Key Specs
| CPU | Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (4nm) Adreno 750 GPU |
| Memory | 12GB LPDDR5x RAM 512GB UFS 4.0 Storage |
| Display | 6.7’’ FHD+ AMOLED 120Hz 3840Hz PWM dimming 360° Adaptive Dimming AI Circadian Night Display 5000 nits peak brightness |
| Camera | 200 MP, f/1.9, (wide) PDAF, OIS 50 MP, f/2.4, (telephoto) 12 MP, f/2.2, 112˚ (ultrawide), 50 MP f/2.0 (selfie) + 2 MP f2.4 depth camera |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth 5.3, USB Type-C 2.0, Up to WiFi 7 |
| OS | Android 15, MagicOS 9 6 major Android Upgrades |
| Battery | 6000 mAh, 100W Fast Charging 50W Wireless Charging |
| Available Colors | Midnight Black Lunar Grey Tidal Blue |
| Retail Price | 12GB+512GB : RM 2699 |
What Is The HONOR 400 Pro
HONOR’s numbered series has always have a great track record of being strategically well-specced out devices while keeping it under the RM 3000 range. This makes it a premium mid-ranger option, and doubly so for this year considering that the HONOR 400 Pro offers some bumps in hardware while keeping the same launch price of RM 2699 that we saw on the HONOR 200 Pro.
Key Differences
| Honor 400 Pro | Honor 200 Pro |
| Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 | Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 |
| 200MP main sensor | 50MP main sensor |
| 50MP 3x Optical | 50MP 2.5x Optical |
| 6000 mAh | 5200 mAh |
| IP68/69 | IP65 |
I can see and feel that this time the HONOR 400 Pro takes a more subdued approach towards design, compared to the more charismatic HONOR 200 Pro. It looks way cleaner, more sterile and fitting of the word Classy. Its edges are slightly rounded, with a super smooth glass finish which really slides onto the fingers well.
The frame itself is clean aluminum material, matted-up to complete the smooth outlook.
The camera island takes a unique shape encasing the triple-sensor setup in a rounded, cut-inwards rectangle, definitely unusual but eye-catching. Many would be asking what phone you’re using and you’d be proud to tell ’em.
Apart from the hardware changes and how it affects the final user experience is the software. The HONOR 400 Pro 5G comes with MagicOS 9 out of the box, which makes it Android 15. The UI design remains extremely sterile, a plain dull that’s waiting for a good wallpaper to make up for it. I don’t fully blame them as MagicOS 9.0 was intended to be a real AI-powered update, full of backend enhancements that I’d rather have compared to just an aesthetic upgrade which I could always change by switching my default launcher.
HONOR 400 Pro in Malaysia gets 2 Years of Major Android Updates and 3 years Security Patches, while European models gets 6 Years
As A Work Phone
AI Features
The HONOR 400 Pro, like the Magic 6 Pro from last year, gets all the AI goodies since they have the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, which comes with a dedicated NPU to leverage on. At a glance, here are the AI features you get to use on the HONOR 400 Pro :
Magic Portal 2.0: This feature allows you to circle an item on your screen, and Magic Portal will intelligently recommend related services. It’s designed for quick information retrieval and interaction.
AI Translate: Supports automatic language detection and real-time interpretation for meetings and lectures.
AI Notes: Transcribes meeting minutes with voice-to-text and real-time translation capabilities, supporting multiple languages and dialects, and offers a one-click summary feature.
AI Magic Photo Editor: Provides advanced image editing tools including:
AI Super Zoom: Enhances telephoto capabilities, allowing for impressive zoomed shots.
Deepfake Detection: Helps identify manipulated videos in real-time, enhancing security during video calls.
YOYO Agent: An upgraded AI assistant that simplifies complex tasks into single commands, learns user habits, and provides smart suggestions.
Does It Matter?
From a productivity standpoint, some of the features have proven to be a great help, such as Magic Portal 2.0, allowing me to circle objects on my screen to send to my clients via messaging or email, without needing to tap into the app itself and attach it from there. It cumulatively saves time and keeps me in check. AI Translate is pretty useful for both work and holiday. I managed to enjoy my trip in Taiwan thanks to real-time translation of Mandarin to English in a matter of seconds. It served me well in networking with potential clients from China who usually prefer to deal with Mandarin speakers.
