Honor 400 Pro review: AI-powered photography and flagship features at a mid-range price
Honor 400 Pro 5G AI photography enabled mid-range smartphone. Pictures: Noel Campion.
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.
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 Meteor Silver and Midnight Black, look and feel premium, giving off flagship vibes. At 205g and 8.1mm thick, the 400 Pro is light, slim, and easy to handle without sacrificing performance.
It’s also built to endure with IP68 and IP69 water and dust resistance, plus SGS-certified drop protection. After using the device daily for the last few weeks, 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.
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.
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. App launches are fast, multitasking is seamless, and AI-powered features run fluidly. Gaming performance also shines. 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.
The phone packs a 5,300mAh battery that charges rapidly, thanks to 100W wired SuperCharge, bringing it to full in under 30 minutes. It also supports 50W wireless charging for added convenience. However, there’s no charger 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, which translates to over four years of daily use without noticeable degradation.
Photography is where the Honor 400 Pro sets itself apart. The 200MP main camera, with its large 1/1.4-inch sensor (f/1.9), delivers stunning detail and clarity, aided by both optical and electronic stabilisation. Thanks to AI enhancements, this main lens also handles telephoto-like tasks, ensuring 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. 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.
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. Motion-sensing capture 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.
Honor’s new ‘AI Image to Video’ feature lets users convert static photos into dynamic five-second video clips or live photos. Designed for quick sharing on social platforms, it brings motion and life to still images. Honor’s says it’s aimed at content creators and casual users alike who want to enhance their visual storytelling without extra editing apps. While the quality of the short videos is impressive, the feature feels more like a novelty than a practical tool. It's fun for a quick social post or to show off the tech, but it’s hard to see it becoming part of a regular creative workflow.
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.
The Honor 400 Pro excels where it matters most: performance, battery, and especially photography. Its AI features are more than just tech buzzwords—they actually add value and enhance the user experience. While the software interface could benefit from a bit more polish and there's no expandable storage, these drawbacks are minor compared to everything the phone does right.
€799 - Three, Harvey Norman and Tesco Mobile with availability in June.
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