Hands-on: The Honor 400 Pro is a flagship in disguise with some really cool features
Honor has launched its next midrange series, the Honor 400, and I had the chance to test-drive the phones firsthand. The Royal Academy of Arts in London was indeed a fitting place for this premiere, firstly because the UK market has proven to be important and successful for Honor, and secondly, because the Honor 400 is a pretty stylish series.
The Honor 400 Pro features some impressive specs | Image by PhoneArena For those of you unfamiliar with the naming scheme Honor uses, the "hundred" series (actually, these started with double digits back with the Honor 50) is the company's take on the midrange smartphone with a stylish twist.Nowadays, though, this series has its own "Pro," vanilla, and "Lite" variants, just like a flagship model. The series has come a long way, offering some flagship features in its upper-tier models, both in the hardware and software departments.So, the Honor 400 series comes in three different flavors, and they are quite different indeed. The Honor 400 Pro is a quad-curved screen, triple-camera device; the vanilla Honor 400 is flat all around and has only two cameras; and the Lite model was actually released a month or so ago, featuring some modest specs but keeping in line with the stylish looks of the series.So, let's quickly go through these models and see how they feel and what they bring to the crowded midrange smartphone market. We will have full-blown reviews soon, so stay tuned for that too. The Honor 400 Pro looks and feels like a flagship. It has a triple camera setup on the back and a quad-curved 6.7-inch AMOLED display. Don't let the curved part scare you, though. It's not a radical radius, just a gently curved screen, reminiscent of what we used to call 2.5D glass. It makes the phone appear thinner than it really is and also makes it a bit more compact compared to a completely flat-screen one.The display is subjectively very bright; we tested it under direct sunlight, and it was impressively legible. Honor claims it can go up to 5000 nits, but we will test these claims in our lab later.
In the hand, you can't feel that this is a 200+ gram phone; it's a joy to hold. The back is slightly frosted, so no fingerprint magnet.
The complex camera bump on the Honor 400 Pro | Image by PhoneArena Now, in terms of aesthetics, the camera bump looks very interesting. It's a trapezoid shape with three circular openings for the cameras, with the middle one offset to the right. On the front, there's a pill-shaped camera hole for the front snappers, featuring two selfie cameras.
The Honor 400 Pro comes with a flagship processor inside, albeit one generation older. It's the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and as you might've imagined, it works like a well-oiled machine. Everything runs smoothly with no hiccups or stutters. The 120 Hz display refresh rate also helps a lot. The camera system is pretty versatile. It features a 200MP main sensor, a 50MP telephoto with 3x zoom, and a 12MP ultrawide camera. We're yet to snap some real-life samples with those three, but our first impressions at the venue were quite positive.Honor's AI efforts also deserve a couple of words (actually, there will be a separate article covering those, as they are really something). Alongside the usual Magic Portal, AI suggestions, and contextual visual search Honor has been doing in its phones, there is some new stuff in collaboration with Google.You can edit images with AI in ways that are truly fascinating. You can also use still images to create short videos, and the results are impressive. We will cover this in more detail, so stay tuned.
The Honor 400 Pro is a flagship in disguise but the price tag unmasks it | Image by PhoneArena Prices for the Honor 400 Pro start from £699.99 ($939 after direct conversion), which is flagship territory through and through.
Now, the phone looks and feels amazing, but there are a few arguments to be made. First of all, it kind of tries to take the Galaxy S24 FE and the A56, but it's much more expensive. We genuinely think that the Honor 400 Pro is the better phone, but will people pay more for it? We can't say.
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