AI Notes is definitely going to be a thing. Transcribing meetings helped me remember all key points my clients wanted to make, eliminating human error based on forgetfulness. The transcription to text, along with prompts to summaries the raw text into a better readable format saved me a lot of time and statistically lowered my margin for error by making sure I could confirm key information immediately through meeting-minutes compilation that were both speedy and accurate.
In short, I’d say it does matter as the application of these features make sense, it will definitely speed up the way you do things, and its usefulness gets further expanded if you have the full suite of HONOR products, such as the HONOR Pad 10 or the Magicbook 14 Pro. HONOR Connect, a full cross-operating system feature that allows connectivity for file transfer across Android, iOS and Windows devices, with HONOR devices being the preferred platform.
This drag and drop approach across all systems saves time and simplifies workflow, since its a cable-free approach, while also reducing time needed to upload files to a Cloud and downloading it onto your intended destination devices to work on.
If you look at the picture I painted, HONOR’s really focused on making sure you get all the info you need from your meetings, ensure inter-language communications are quick and smooth, your photos are free from unintended clutter and that you’re able to send files through any device and platform by simply dragging and dropping the files in just a few steps. Definitely an ideal starting point for productivity for the price.
If AI Isn’t What I’m After?
Outside of AI and file-sharing, you will have nothing to worry about when it comes to day-to-day use. You’ll have plenty of performance power thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, 12GB of RAM and 512GB of extremely speedy UFS 4.0 storage. I definitely know that they’re just using last year’s flagship chip, but I’d say its a smart choice since it’s the only viable upgrade from the HONOR 200 Pro’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. The launch price was retained from last year as well, so this move drives value, and would not hurt Magic 7 Pro users who bought into this year’s Elite chipset earlier this year.
Battery life and charging is pretty solid too, thanks to a large capacity and fast charging, a dynamic combo which did put HONOR on a lot of end users’ radar. Screen-on times this round are pretty consistent between using WiFi and 5G, which isn’t common at all, since data does consume more power compared to WiFi.
| Connectivity (Based on a 12 hour day) 1 hour gaming, 1 hour doom-scrolling 10 hours typical messaging, music, and social media | Screen on time |
| WiFi (Dominant) : 5G Data (60:40) | About 6 hours |
| WiFi : 5G Data (Dominant) (40:60) | About 5-6 hours |
| Charging From 0% | Battery Charge Level (6000 mAh) |
| 30 Minutes | 85% |
| Fully Charges In | 40 Minutes (100%) |
| Wireless 50W charging | 1 hour 5 minutes (100%) |
Gaming and Entertainment
Most likely, after knowing its performance potential for work and how well it can handle such tasks, gaming is surely the next point of consideration.
Gaming
| Game | Activity | Highest Temperature |
|---|---|---|
| ZZZ (High, 60 FPS) | Hollow Zero session (FULL) @ 50-60FPS | 45°C |
| Dead Cells (Highest Settings No FPS Cap) | Standard Run @ 115 – 120FPS | 42°C |
| Mobile Legends (Highest Settings) | Ranked Matchmaking @ 60 FPS (5 matches back to back) | 39°C |
This is no surprise, as the only expectation that the HONOR Magic 400 Pro managed to surpass was how well it kept the temperatures low, and the FPS sustained throughout long play sessions. This is the result of better software implementation on a familiar chipset. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 may be 1 year old now, but that also means that HONOR has had at least lessons learnt from their flagships with the same chipsets and has tweaked it accordingly. Other contributing factors that may have indirectly improved performance and stability :
Turbo X Engine: Upgraded graphics engine for faster rendering (40% boost) and reduced energy consumption (11% reduction).
Predictive Scheduling Engine: Optimizes system resources for smoother multitasking and stable frame rates.
AI Refactoring Compilation Engine: Improves application startup speed and stability.
For those looking to stream videos and in need of good visuals, the HONOR 400 Pro is well equipped for that. You get a 6.7″ AMOLED panel that goes up to 120 Hz, followed by up to 5000 nits of peak brightness for those sunny days. Colors are great as expected, full of vivid detail that people would find pleasing.
For night owls who work in the dark, the HONOR 400 Pro draws significant advantage thanks to a lineage of screens with high (3840Hz) PWM dimming. This ensures that sensitive eyes would not experience flickering and eye pain from browsing in the dark before bed.
How About Taking Photos?
