The Honor 400 Pro is a solid mid-range phone with a rather nice camera, though its AI features are (predictably) over-hyped.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Nice design | Actively advises you to not use a case, which is… a choice. |
| Decent CPU and GPU performance | MagicOS is very much an acquired taste |
| 6000mAh battery on board, but… | Actual battery life is only ordinary anyway. |
Score: 3/5
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In this review
Honor 400 Pro Specifications
Honor 400 Pro Design
Honor 400 Pro Camera
Honor 400 Pro Performance
Honor 400 Pro Battery
Honor 400 Pro Verdict
Ethical disclaimer: The Honor 400 Pro used in this review was loaned to me by Honor Australia, and like every other review on this site, whether a product is loaned to me or given to me makes absolutely zero difference in how I review it or my conclusions. Honor has had no input into the final review, and they can read it the exact same time you do. Sure, ethical disclosures aren’t exciting in themselves, but given how much AI slop and commercially compromised “reviews” are out there, I do feel like they’re more necessary than ever.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
For the longest time, Honor phones weren’t available in Australia, due to the brand originating as a Huawei sub-brand at a time when Huawei still actively sold smartphones in Australia. Honor was active in China, no surprise, and to an extent to my understanding in the US as well, but not down under.
Fast forward a few years and Huawei doesn’t sell phones here at all, and it also sold off Honor to (basically) the Shenzhen city government as a way to get around the US blockade on it using full Google services and Android features. I won’t get any further into the politics of that whole arrangement here, save to note that this was back in 2020; Honor’s been a non-factor in the official Australian market that whole time… until now.
Just before Christmas 2025, Honor launched itself into the Australian market with just a small selection of its phone offerings, including the mid-range Honor 400 Pro, a $999 AUD phone that first broke cover back in May 2025.
The Honor 400 Pro is built around a rather nice 6.7 inch 120Hz capable AMOLED display with a resolution of 2800×1280 and minimal bezels.
While its default colour style edges towards the garish, it works well in both low light and direct sunlight, and it’s rated at IP68/69, so it should also be reasonably robust. No, I haven’t drowned one to find out just how robust, because I don’t do that kind of thing purely for kicks.
All of that is quite pleasing, though I was less pleased on initial setup to be greeted by a display screen that suggested that using a phone case with the Honor 400 Pro would be a bad idea.
Wow. That… sure is a choice, and not the choice that I would advise you to make.
I know I bang on about phone cases a lot in my reviews, and that’s for a reason. $999 isn’t chump change, and the investment in a phone case is one small simple way you can protect your phone investment whether you’re buying a budget phone or the highest-priced premium gear.
I do get why some phones (especially folding phones) tell you not to use screen protectors, but that’s for a different reason to do with the way those screens are made. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a phone manufacturer come out and tell you not to use a case during setup like this before, and I don’t like it.
Perhaps the anti-case stance comes from the way that the camera block is arranged at the rear of the phone. It’s built around a curved four sided shape that’s certainly eye-catching, and also to an extent pocket catching if you’re trying to get the Honor 400 Pro out of a pants pocket in a hurry.
Technically it’s a trapezium shape, and I bet reading that is the first time you’ve thought of trapeziums since high school maths, right?
Four sided shape discussions aside, Honor produces the Honor 400 Pro in three finishes; the model sent to me for review was the Lunar Grey variant, but it’s also listed on Honor’s Australian site as being produced in “Tidal Blue” and “Midnight Black” finishes.
I’m not 100% certain that the Tidal Blue model is officially available in Australia; at the time of writing, Harvey Norman, the only place that Honor lists as selling the Honor 400 Pro only has the Black and Grey options available.
Camera
On the camera front, the Honor 400 Pro’s biggest selling point is the inclusion of a 200MP rear wide sensor at the back in that curiously shaped camera block, alongside a 50MP 3x telephoto zoom sensor and 12MP Ultra-wide sensor. At the front, selfies are handled by a 50MP sensor.
While I’m writing the review of the Honor 400 Pro in 2026, this is really a 2025 phone, and in 2025 – and likely 2026, thought the year is young right now – the catchcry for any phone’s camera prowess was around AI optimisation and post-processing.
Without dipping into the AI world at first, the Honor 400 Pro is a capable enough shooter within its price space, whether we’re talking selfies, nature shots or action.
I’ve been testing the Honor 400 Pro for a while, though my UK sojourn did create a gap in its testing.
It’s not true that I only take cat photos. Sometimes I take dog photos too.
Name the comic character win… absolutely nothing. Sadly, I cannot afford prizes.
On the telephoto front, it’s natively only 3x but supports up to 50x zoom, which is an interesting stop point given that this is all but certainly more of a crop of the primary 200MP sensor than it is a much smaller crop of that 50x sensor.
A tall building. Cities are rife with them, but what happens when we get up close?
Basic zooms are fine, but predictably, pushing it all the way isn’t a good idea.
See? This is maximum zoom level, and not a good shot at all.
As a base level camera, the Honor 400 Pro works well enough, but then there’s the question of its AI chops. I’m on the record as not being a huge fan of the way AI has been crammed into most creative spaces, but it’s equally also true that a lot of photographic tweaking software is essentially AI-based and doesn’t necessarily burn the planet while delivering somewhat improved photo results.
