Honor 400 Pro Review | Trusted Reviews

Design

• Grown-up, slick design
• Slim metal frame
• IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance

The 400 Pro is definitely going for more of the grown-up aesthetic afforded by its competitors, with a slick and smooth finish in either grey or black; you don’t get any zanier colours than that with this Pro model. It’s a light grey, too, and in some lighting situations has an almost pearlescent quality to it

At 8.1mm, it’s slim and easily pocketable, while a 205g also keeps this candybar phone relatively light. The only chunky feature is the camera bump in the top left corner, as has been quite typical for Honor phones I’ve handled in the past.

Branding is kept to a minimum, in keeping with that grown-up feel, with a small Honor logo on the back, and a mention of the 200MP AI main snapper on the ridge by the camera bump.

The 400 Pro is definitely a modern-looking and feeling handset, with a large 6.7-inch screen with very tiny bezels around the edge, and a small holepunch selfie camera in the top middle.

You also get a volume rocker and on/off/AI wake button on the right side, as well as a USB-C port for wired charging and SIM tray on the bottom; no microSD expandable storage in sight.

Honor has also gone the whole hog in terms of making the 400 Pro as rugged as a phone can be these days, with full IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance. You’ll be able to take this phone out in the rain, or even submerge it in water accidentally, and it’ll come out as fit as a fiddle.

Screen

• Large, buttery smooth OLED screen
• Immensely vivid HDR highlights
• Useful eye-care features present

The 400 Pro’s screen-to-body ratio is impressive, thanks to a large 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED screen that’s as equal parts detailed as it is silky smooth for everything from binging Apple TV+ content to scrolling through Bluesky or Google Discover. It’s a truly lovely display with crisp detail, deep blacks and lovely contrast to it.

A peak HDR brightness of up to 5000 nits also means highlights in supported content are strong too, while I was also suitably impressed with it generally when out and about with a peak brightness that made it visible in brighter sunlight on some recent weekend walks in London.

As with the flagship Magic 7 Pro, the 400 Pro also comes with slightly curved glass at the edges for making general navigation that little more comfortable.

This screen also comes with the typical PWM dimming and low blue light eye care features as some of its brothers and sisters in its range, and while there isn’t necessarily a scientific way I can test its effectiveness, I haven’t noticed any real eye strain in using the 400 Pro in the last week or so.

The only real weakness here is that the 400 Pro’s panel isn’t an LTPO screen, so it doesn’t adjust its refresh rate at small increments, although the 120Hz top rate means on-screen action is responsive for gaming and for general scrolling.

Camera

• Triple camera with a 200MP main wide sensor
• Good detail and depth in ideal conditions
• Low light performance can be a little lacklustre

Honor has made the largest hoo-ha with the 400 Pro on the camera front, and on paper, it’s easy to see why. It comes with a triple array that features a hefty 200MP main wide snapper, a 50MP telephoto with a 3x optical zoom, and a 12MP ultrawide sensor.

General results with the main and ultrawide sensors are pretty good in ideal conditions, with good detail captured and reasonably natural colours. It did particularly well in capturing a band on a roof terrace on the Highgate Road in London, with a crop-in to capture the banner behind, keeping a great level of detail.

For casual shooting and social media grid posting, the zoom lens preserves a lot of the qualities of the main snapper, with natural greens and blues of hedges, trees, and the sky that don’t feel too overblown, or that the 400 Pro’s camera is trying too hard.

Going more into the digital zoom range to capture the church in Goring-on-Thames also retained some reasonable detail for the building’s brickwork, although cropping in too far made things a little fuzzy.

Anything beyond 15x zoom for super telephoto shooting required the use of AI Super Zoom upscaling to extract any good level of detail, though. In shooting a weir of water, it smoothed over the fuzzier waves of the water and of the fixtures on either side, although it presented quite a synthetic result. The same was also true of any skyscrapers I shot, and the BT Tower – the latter also came with an interesting interpretation of the logo.

There is a macro mode here, as is present on other Honor phones, and that extracted some pleasant detail on up-close subjects in my walkaround, such as flowers or an unassuming road sign.

