3 days ago
Honor 400 5G Review: Form meets function
The Honor 400 5G is the latest mid-ranger, part of Honor's "number" series. The phone launched on 21 May and comes in two flavors, a "Pro" version and a vanilla 400. Today we're going to focus on the core model. The 256GB version of the Honor 400 5G starts at €499, which puts it in direct contention with the Samsung Galaxy A56, the Pixel 9a, and the iPhone 16e - three midrange phones from the three biggest brands out there.
Honor managed to achieve this attractive price tag by cutting some corners in some areas, while in others the phone excels, challenging even flagships. Time to take a deeper look.
The Honor 400 5G managed a composite score of 6.4, which is right between its main competitors — the Galaxy A56 (6.1) and the iPhone 16e (6.6). The final score is dragged down by the lack of wireless charging and the somewhat low video score, but the phone does well in the main camera department, wired charging, and also the display part.
Let's start with an overview of the Honor 400 5G specs:
The design language of the Honor number series has certainly changed. The core model now employs a much more modern flat design, with flat sides, front, and back. Some might argue that this design has become so widespread that most modern phones look the same, and this is true to some extent.
The Honor 400 5G, however, has a very distinctive and unique camera housing. This camera bump has the shape of a trapezoid with rounded corners and houses two big vertically positioned circles—for the main and ultrawide cameras. There's an offset smaller circle with an LED flash inside. Overall, the end result is pretty stylish, especially in the Desert Gold color variant.
The size and weight of the phone are average—right in the middle with the 6.55-inch screen and the weight of 184 grams. In the hand the phone feels sturdy and substantial, well-made, without any flex or weird sounds when put under load and pressure.
All the available colors for the Honor 400 5G | Image by Honor
We already mentioned the Desert Gold color option (it's the best in our opinion), but you can get the phone in two other hues—Midnight Black, Meteor Silver. There's a special color called Tidal Blue but at the moment it's not available globally.
A modest retail box, just in line with what other brands are doing (bye-bye included chargers and cases) | Image by PhoneArena Sadly, another trend has caught up with the Honor 400 5G, and it's the barebones retail box one. There's no charging brick included, nor any back cover or case. You get only the phone and a USB-C cable. A small bonus is the pre-applied screen protector. These are the times we're living in.
A gorgeous AMOLED screen that's plenty bright | Image by PhoneArena
Moving to one of the best features of the Honor 400 5G—its display. The 6.55-inch AMOLED panel is great—bright, vibrant, and smooth. Honor claims 5000 nits of peak brightness, which is overkill and probably measured with a very small portion of the display lit, but we have tested these claims in our lab, and the results are below.
The Honor 400 5G managed to shine with around 1600 nits both at 20% APL and with the whole display lit, which goes to show that there's a limit set on the brightness. Nevertheless, this result is pretty impressive, and in real life the phone is legible even under very bright sunlight.
Other metrics, such as color accuracy, minimum brightness and color temperature, are also up there with much more expensive models. The Honor 400 goes down to just 1.5 nits of minimum brightness, and also sports an average deltaE of 1.22—very good color calibration from the factory.
In terms of biometrics, we have an under-screen optical fingerprint scanner, which is the most popular solution nowadays. It's not as fast or as accurate as an ultrasonic one but gets the job done.
The classic wide-ultrawide combination on the back of the Honor 400 5G | Image by PhoneArena
We do all kind of scientific measurements in our lab in order to produce camera score that is as objective as possible. The Honor 400 5G main camera scores a decent result, and even though the phone doesn't have a dedicated telephoto, the zoom results are also decent (thanks to crops from the huge main sensor). Where the phone lags behind is video, both shot with the main camera and the ultrawide. The selfie result is pretty good, though.
Honor went down the well traveled road of dual camera systems, slapping a main and ultrawide cameras on the back of the Honor 400 5G. What grabs attention is the 200MP sensor under the lens of the main camera. The sensor itself is 1/1.4", so decently large, and it sits under lens with f/1.9 aperture. The ultrawide camera is nothing to write home about. There's a 12MP sensor, the aperture is f/2.2 and we've got 112-degree field of view. You can check out some samples below.
All in all, just like our lab tests showed, the main camera of the Honor 400 5G is doing the heavy lifting. It produces quite pleasant and detailed photos with wide dynamic range and accurate colors.
The ultrawide is just okay, there's some loss of detail due to the small-ish sensor but nothing major. As the phone doesn't have a dedicated telephoto, all zoom shots are either 2x crops from the main sensor (which are quite nice, as there are more than enough pixels at hand), or digital (4x).
