Honor has tried to sneak into the conversation about powerful phones with a very clear play: put a high-end camera in an upper-midrange body and back it with hardware that doesn’t break a sweat. The result is the Honor 400 Pro, a smartphone that, besides boasting design and display, bets on a surprising zoom and battery life consistent with its capacity. Does it sound like a well-thought-out balance? Let’s take a closer look.
Design, display and sound: an almost total success
In hand, the Honor 400 Pro looks more premium than the photos suggest. The gentle curvature of the sides breaks with the flat-edge trend, achieving a more comfortable grip and a very pleasant sense of continuity on the slightly curved front. The button placement, lower than usual, is reachable without stretching the thumb—an ergonomic detail worth copying. The frame is plastic, yes, but the finish is so well executed that at first glance it could pass for aluminum.
The 6.7-inch AMOLED display (1280 x 2800) is one of its main selling points: 120 Hz for impeccable smoothness, a peak brightness that rises up to 5,000 nits so you won’t struggle in full sun, and PWM Dimming at 3,840 Hz which helps minimize visual fatigue. Factory calibration leans warm in a very pleasant way, and the front “island” is small and discreet, echoing what we’ve seen on iPhones but without being intrusive.
The least inspired point comes with the audio: despite the dual stereo speaker, bass is lacking and distortion appears if we raise the volume beyond half. For long music or series sessions, better use headphones. In any case, the physical package conveys solidity: 160.8 x 76 x 8.3 mm and 202 g, well balanced.
Performance, software and battery: plenty of power, ROM to improve
With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 at its heart, there’s little room for doubt: the 400 Pro flies in demanding games, light video editing and aggressive multitasking. It heats at the top if pushed, though not uncomfortably, and never feels underpowered. It is paired with 12 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512 GB of storage, a combo that guarantees breathing room for a while. During testing it didn’t allow installing benchmark apps from the Play Store, an odd detail that doesn’t change the real-world experience.
The software, however, doesn’t charm. MagicOS 9 on Android 15 works, is stable and is full of options, but its aesthetics and organization are still too far from what Material You proposes. Also, it comes with preinstalled bloatware (shopping and travel apps, among others) that can be uninstalled but shouldn’t be there. Honor’s AI suite includes useful features like extracting text from images, real-time translation, object recognition or air gestures; it also allows the knuckle “circle” gesture to invoke its Magic Portal, which is clever though less convenient than using a finger. The collaboration with Google for AI editing tasks (sketches, glare removal or image enhancement) adds value, although the novelty of generating small animated clips from photos feels more like a toy than a tool you’ll use daily.
Battery life is very well solved: with 5,300 mAh, under normal use it’s easy to reach about seven hours of screen-on time, and if we push it we’ll be close to six. The 100 W wired fast charging takes it from 0 to 100% in around 40 minutes, and there’s also 50 W wireless charging. It’s the kind of combo that lets you go out without fear even if you forgot to charge overnight, because a quick plug saves you in a blink. In connectivity, it arrives up to date with WiFi 7, 5G SA/NSA and Bluetooth 5.4.
Cameras: brilliant zoom and processing that needs improvement, price and verdict
The photographic setup is ambitious: a 200 MP f/1.9 main sensor, a 50 MP f/1.9 telephoto with 3x and a 12 MP f/2.2 ultra wide, plus a 50 MP front camera. The camera app is complete and fast, although its interface recalls previous generations and would welcome a facelift, just like the ROM.
The main sensor offers natural color and white balance — something not so common below €1,000 — but the processing tends to remove noise too aggressively. The side effect is known: fine texture is lost even in good light, as if a noise-reduction mask had gone overboard. It’s a reasonable strategy at night, not so much in bright sun.
Where the 400 Pro really shines is in the zoom. The 3x is sharp and consistent, and up to 6x it promises a very convincing “lossless” crop; beyond that, up to 30x, it combines the main sensor with AI to reconstruct detail with great success. Does it overdo it sometimes? Some shots can come out a bit washed, but overall the results are surprising for its range. The ultra wide performs without corner blur and prefers slight underexposure over forcing an artificial HDR, which helps maintain a believable aesthetic. Portrait mode segments finely — even with complicated objects like LEGO pieces — and allows adjusting the blur with very successful bokeh. Selfies keep natural skin tones and a sufficiently wide framing. In video, it handles 4K at 60 fps with solid stabilization, although the look isn’t the most organic in the segment.
So is it worth buying or not?
With a launch price of €650, the Honor 400 Pro is a very balanced device: attractive design, excellent display, top-level performance and a versatile photographic department, with a zoom that stands out above average. If Honor polished the main sensor processing and refreshed MagicOS to get closer to Google’s design guidelines — goodbye bloatware, hello coherence — we’d be looking at a strong candidate for a direct recommendation.
For geeks, it’s one of those phones that invite tinkering: from trying its AI gestures as if you were tuning a shortcut on your PC, to squeezing the 8 Gen 3 in games like overclocking a GPU. The feeling of control and power is there.
