Honor 400 Pro review: AI-powered photography and flagship features at a mid-range price

Irish Examiner

22-05-2025

The Honor 400 Pro is a mid-ranger that focuses on AI-enhanced photography, powerful hardware, and a sleek design that rivals flagship models. It offers impressive value, but it's not without minor compromises.
Design and build
The 400 Pro sports a micro-curved design that offers a balanced blend of aesthetics and comfort, giving you a flat-feeling screen without the sharp edges. The finishes, particularly in Luna Grey and Midnight Black, look and feel premium, giving off flagship vibes. At 205g and 8.1mm thick, the 400 Pro is reasonably light, slim, and easy to handle without sacrificing performance.
It's also built to endure, with IP68 and IP69 water and dust resistance and SGS-certified drop protection. After using the device daily for the last few weeks, I found it can handle everyday wear and tear, even a short drop on my kitchen tile floor. The glass back resists fingerprints surprisingly well, thanks to the silky smooth frosted texture, though a protective case is still recommended for peace of mind.
Display
The 6.7-inch AMOLED display delivers crisp visuals at 460 PPI, with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate and up to 5,000 nits of peak brightness, bright enough to stay legible under direct sunlight. Thanks to built-in AI enhancements, contrast, colour saturation, and brightness automatically adjust for optimal viewing. In real-world use, I never needed to adjust any of the display controls, including brightness, manually.
The screen includes multiple TÜV Rheinland-certified protection modes and a unique 360° motion sickness relief feature, making it one of the most eye-friendly displays in its class.
Hardware performance
Under the hood, the Honor 400 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, offering substantial upgrades in both speed and efficiency. While this isn't the latest Snapdragon chipset, app launches are fast, multitasking is seamless, and AI-powered features run fluidly. Gaming performance is also solid. Frame rates remain consistent even during high-demand gameplay, helped by Honor's AI Game Thread Optimiser and the full-stack graphics engine borrowed from its Magic series.
Charging and battery life
The phone packs a 5,300mAh battery that charges rapidly and is compatible with the Honor 100W wired SuperCharge, which can bring it to full in under 30 minutes. It also supports Honor's 50W wireless charging. However, no charger is included in the box, so to achieve those high charging speeds, you'll need to purchase compatible adapters separately.
In general, I could get a full day of use on a single charge, and often well into the evening of the second day.
Honor's steady-carbon battery technology promises to retain 80% of its health after 1,200 charge cycles, translating to over four years of daily use without noticeable degradation.
Cameras
The Honor 400 Pro sets itself apart in photography. The 200MP main camera, with its large 1/1.4-inch sensor (f/1.9), delivers stunning detail and clarity, aided by optical and electronic stabilisation.
Thanks to AI enhancements, the main lens also handles telephoto-like tasks, delivering sharp results even when digitally zoomed.
The 50MP telephoto lens offers up to 50x zoom, and in many cases, it holds up remarkably well against premium flagships. However, while zooming up to 20x produces excellent results, as you approach 50x, detail diminishes, the AI takes over more aggressively, and image quality becomes less predictable.
The ultra-wide and selfie cameras, at 12MP and 50MP respectively, are equally capable, rounding out a well-balanced imaging setup. Overall image quality is excellent, though there is a noticeable drop compared to the top-tier flagship camera phones on the market.
AI features
Many of the latest phones, including the 400 Pro, now come equipped with Google's AI-driven tools, collectively offering powerful enhancements that benefit everyday users. However, Honor has added some of its own features, including motion-sensing capture, which intelligently predicts the perfect moment to take a photo. Portrait mode sharpens facial features and simulates natural bokeh with a quality that rivals studio portraits.
There's also a suite of creative tools that leverage Honor's on-device AI, including automatic background replacement, reflection removal, and object erasing, which is ideal for travel photos or social content.
For video, Honor incorporates generative models from Google's Gemini to enable on-device video creation and editing, turning the phone into a compact content creation machine.
Software
Honor has committed to six years of Android OS and security updates for the Honor 400 Series, matching the long-term support seen from top-tier rivals. Honor devices will update to Android 16 in 2025, bringing advanced AI features developed with Google. Honor's close partnership with Google offers early access to new Android versions. Last year, it rolled out Android 15 Beta early; this year, Android 16 Beta 3 is already running on the Honor Magic7 Pro. It's a strong indication that Honor wants to be seen as a serious player in Android longevity and innovation.
Verdict
The Honor 400 Pro excels where it matters most: performance, battery life, and especially photography. Its AI features genuinely add value, enhancing the overall user experience. While the software interface could use a bit more refinement, the phone has few drawbacks when weighed against everything it gets right.
€799 - Three, Harvey Norman and Tesco Mobile with availability in June.