Honor 200 Pro smartphone: Stunning portraits with cutting-edge features wrapped in a sleek design
Honor 200 Pro. Picture: Noel Campion.
The 200 Pro is one of Honor’s newest offerings in the mid-range category, and it brings a host of impressive features, including a triple rear camera setup, dual selfie cameras, a high-end chipset, and a curved OLED display.
The Honor 200 Pro's design is striking. The phone features an eye-catching oval-shaped camera bump, which adds a distinctive touch.
The phone's back has a unique finish with tones of frosted textures that remind me of how the sand looks as seawater washes over it on the beach. The handset feels great in the hand, with a good balance. It is not too heavy, yet not so light that it feels cheap.
It features IP65-rated ingress protection against dust and water splashes. However, it’s not fully waterproof, so I wouldn’t wash it under a tap.
The 200 Pro sports a 6.78-inch curved OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, offering a sharp and vibrant viewing experience at 437 PPI (2,700x1,224px). The display supports 10-bit colour depth and HDR10, with rich and accurate colours.
The pill-shaped cutout at the top houses the dual selfie camera setup, which is larger than your typical punch-hole design but tiny compared to the iPhone’s Dynamic Island.
While the 200 Pro doesn’t reach the class-leading levels of brightness offered by its flagship sibling, the Magic 6 Pro, it still manages a peak brightness of 4,000 nits, which is more than many flagships.
The phone offers three refresh rate modes: Dynamic, High, and Standard. The Dynamic mode adjusts the refresh rate automatically up to 120Hz in many apps to ensure smoothness, while the High mode forces 120Hz all the time, but you can choose which apps are set to 120Hz. Standard mode is fixed at 60Hz to save power, but I opted to leave it at 120Hz for maximum performance at the expense of a small hit on battery life.
The Honor 200 Pro features a stereo speaker setup that delivers good loudness. The audio quality is decent, with some bass presence and well-presented highs and mids.
The 200 Pro features a versatile camera setup: a 50MP main camera (f/1.9) with a large sensor and optical image stabilisation, a 50MP 2.5x telephoto lens (f/2.4), and a 12MP ultra-wide lens(f/2.2) with autofocus.
Honor has collaborated with Studio Harcourt to enhance the portrait mode, offering three presets: Classic (black and white), Colour (warm movie look), and Vibrant. When you enable Harcourt mode, it will display a few simple tips to help you get the best out of the effect.
While you can get stunning results using these modes, don’t expect miracles. My best results were when I could pose my subjects with good and interesting lighting. Like any photography, the camera is only a tool; good results come from good compositions.
Standard portrait shots with the main camera have excellent subject detection and natural-looking bokeh. The telephoto camera’s 70mm focal length provides a flattering perspective for portraits, capturing detailed and lifelike skin tones, although some might feel it lacks reach for other compositions.
The main camera captures high-quality photos with excellent detail, good dynamic range, and vibrant colours. You can switch to an Authentic profile for higher contrast and saturation or a Natural mode for toned-down colours.
The 200 Pro delivers detailed photos in low-light conditions with well-controlled noise and good colour saturation. However, it sometimes tends to blow out highlights, even with HDR enabled, unless night mode is activated, which helps balance the exposure.
4K video recording with the main camera is impressive, offering good detail, excellent contrast, and vibrant colours. Electronic stabilisation works well, ensuring smooth footage even in low light.
The telephoto camera produces excellent 2.5x zoom images, maintaining good detail and colour rendition. In low light, the telephoto camera benefits from night mode, which enhances dynamic range and detail.
The ultra-wide camera captures detailed, sharp photos with good dynamic range and colour accuracy. It also supports macro photography, delivering impressive close-ups. The ultra-wide camera struggles with highlights and softness in low light, but night mode improves exposure and sharpness.
4K videos from the ultra-wide camera are solid, with decent detail, good dynamic range, and accurate colours.
The front-facing setup includes a 50MP selfie camera and a depth sensor. Selfies are detailed with a wide dynamic range and lifelike skin tones. The depth sensor also benefits portrait selfies, providing good subject detection and believable background blur. Unfortunately, Studio Harcourt isn’t available for the selfie camera.
The only real niggles I have with the camera software are the lack of an auto-correct option when you’re editing photos and that you can't change the background blur in portrait shots afterwards.
The 200 Pro runs on Magic OS 8.0, based on Android 14. The interface is similar to older versions of Magic OS, providing a familiar look and feel.
Magic OS 8.0 includes several custom features, such as cards for app widgets and the Magic Capsule, similar to iOS’s Dynamic Island, which displays information around the selfie cutout. The software also boasts AI-based features like the Magic Portal, an AI-powered feature that enhances user productivity by allowing interaction with highlighted text on the screen. You can search the web, send emails, or create notes directly from the highlighted content without switching apps. The integration is designed to streamline tasks, making it quicker and more efficient to act on information as you encounter it.
Honor promises four major OS updates and five years of security patches for the 200 Pro, which is great news for those who like to keep their devices for several years.
The Honor 200 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 chipset, a step below the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Although it does not keep up with the benchmark results of flagships like the Honor Magic 6 Pro, its performance is stellar in real-world use, easily handling gaming and multitasking.
Although a microSD card is not supported, you do get 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
The 200 Pro includes a fast and accurate under-display fingerprint sensor and face unlock for security.
The 200 Pro houses a 5,200mAh battery, enough for a heavy day of use. As with most phones, you won’t find a charging brick in the box. However, it supports up to 100W wired or 66W wireless charging if you use one of Honor’s SuperCharge adapters (€59.99 for the wired SuperCharger).
In my testing, using a 100W charger, I only managed a peak of 52W, but actual speeds will vary depending on the charger and even the cable you use. For comparison, flagships like the Samsung S24 Ultra tops out at 45W, while the iPhone 15 Pro is rated for up to 27W.
I started charging the battery at 15%, and in 30 minutes, it was at 92%. It took less than ten minutes to reach the full charge.
The Honor 200 Pro is a solid smartphone with a unique design, excellent performance, and versatile cameras. The Harcourt portrait modes are wonderful, but don’t expect miracles if you struggle to take good portraits.
Honor 200 Pro (12/512) will be available in Black through Harvey Norman and Tesco Mobile in early July with a SIM free RRP of €799.
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