My test found the Honor 400 Pro's image to video AI a bit freaky, but I still think it's a fantastic mid-ranger

Stuff.tv

22-05-2025

Stuff Verdict
An exceptionally capable all-rounder. The Honor 400 Pro might not have the same mainstream appeal as its Big Three rivals, but it easily competes with them on cameras, battery and software smarts.
Pros Long-lasting battery with rapid wired and wireless charging
Colourful, engaging photos in almost all conditions
Extensive AI toolbox and upper-tier performance for everything else
Cons Some might find all the AI photography features a little creepy
A little less pre-installed bloat should be standard at this price
Introduction
Honor's mid-season smartphone launches have been blurring the line between mid-range and flagship for a while now. The formula is largely the same: show up roughly six months after the firm's tip-tier Magic model, packing the sort of spec you'd usually expect to pay a lot more for. The Honor 400 series also continues the firm's trend for starting with a cut-price Lite version, before following it up with a more potent bigger brother.
The Honor 400 Pro feels like a very different proposition to the Honor 400 Lite, though. The iPhone-imitating styling is gone, replaced with more a bespoke look; photography is even more of a focus, with an extra-large helping of AI; and the price has put it closer to big-name rivals – while still staying the right side of affordable.
At £699 (there's no US release planned, as is usual for Honor) it undercuts the Google Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25, and slips between the iPhone 16e and iPhone 16. With hardware that has all three beat in places, could it be 2025's first genuine upper-midrange model surprise?
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Design & build: much more personality
My first thoughts after taking the Honor 400 Pro out of its box? 'Now this is more like it.' I'd been disappointed by the 400 Lite's 'Me too' styling, which tried way too hard to be an iPhone at pocket money pricing; the Pro feels far more unique, with a slightly rounded frame, subtle quad-curved glass up front, and a distinctive rear camera housing.
There really are three sensors underneath the three lenses this time, and it's glass on the rear rather than polycarbonate, which wraps neatly into the frame. OK, Lunar Grey and Midnight Black aren't the most exciting two colour choices, especially compared to some of Honor's more out-there offerings lately, but the materials feel suitably luxe for the money.
Honor hasn't included the AI camera button found on the 400 Lite, which only further highlights how different the two phones are, despite sharing a name. I feel it would've made a lot of sense to bring it back here, given the better camera setup; maybe next year.
At 8.1mm it's not the slimmest mid-ranger around; nor is it the lightest, tipping the scales at 205g. But it sits very comfortably in the hand and those subtly protruding camera lenses mean it slips easily in and out of a trouser pocket. It's also impressively durable, with both IP68 and IP69 resistance ratings. Protection from high pressure water jets probably isn't something you'll need on the regular, but it's still nice to have in a phone that doesn't cost four figures.
Honor has brought back its secure face recognition, via an iPhone-esque pill-shaped screen cutout, and also offers fingerprint biometrics from an under-display sensor. I liked having both configured, so I could quickly skip the lock screen regardless of lighting conditions or the angle I was holding the phone. Both worked quickly and accurately enough.
Screen & sound: easy on the eyes
The 400 Pro's bright and colourful AMOLED screen isn't a huge step down from the flagship Magic 7 Pro's. It's ever-so-slightly smaller at 6.7in, but has the same 2800×1280 resolution, and Honor has carried over the subtle 2.5D glass as well. This doesn't reflect light anywhere near as much as a properly curved-edge screen would, yet feels more in keeping with modern phone design trends – without being a carbon copy of any flat-screened rivals.
Viewing angles in general are fantastic, and given its an OLED panel underneath contrast is understandably rather brilliant. Black levels are suitably deep and inky, and the 120Hz refresh rate ensures scrolling is as smooth as silk. Streaming content was a pleasure to kick back with, particularly shows shot in HDR. Those really let the 400 Pro's extreme peak brightness shine.
5000nits is about as good as it gets in the phone world, although that figure only counts a tiny portion of the screen at a time. The phone doesn't get anywhere near as bright in everyday use, but I couldn't fault it for outdoor visibility. Even on especially sunny days, I could clearly see what was onscreen. It fared well against the impressively potent Google Pixel 9 XL, which costs considerably more.
It's great to see all of Honor's usual eye comfort tech included here. As well as dialling out extra blue light, the phone supports high frequency dimming and automatically adjusts its colour temperature to lower eye fatigue. The defocusing mode softens the screen edges to help here too, which is something you won't find on rival Androids. I liked how dark the extra dim settings gets for night-time reading, too.
The Honor 400 Pro's speakers put in a strong showing, with the earpiece tweeter and down-firing main driver delivering more than enough volume for headphone-free listening. Sound is generally clean and clear, with the usual lack of bass I expect from any phone speaker setup.
