How The Honor 400 Defines Its Future Through Form, Features And History

Forbes

3 days ago

Honor 400
In some ways, the Honor 400 is a confident look back into its corporate history. Honor was spun out of Huawei in 2020; before then, it was the 'youth' sub-brand of the Chinese company. It focused on more affordable phones than the flagship Huawei devices, while still offering as many features as possible
Honor stands alone now, with its own flagship devices, including the recently launched Honor Magic7 Pro, standing alongside the mid-range where it made its name.
Arguably, the Honor 400 is the closest we have to a 'traditional Honor smartphone,' but is that ideal fit for purpose in 2025? I've spent time with the new Honor 400 to find out.
Honor 400
There are a lot of comparable phones in the market at the $499 price point of the Honor 400. The three leading manufacturers all have their own entry: Samsung's Galaxy A56, Google's Pixel 9a, and arguably Apple's iPhone 16e (by virtue of it being the lowest priced of all the iPhones).
These devices all have to decide what to sacrifice to reach that price point, and which options are critical to making the phone feel right for the consumers. Honor has leaned into both the display and the camera as the phone's selling points. On the other side of the equation, the luxury of wireless charging never made it onto the drawing board. The key compromise is using the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset; this processor will not match the benchmarks against the competition.
Honor's decisions do not feel radically different to its three competitors. Google's Tensor chipset has never pushed the boat out regarding performance. Samsung's A56 camera works hard to maintain a clear and sharp image, while Apple's iPhone 16e leans into its unique software offering but comes with a single main camera lens and a $100 premium.
Honor 400
It's the camera where Honor's physical design shows through. The camera island moves to a trapezoidal shape with wide corners, as the LED flash rises higher and two lenses higher still. It helps the Honor 400 stand out with its own identity, something critical at all price points. However, when it is as competitive as this point, getting character and attitude into the design is key to getting that personal connection.
The Honor 400 sports a primary lens and an ultra-wide lens. The latter comes with a 12 megapixel sensor and a middle-of-the-road 112-degree field of view. The former brings with it a 200 megapixel sensor. It offers a wide dynamic range and colour reproduction feels natural, without too much over-processing.
The 200 megapixel sensor partly makes up for the lack of a telephoto lens. Moving to X2, the software is effectively cropping the picture, and the excess pixels on offer compensate for the potential loss of visual information.
The weak point is video capture. The clear colour reproduction seen in the images from the main camera does not quite carry through to the video, where the colours sometimes slip into too vivid moments, and exposure struggles in fast changing conditions.
Honor 400
At 6.55 inches, the Honor 400 display is a touch smaller than others, but three key features balance out that slight deficit. The first is the increased resolution, the Galaxy A56 manages 385 pixels per inch, while the Honor 400 goes up to 460 ppi thanks to the 1264 x 2736 pixel resolution.
The second is the refresh rate. Fast refreshing screens are fast becoming a standard feature across the board, so while it's worth noting that the Honor 400 goes up to 120 Hz, so does pretty much every other handset.
Finally, the 400's display is rated to 5000 nits of brightness, which is a practical point of difference if you're going to be using your phone outdoors.
Honor 400
Honor's Magic Portal remains one of the key differentiators of the MagicOS variant of Android. It's context aware, and you can select elements on the screen with an old school select option, right up to a circle the element to drag it into the portal, from there into various apps. For example, highlighting text, you can drop it into a note, use it as a prompt to create content, search with it, and more. The same goes when selecting an area of the screen, such as an image, and using that as the jumping-off point.
This all sits in a sidebar which you slide in from the edge of the screen. You can also configure this to show shortcuts to apps and functions outwith the AI features. It's a smart alternative to searching through all your apps on the homescreen.
You also get the AI features from Google that are seen as the standard AI apps in Android. This includes the established tools, such as Circle to Search on the screen and the Google Gemini app for direct interaction with the AI, along with newer tools, including the new tools in Google Photos.
It's also nice to see that Honor is pushing out the support window; the Honor 400 offers six years of Android updates and security patches. It's not quite the seven years of the premium and flagship smartphones, but at this price point, that's in the top tier of support life.
The software package is backed up by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, 8 GB of memory, and 256 GB of storage (a model with 512 GB is also available). If you were going to spec out an utterly average mid-range smartphone, you'd probably go with the 7 Gen 3, 8GB, and 128 GB storage, so Honor has exceeded that, albeit by a rather fine margin.
Mid-range smartphones have to make a conscious decision on what to prioritise. Consumers have to do the same and decide which phone is best suited to them. This is where Honor's previous experience in the space becomes crucial corporate knowledge. They know their audience, and the Honor 400 bears all the hallmarks of knowing their market segment.
Now read how the Honor 400 fits in with Honor's evolution of photography in 2025's smartphones…