones, like the Pixel 9a, that makes you question why you’d ever consider spending double the money. It’s got the essentials down pat.
Honor 400 review: What you need to know
While Honor hasn’t completely gone back to the drawing board after last year’s Honor 200, the Honor 400 does feel like something of a soft reboot.
There’s a new design that, much like the Honor 400 Lite (albeit to a lesser extent), cribs from the iPhone playbook. It’s a slimmer, flatter, more water-resistant device than before with a smaller 6.55in OLED display.
There’s no dedicated telephoto camera this time around either, but there is a new 200-megapixel main sensor that can use those extra pixels to create reasonably detailed ‘zoom’ crops. You also get a 12-megapixel ultra-wide and a 50-megapixel selfie camera, as before.
Honor has stuck with exactly the same Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip as its predecessor, accompanied by 8GB of RAM and either 256GB or 512GB of storage.
If that all sounds like a sideways step from the Honor 200, it becomes much more palatable when you consider the Honor 400’s significantly cheaper price.
Honor 400 review: Price and competition
The Honor 400 starts at £400 for 256GB storage, while doubling up to 512GB will only cost you £449. This is noteworthy because, at a time when everything seems to be getting more expensive year-on-year, the Honor 400 costs £100 less than the Honor 200 before it.
This isn’t a demonstration of extraordinary generosity on Honor’s part, but rather a smart piece of repositioning for its mid-table offering. The Honor 400 isn’t a direct follow-on from the Honor 200 – it’s something slightly different.
At that starting price, it also undercuts the aforementioned Google Pixel 9a and the Samsung Galaxy A56 by £100. In fact, the Honor 400 is closer in price to the £449 Nothing Phone (3a) Pro and the £379 Motorola Edge 60 – two more well priced phones with lofty ambitions.
Honor 400 review: Design and key features
Honor has taken a very different approach with the design of the Honor 400 compared to last year’s Honor 200. That’s not to say that it’s an original approach, though. Like the Honor 400 Lite, there’s a clear influence from Apple’s iPhone design at play here.
The shape is very similar to the iPhone 16, with a slim, relatively compact (75 x 7.3 x 157mm), and fairly lightweight (184g) body. Unlike the Honor 200 and the Honor 400 Pro, there’s barely a hint of a curve until you consider the corners of the phone.
Also unlike the Honor 400 Lite – and indeed the iPhone – there’s no extended selfie notch here, just a classic hole punch. You’ll still get the little Dynamic Island-aping Magic Capsule animated widgets hovering around it, however, providing heads-up information on playing media and timers.
Nor do you get the dedicated camera button of the Honor 400 Lite. That’s one Apple-esque feature that would have been nice to have, though it’s far from essential. The angled camera module feels far less Apple-flavoured than its Lite counterpart, too, and it’s all the more distinctive for it.
In fact, overall, the Honor 400 design is a step forward from the Honor 200. It’s tighter and more modern, the display bezels are smaller (if not quite uniform), and it now features IP65 certification. All in all, it falls short of flagship-level, but it gets surprisingly close.
The phone ships with Android 15, but it’s Honor’s custom MagicOS 9 that you’ll be interacting with. This is far from the cleanest UI around, with too much bloatware, and it’s a little too beholden to the iOS way of doing things. On the other hand, it’s sufficiently fast and fluid, and Honor now supplies a strong six years of OS and security updates. That’s not as good as the Pixel 9a or the Samsung Galaxy A56, but better than pretty much everything else in its class.
Honor 400 review: Display
In keeping with its more compact design, Honor has rolled back to a slightly smaller 6.55in AMOLED display, compared to the 6.7in Honor 200 screen. Smaller does not mean inferior, however. This is a fantastic display for this or any amount of money.
At 2,664 x 1,200 it gets nice and sharp, with an iPhone-like pixel density of 446ppi. It’s also HDR ready, with an impressive 5000 nits peak brightness. Outside of HDR scenarios, I measured a top brightness (with auto brightness switched off) of around 600cd/m2, which is a tad higher than the Honor 200’s 568cd/m2, and significantly higher than the Samsung Galaxy A56’s 462cd/m2, though still well short of the Pixel 9a’s 1,120cd/m2.
This was recorded in the Honor 400’s Normal screen colour mode, which is preferable if you’re after the most natural and authentic picture. With this active, I recorded an sRGB gamut coverage of 99.3%, with a total volume of 101.6%. The average Delta E colour variance score was 0.67, which is the same as the Pixel 9a’s display. Suffice to say, anything less than one is pretty special.
Turn the display on its side for landscape video or gaming content, and you’ll find it flanked by a solid set of stereo speakers. They get nice and loud without distorting.
Honor 400 review: Performance and battery life
We weren’t massively impressed with the Honor 200’s performance, which didn’t really exhibit any major gains over its predecessor, the Honor 90. You’d expect me to take issue with the fact, then, that the Honor 400 packs the exact same Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor as its predecessor.