The selfie shots are also pleasant, thanks to the 50MP selfie camera, one of the largest pixel-count-wise on a phone in this price range.
You can check out the quick video sample above. The image stabilization is decent, and the detail is good, but colors seem a bit weird and there are occasional exposure troubles here and there. In our lab, the video quality scored somewhat low, but in real life it's decent and gets the job done.
MagicOS 9 powered by a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 | Image by PhoneArena Unlike the "Pro" model, the vanilla Honor 400 5G comes equipped with a midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor. There's 8GB of RAM on all storage variants (256GB and 512GB), and this constitutes the average midranger (forming sort of a tautology).
Unsurprisingly, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 is not really a powerhouse. The CPU scores put the phone last, compared to the relevant competitors from the three biggest brands. Even the Pixel 9a with its Tensor G4 is faster, and the Samsung A56 (the main rival, as we see it) is also faster in raw synthetic CPU benchmarks.
That said, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 gets the everyday job done decently, there aren't any lags or stutters during normal day-to-day tasks, and you can play games if you like, the phone is more than capable of handling most of those as well. GPU Performance
Speaking of games, the GPU performance is a bit better on the Honor 400 compared to what the Exynos inside the Galaxy A56 achieved, so it's a consolation of sorts. If you want the most power for the least amount of cash, though, the iPhone 16e is unbeatable in this particular task with its A18 chip inside. Honor 400 5G Software
The Honor 400 5G comes running MagicOS 9 out of the box, based on Android 15. There are some clever AI tricks on board, carried over from the flagship Magic series. You can use Magic Portal to quickly select images and text and send them to another app. You can also translate text and audio in real time, get help with your writing, and generate subtitles for songs, movies, etc. There's also a deepfake detection feature that uses AI and can detect spam audio and video calls. But the really cool AI feature comes from Google, and it's called Image to Video. This can be found inside the Gallery app under the tab select a photo to be turned into a video, and after a couple of seconds, you get a pretty amazing result. People start walking, cars start driving, and old oil paintings come to life. It's a neat feature, and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it—for example, take a black and white picture of your great-grandfather and make it move.
Finally, Honor stepped up its game with the software updates and now offers up to 6 years of major OS updates for the Honor 400 5G, matching what Samsung is doing with the Galaxy A56 . Honor is now well into the fourth generation of its silicon-carbon batteries, so we expected great things from the 5,300 mAh cell inside the Honor 400 5G. Especially given the midrange chipset.
Sadly, the phone performs rather mediocre, getting beaten by competitors with smaller batteries (e.g. the Galaxy A56 ), and the main culprit seems to be browsing score. The phone manages just 13 hours, where competitors are able to go for 17-20 hours in the same test.
The Honor 400 5G supports up to 66W of wired charging power, and this juice fills the battery from zero to full in 45 minutes. In this particular area the Honor outperforms its competitors, which all need twice as long (or even longer) to charge to full.
Fast wired charging but no wireless - it is what it is | Image by PhoneArena
The other area where Honor cut some corners is wireless charging. Or the lack of it. There are no wireless charging coils inside the Honor 400, and there's not much else to be said about it. If you're into using this tech, it will be a drawback for you.
When it comes to audio we were pleasantly surprised by the Honor 400 and its stereo system. The loudness is decent and there's almost no harmonic distortion even at max volume. You can spot some in the high frequency, but all in all, the audio quality is quite good. There's no 3.5 mm headphone jack, so you need to rely on Bluetooth headphones or use an adapter.
In terms of haptic feedback, the vibration produced by the motor inside the phone is strong and also tight, you won't miss a notification or a call in silent mode.
It's a good-looking device, but is it enough for a buying decision? | Image by PhoneArena Time for the million-dollar question! Should you buy the Honor 400 5G? The answer, anticlimactically, is it depends. The phone does some things right and neglects others. For starters, the display is beautiful—thin bezels, bright and colorful, sharp and detailed. The main camera is also pretty decent; not many phones in this price range get the 200MP treatment in this the wired charging is pretty fast, and we can't overlook the design (quite literally). Last but not least, the Honor 400 comes with the promise of 6 years of major OS updates, though we're not sure if the hardware will manage to live up to that promise. Now, not everything is roses, though. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 is not the fastest midrange processor, and we doubt it will be able to keep the phone running smoothly for 6 long years. There's no wireless charging, and the video quality is not on par with the competition.
But you get what you pay for, in the end. For €499, the Honor 400 5G offers quite a decent package. If you want to go against the grain and not reach out and grab a Galaxy A56 or a Pixel 9a , this phone could be a decent alternative.