Cameras: AI video arrives
On pixel count alone, the Honor 400 Pro looks formidable. There's a 200MP lead snapper (with optical image stabilisation, naturally), backed up by a 50MP telephoto (also with OIS) equipped for 3x optical zoom. The 12MP ultrawide leans more mid-range, but also doubles as a macro shooter with a very short 2.5cm focus distance. A 50MP selfie can up front completes the set.
Sensor cropping expands the camera's reach from 0.6x to 6x before digital zoom properly comes into play, and you're offered a trio of colour modes. These either give your snaps authentic, natural-looking hues, more vivid and highly saturated shots, or an analogue film-style treatment that ups the vignetting and strips out a little warmth. I liked experimenting with them on the Magic 7 Pro at the start of 2025, so it's great to see them return here – even if a lot of owners are likely to pick one of the three and rarely stray from it. Most of my shots were taken in Vibrant mode, which is selected by default.
Honor's partnership with Studio Harcourt has also returned for the portrait mode, for moody black-and-white snaps that do a pretty decent job of preserving loose hairs and finer edge details.
Algorithms are just as important as pixels, of course, and for the most part the Honor 400 Pro delivers. The lead lens captures a glorious amount of detail as you'd expect, along with convincing and vibrant colours. Colour and exposure consistency between it and the other two lenses is rather great too, if not quite up there with the class leaders.
Dynamic range isn't quite as wide as some rivals can manage, leaving some of my most brightly-lit scenes looking a bit washed out as HDR processing exposed for both highlights and shadow detail. Outside of extremes, though, it held up rather well across all three lenses. The ultrawide definitely shows a detail drop-off compared to the other two, and the edges of the frame aren't super-sharp, but its narrow minimum focus distance meant I got some rather tidy close-up shots.
I was genuinely impressed with the clarity of the zoom at 6x, too. In some cases I thought the colours were more convincing and the contrast more true-to-life than 3x shots taken from the same spot, despite cropping the sensor to achieve them. It quickly became my favourite 'lens' for travel snaps, so long as my subjects were far enough away from me. I'd sooner reach for this than a Galaxy S25.
Honor's AI Super Zoom can take over beyond 30x, as it could on the Magic 7 Pro flagship. Your shots are optionally sent to the Cloud for processing, and come back either looking like someone took a decent stab at adding detail the sensor couldn't capture, or more like a poster illustrated version of what you saw in the viewfinder. Even without AI, there's clearly a lot of smoothing and noise reduction going on to create a usable image.
There's still a bit of work to do in low light, where the colour disparity between lenses seems stronger and the ultrawide quickly runs out of pixels to preserve fine detail. The other two hold up well for contrast and exposure, though, and aren't far off the class leaders.
Honor is also all-in on AI image editing at this point, and is first in line to bake support for Google's Leo Cloud processing straight into its gallery app. On top of the generation image expansion, smart subject cutouts, reflection and background object removal it could do previously, you now get AI image to video.
There are a few limitations, like using single subjects and it rejecting blurry snaps, but it needs just a few minutes to turn a single static image into five seconds of video. These aren't basic clips, either: as well as animating your subject, it adds camera pans, zooms, and drone-like aerial climbs. Naturally you'll have to pay for this functionality at some point – it's labelled as a 'free trial' on my review unit.
Honestly, it's freaky stuff at times: some of my test snaps looked incredibly convincing. A few were clearly AI slop, with nonsense creations and artifacts appearing mid-scene. You've also got no input over the camera movement or what your subjects are animated to perform. There's a fun side to it, but I can't ever imagine forking over cash to be able to use it.
Software experience: that's magic
Honor usually saves big updates to its Android skin for flagship phones, so the 400 Pro arrives running the same MagicOS 9 software as the 400 Lite and Magic 7 Pro I tested at the start of 2025. It's based on Android 15, though a lot of the styling feels very iOS-inspired. All your apps get spread over multiple home screens by default, notifications and quick settings are on separate pull-down menus, and a few of the icons look pretty familiar.
There's the usual extensive selection of own-brand apps, with dupes for most of Google's defaults (which are hidden away in a folder). I was also a little disappointed my review unit had so much pre-installed third-party bloat; it's a pretty common move on budget models, and was excusable on the sub-£250 Honor 400 Lite, but less so on a phone that costs a fair bit more. Your mileage may vary as the phone will be set up differently for different regions, admittedly, and it's only the work of a minute or two to erase them if you're not a fan. With a whopping 512GB of onboard storage, it's not like you're short on space right out of the box either.