It’s certainly a shame that we haven’t seen the slightest hint of progress here, and the benchmark results I obtained from the Honor 400 are predictably similar. However, the context of the phone’s price is vital here. Sure, the Honor 400 isn’t as fast as the Samsung Galaxy A56 or the Google Pixel 9a. But then, Honor’s £100 price slash means that it’s not really competing with those phones any more.
The Honor 400 is up against the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro and the new Motorola Edge 60, and in those terms its performance is competitive. The £309 Poco X7 Pro demolishes it in performance terms, but that’s a bit of an outlier.
Honor’s phone runs well enough in general use, with fluid screen and app transitions, while Genshin: Impact remains playable at medium settings. Performance isn’t this phone’s strong suit, but it’s not something you’re likely to concern yourself with in day to day use.
While the Honor 400 is slightly smaller than the Honor 200, its 5300mAh battery is actually a little bigger. This larger-than-average cell was sufficient to comfortably get me through a full day of moderate usage, with just over 4 hours of screen on time. I had around half a tankful at the end of it. Naturally, heavier usage and more challenging network scenarios will drain it much more, but this is the kind of smartphone performance you don’t have to even think about when you head out for the day.
Our usual looping video playback test didn’t yield the best results, though. At 20 hours 26 minutes, the Honor 400 is down there with its fellow Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 user, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, as well as the Poco X7 Pro. Somewhat bizarrely, it falls way short of the Honor 200, as well as the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro, on this test.
The charging provision has worsened since the Honor 200, but it’s still good enough. Pair it with a suitable 66W charger, and Honor claims you can get from empty to 44% in just 15 minutes. I used a Samsung 65W brick, as Honor doesn’t bundle one in, and found that a full charge took a little under an hour.
Honor 400 review: Cameras
The Honor 400 carries an impressive main camera this year, in the shape of a main 200-megapixel AI Super Zoom Camera. That’s quite the word jumble, but it basically means that this unusually pixel-packed main camera (especially for a cheaper phone) is pulling double duty. In the absence of a dedicated telephoto camera, it can use AI to bolster extreme cropped zoom shots.
At 2x and 4x, this main camera does a grand job with such close-up shots. There’s ample detail, and exposure is decent. At the extreme end of the zoom scale – that’s 30x – Honor offers the opportunity to sharpen things up with AI. As we saw with the Honor Magic 7 Pro, the effect is somewhat hit and miss. It can work scarily well, making a seagull and a distant lighthouse look much cleaner than the original unassisted shots. People tend to prove more problematic, however, being rendered like something out of a particularly creepy old Dr Who episode.
An even more impressive, if somewhat empty AI trick is Image to Video, which generates five second videos based on still images. After a minute or so of AI processing, the results can be uncanny – a still landscape shot becomes an ascending drone shot, while people and pets spring to life. This video snippet of a chicken was generated entirely from a still. But as something of a photography traditionalist, I have to question the purpose beyond showing off what AI can do to your friends. Surely the point is to capture reality, no?
Splashy AI tricks aside, this main camera is a very accomplished performer. I was impressed with the depth and the clarity of the shots I captured in decent lighting. Honor offers three distinct looks, the default Vibrant mode offering shots with plenty of colour pop and contrast. Natural takes some of the pep out of things, offering a more ‘as seen’ look, while Authentic takes on a more filmic look.
Night shots are perfectly adequate if there’s a fair amount of artificial lighting, with OIS and a decent-sized sensor combining to render solid detail and exposure, without brightening things unnaturally. It struggles in extreme low light conditions – but it’s important to remember we’re dealing with a £400 phone here.
The 12-megapixel ultra-wide is, predictably, much weaker. It offers much less detailed shots, with noticeably inferior contrast. You’d expect this of any non-flagship phone, so it’s less a criticism than an observation. And besides – Honor does well to broadly match the colour tone of that main sensor, even if it’s obviously a lesser component.
The Honor 400’s 50-megapixel (f/2.1) front camera seems to be broadly the same as that of the Honor 200. It captures decent selfies with sharp detail, solid exposure, and natural skin tones. It shoots with a wide angle by default but you can crop in from 0.8x to 1x for a more traditional close-up selfie.
Video extends to 4K at 30fps, which falls short of flagship models (or indeed the Honor 400 Pro) and their 4K/60fps capture. With that said, the 4K/30 footage that I filmed was smooth and sharp, and you can always bump things down to 1080p/60fps if you want something smoother.
Honor 400 review: Verdict
Honor has taken a subtly different tack with its latest mid-ranger, and it’s paid off. By making a few judicious cuts from the Honor 200 – or even just keeping a few elements the same – it has been able to offer a capable phone at a £100 discount. As such, it’s no longer competing with the mighty Pixel 9a or the Samsung Galaxy A56. Smart.
The company hasn’t rested on its laurels, however. The Honor 400 is a sharp-looking phone with a truly excellent display and a very good 200MP main camera. Stamina is decent, too, thanks to a large 5300mAh battery, while charging speeds are snappy enough.
Throw in six years of software support, and the Honor 400 is a very interesting proposition at around the £400 mark. Regardless of what the spec sheet says, it’s the kind of mid-range phone that doesn’t feel as much of a step down as the price suggests.