The dual camera front setup features a 50MP wide and a 2MP depth sensor, and I was pleasantly impressed with its clarity and depth. The portrait mode also provided good bokeh, especially with the aperture at its widest, although using some of the AI background blurring left a synthetic feel at times.

Depending on conditions, low-light photography is either generally good or quite poor. I took the 400 Pro to a show at the Royal Albert Hall, and it was with the main 200MP wide sensor where I saw the best results with decent detail and natural colours, either inside the venue, or when taking survey shots of the Albert Hall outside.

Zooming in to focus on a subject in darker conditions though, left a lot to be desired, with a softer and blurry appearance.

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 offers good performance
• Responsive for general working
• Thermals are good, if not remarkable

In spite of the 400 Pro being a 2025 phone, it skimps a little bit on its processor inside. Where even the likes of the cheaper Poco F7 Ultra have the flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen Elite chip inside, this quasi-flagship is left with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

It was the 2024 flagship chipset of choice so performance here is still good, with solid results in the likes of the Geekbench 6 test with single-core scores that hold up against the more powerful chip, although it’s with multi-core tasks where the Elite chip pulls ahead.

GPU tests are on par with the more expensive OnePlus 13, in spite of it having the Elite chip inside, though that’s likely down to the phone’s QHD+ resolution. There is a more noticeable gulf in the GFXBench tests and 3DMark tests against other FHD+ handsets with the same chip inside.

I am being a little nitpicky here, as for the most part, the 400 Pro is a brisk and responsive device. Responses to inputs are virtually instant, and I had no trouble playing some Call of Duty Mobile or EAFC Mobile for fun in the evenings.

Thermals here are also generally pretty good, with the 400 Pro only getting quite toasty during an extended benchmark stress test, and during general use, it was comfortable to hold.

Software & AI

• MagicOS 9 skin of Android 15
• Some useful AI and customisation features
• Good length of Android and security updates

As with other 2025 Honor devices, the 400 Pro ships with MagicOS 9, Honor’s highly customised version of Android 15. This means it comes with a range of UI tweaks and additional features that Android purists might want to steer away from.

As Android versions go, it is livable and comes with the usual flavour of iOS-inspired features with a dual notification/settings menu and Honor’s clever Magic Capsule feature for displaying album covers when listening to music or any timers I have set, regardless of what’s running in the background.

This particular version includes many AI functions, including some clever AI recording functions with real-time speech-to-text and some generative AI writing tools. It also has many camera functions for editing photos, attempting to upscale fuzzy images, and adding extra detail.

It also comes with lots of customisation, such as the clever Magic Lock Screen, which shows at-a-glance information for weather and news, as well as a good mix of default wallpapers. You can also add a custom image to your always-on display.

MagicOS 9 comes with some bloatware by default, including TikTok, Facebook and the Booking.com app, although these are easily removable.

Honor has also committed to six years of both Android and security updates with the 400 Pro, meaning it also has some longevity to it.

Battery Life

• Larger silicon-carbon cell
• Sips power when streaming video
• Versatile charging options with speedy resullts

Honor has been reasonably generous with the battery capacity of the 400 Pro, coming with a 5300mAh capacity silicon-carbon cell that proved to be wonderfully efficient and sip power, in some situations.

An hour of video playback at the display’s native res took four percent off the total charge, while half an hour of light gaming plunged seven percent. It’s a good capacity for all-day use, and I had no real issues in getting through a couple of days before charging the 400 Pro back up.

Honor says the 400 Pro supports up to 100W wired charging, and it also supports up to 80W wirelessly, too. You can also charge another device from it at up to 5W with reverse-charging powers.

The problem, as with other modern phones these days, is that you don’t get a charger in the box, so you’ll be left to source a Honor-compatible 100W brick yourself. I had a 66W Honor Supercharger brick here, which put 50 percent back in the phone in just 17 and a half minutes – if you are in a pinch, you’ll be up and out with an evening’s worth of charge in no time at all.

A full charge took 47 minutes using the 66W unit, although it makes sense to expect faster results at the full 100W of power with an equivalently beefy brick.

Should you buy it?