Magic Portal is quickly becoming an Honor standout, letting you drag images or text to the side of the screen to bring up contextual actions and relevant apps. Highlight an address and Google Maps shows up at the top of the sidebar that appears. It's a handy way for opening two apps in multi-window, too.
I'm in two minds about the Apple-like Magic Capsule, which puts music controls, call timers and alarms around the pill-shaped camera cutout. Yup, it's Dynamic Island – except far more limiting, with no third-party app support. I'd love Honor to open up the API to app developers, or at least integrate more of its stock apps.
The firm gets a thumbs up for its long-term update support, though. Honor flagships get seven years of Android versions and seven years of security updates now. The 400 Pro isn't quite a flagship, but six years of each is still a great showing, and puts it just behind the likes of Google's Pixel 9 and the Samsung Galaxy A56.
Of course it's all the AI additions that Honor is putting the biggest emphasis on this year – and why not, given everyone else is doign the same. A lot of the various tools use Google Gemini, so of course you get Circle to Search, the Gemini voice assistant, and Gemini Live conversational AI. The writing tools, live language translation, voice transcription and subtitles are all par for the course, too.I wouldn't say they're better or worse than any rival offering, currently.
Performance & battery life: what more do you want?
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside the Honor 400 Pro isn't quite cutting edge today, but you don't have to go too far back in time to the point where it was Qualcomm's class-leading silicon. Paired with a healthy 12GB of RAM, it means this phone feels every bit the high-end hero, with a near-unflappable Android experience for the most part. Apps open in a blink, multitasking is no sweat, and even demanding apps run smoothly.
It's not quite so fast in synthetic benchmarks, as single- and multi-core scores of 2046 and 6463 in Geekbench 6 show; flagship rivals with Snapdragon 8 Elites are some 2000 points quicker on the multi-core test. Single-core grunt is greater than Razr 60 Ultra flip phone, though – showing what a difference effective cooling can make on performance. At no point in real-world use did I feel like I needed any extra oomph.
Gaming was a similar story. The 3Dmark Solar Bay test churned out a score of 7665, again putting it some distance behind the fastest phones on sale today – but not so much that games from the Play Store weren't nigh-on flawless. Horror fishing adventure Dredge isn't asking an awful lot of the GPU, so it was no surprise I saw perfectly smooth gameplay, but Genshin Impact was also stutter-free. You're in no way getting a sub-par processor for your money here.
I like that the 400 Pro continues Honor's streak of offering plenty of on-board storage, too. You get 512GB as standard here, while rivals only offer 256GB – or in some cases just 128GB.
Honor also puts its competition on blast when it comes to battery capacity. Admittedly the Pixel 9 and Galaxy S25 are both physically smaller phones, but there's a big gulf between their meagre cells and the 400 Pro's 5300mAh unit. Chinese brands have been quick to adopt silicon-carbon tech, and it has made a big difference to this phone's staying power. I comfortably lasted through full days of heavy use without having to plug in, and two days was achievable with lighter use. That's an excellent showing for a phone that's otherwise so capable everywhere else.
I was never waiting around for the phone to charge, either. The 400 Pro supports 100W top-ups from a compatible power brick, so I could complete a full refuel in under ah hour. Wireless charging is impressively speedy at 50W, too, though compatible charging plates are a little rarer.
Honor 400 Pro verdict
In just a few short years, Honor has transformed its upper-midrange phones into true mainstream flagships. The 400 Pro can comfortably rub shoulders with Google and Samsung's mass market models, thanks to its capable rear camera trio, high capacity battery, and impressively wide-reaching software smarts.
Not everyone wants their photo galleries filled with AI-adjusted images, and Honor still needs to remember customers paying this sort of cash have a lower tolerance for pre-installed bloat. But the colourful screen, modern (yet still unique) styling and slightly more affordable price make it a genuine alternative for those who aren't obsessed over brand names.
Stuff Says…
Score: 4/5
An exceptionally capable all-rounder. The Honor 400 Pro might not have the same mainstream appeal as its Big Three rivals, but it easily competes with them on cameras, battery and software smarts.
Pros
Long-lasting battery with rapid wired and wireless charging
Colourful, engaging photos in almost all conditions
Extensive AI toolbox and upper-tier performance for everything else
Cons
Some might find all the AI photography features a little creepy
A little less pre-installed bloat should be standard at this price
Honor 400 Pro technical specifications
Screen 6.7in, 2800×1280 120Hz AMOLED CPU Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Memory 12GB RAM Cameras 200MP + 50MP + 12MP rear
50MP front Storage 512GB on-board Operating system Android 15 w/ MagicOS 9 Battery 5300mAh w/ 100W wired, 50W wireless charging Dimensions 8.1mm thick
205g