HONOR didn’t choose to play around this year for the 400 Pro. Its packing a very capable triple camera setup, with the headliner being the 200MP AI Assisted main unit, followed by the 50MP 3x telephoto and retained 12MP ultrawide.
| Honor 400 Pro | Honor 200 Pro |
| 200MP main sensor | 50MP main sensor |
| 50MP 3x Optical Telephoto | 50MP 2.5x Optical Telephoto |
| 12MP Ultrawide | 12MP Ultrawide |
| 50MP Selfie Camera | 50MP Selfie Camera |
Main Sensor
While it does say that the HONOR 400 Pro has a 200MP sensor, photos are actually output to 12.5MP because of binning, a common practice in smartphone cameras today which is then packaged in marketing jargon.
Leaving that out of the way, the main sensor shoots excellent photos, packing plenty of detail and sharpness without overdoing it. Its only weakness is HDR in low-light situations where certain light sources pose too much a challenge for the process to equalize. Day time however, I don’t see any major issues.
Portrait
I spent most of my time here. Portrait mode is extremely enjoyable, and I’d mark it as one of the HONOR 400 Pro’s numerous strong suits. Standalone, it does really well with human subjects with good subject seperation, blurs and detail. They’re not super sharp, but that’s something I REALLY like, as oversharpening tends to be a recurring theme for smartphone cameras. Shutter speed is fast, but do note that in this mode, it’s all about the moment, and it tends to really focus on immediate faces the sensor is able to pick up. You can see how apparent it is in the photo with the man riding his bike-cart in the rain at night, where him and his features are extremely detailed while the faux bokeh mops up his surroundings, and the person on the far right became part of that bokeh blur.
From a technical standpoint, it’s not exactly a great shot, but from a street photography view, it’s these imperfections that add to the immersion of the shot. It’s been a long, cold rainy day in Taipei and everyone just wants to go home, while some feel a little blur after all that work.
Colors are excellent, thanks to not only Harcourt but also additional film simulation options that are included with the HONOR 400 Pro debut.
Zooms
The HONOR 400 Pro does offer up to 3x Optics, which I feel is a great choice for mid-rangers. There is a contrast in tone between the 1x and 3x shots. At 1x, it leans towards warm, while at 3x it goes cold. Just something to take note off, not a big deal.
Anyway, at 3x, detail is generally good, a good sense of highlight to the overall image. The expectation is there. If you’re going to be a portrait phone, your optics and post-processing has to be good, and its definitely reflecting the results.
Moving on to crops beyond optical point, the HONOR 400 Pro relies on cropping and AI cleanup to produce these shots. You’re able to zoom up to 50x, starting from 4x, and the camera app gives you 6x as a preset toggle right after 3x. Up to 6x, I’d say shots are still usable, clean and well put together, while anything beyond 10x, you can see the pixels coming out and getting plastered with sharpening, which may or may not do you any favors depending your subject matter (best examples are the 2nd and 3rd photos, which I find to be good shots, especially from digital cropping from the 3x telephoto).
ULTRAWIDE
Ultrawide for the most part is pretty neutral in quality, offering decent sharpness and detail from initial POV. Colors are quite lively and there’s not much distortion to be seen so I’m quite content with the results, even in lowlight. The sensor seems to be quite capable to capturing scenes as is, and with a very respectable level of focus. The ability to autofocus here is a real plus point. Well done HONOR.
Selfies
Selfies are good for the most part, capturing good details, even on portrait mode. Blurs are good, and was even able to pick up on gaps on my hair that show very little light. It does pay to have an additional 2MP depth sensor after all.
You do get filters, but they are neither Harcourt’s nor Film Simulations that I got to enjoy from the rear cams. Honor, if you are listening, please add them to the front camera.
The Verdict
The HONOR 400 Pro is a great device that you can depend on for just about anything. It packs enough AI to simplify workflows, take great photos and is offers extremely reliable gaming performance despite the one year old chipset. Still, its a good upgrade from even the HONOR 200 Pro.
Despite it maintaining the launch price from last year, while giving upgrades all over and is considered an admirable feat, the RM 2699 price tag may be good, but it is still the elephant in the room. If you’re looking to maximise all possible dollars, then the likes of the POCO F7 Ultra is a small top up away, offering this year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset but you lose on camera and AI (if that matters to you). Plus, you can only find it online. HONOR has not only offline stores all over, but also more aggresive gifting. At minimum, you get a free HONOR Choice Watch 2i and 1 year of Extended warranty.
If perfomance is your thing, please know that you’re not losing out much in current gaming performance on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Software developers are yet to still catch up on optimization anyway!