So where does the Honor 400 Pro sit in this equation? Its AI tools cover the usual bases of cropping parts of images out, upscaling images or expanding upon them. Cropping works well enough, though upscaling often introduces some odd smoothing effects on images, as with this selfie. I’m getting on in years, there’s no way I’m actually this smooth across the forehead in real life.
A harsh truth about my wrinkles, but hell, I’ve EARNED them.
AI Content expansion is also on the slightly quirky side, though this does depend on your choice of original shot. Take for example this shot taken from a moving Sydney train:
The shot is fine, but what if we wanted to expand its horizons?
Let’s expand that out via AI:
If you don’t look too closely at the bungalow style building at the left that’s not a bad effort, but it’s the general exception to the rule. What happens if we try to expand out a shot with a living creature in it?
Tegan does not want her picture taken, because she’s just woken up.
In the background, Neko looks nonplussed.
Let’s apply a little AI, shall we?
Complete with silly animated star effects, because… reasons.
Oh. Neko appears somewhat… stretched. That’s not good.
Performance
The Honor 400 Pro is built around a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which isn’t exactly cutting edge.
There’s a good reason for that, however; this is a phone that first broke cover internationally back in May 2025, when having that processor would have been a little closer to the cutting edge. Again, this is a $999 smartphone, so expecting the absolute latest and greatest in processors was never going to be a factor anyway.
For the model being sold in Australia and as tested it ships with 512GB of fixed onboard storage and 12GB of RAM, which is decent at this price point, but then this particular part of the mid-range space is one that’s always hotly contested; not only from “budget” flagship models such as the Galaxy S25 FE and Apple iPhone 16e but also some discounted older stock that used to be flagship level. Or, as I discovered at the time of writing, at least one “current” flagship phone. So how does the Honor 400 Pro compare? Let’s have a look at Geekbench 6’s CPU score:
Sitting in the middle of that pack isn’t a bad result for the Honor 400 Pro, and matters improve a lot looking at GPU performance.
Here’s how the Honor 400 Pro stacks up against those same phones using 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme benchmark:
Under the surface the Honor 400 Pro that I tested was running Android 16 at launch, though Honor’s own Australian specification sheet states it’s an Android 15 phone. That is, I guess, one of the advantages of getting the Honor 400 Pro quite a bit later than its launch window, though it’s not clear to me at the time of writing what Honor’s actual promises around future OS and security updates might happen to be.
However, this isn’t a plain stock Android phone; far from it. It’s using Honor’s “MagicOS 10” launcher platform that – like so many of its similar originally-Chinese-market siblings do – fundamentally alters the way that Android looks and operates. I am on the record as being more of a fan of standard Android look and feel, and while MagicOS didn’t do much that really annoyed me, I also wasn’t that taken with its overly garish look and feel.
I’m also not a fan of bloatware, and the Honor 400 Pro certainly comes with more than its fair share of that. On board once set up you’ll find Facebook, TikTok, Booking.com, ReelShort, LinkedIn, Trip.com, WPS Office, Agoda and Block Blast! preinstalled, plus (of course) App Market for an alternative way to find really crappy apps.
Super Bob looks… familiar, somehow. Can’t quite place it.
On one hand I should support alternative app stores because Google having a monopoly on this kind of thing isn’t the most consumer-friendly way to help software developers.
This is an Android phone, so naturally you’re going to want to run an iPhone 15 branded (cough) camera app on it, right?
Equally, when the alternatives look as janky as App Market does and serves up apps such as “Super Bob Run” or “Camera for iphone 15 Pro OS 17” (no, really), they’re essentially impossible to like.
Battery
The Honor 400 Pro is built around a 6,000mAh Silicon-Carbon battery, a nice big number that looks impressive on a marketing pitch – but as always, I want to see how a phone manages its power, not just claims in advertising.
To do this, I put the Honor 400 Pro through my standard YouTube Battery Test to see how it compared against similarly priced phones at the time of writing. Here’s how it fared.
Hitting above 90% in this test typically points to a phone that can last out a day’s moderate usage, and that’s precisely what the Honor 400 Pro can do in more anecdotal testing, but it’s also clearly not quite best of breed, especially when you consider that it’s the only phone in this particular category sporting such a large battery capacity.
For the Australian model, Honor doesn’t provide a charger in the box, so you’ll have to provide your own. Honor claims up to 100W charging via wired chargers and up to 50W wireless, though that’s through a proprietary wireless charger that I didn’t have the opportunity to test for this review.
Honor 400 Pro: Alex’s Verdict
The $999 price point that the Honor 400 Pro sells at is a highly competitive one, and having additional choices is on the surface no bad thing at all. It’s an impressively built phone that benchmarks and runs well, and as long as you mostly steer clear of its AI “features” its camera array is also pretty good for the money.
It doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its 6000mAh battery, and I can’t get excited by either MagicOS or the inbuilt App Market, though, and given that it’s rapidly approaching the point where it’s essentially a year-old phone, it would still be wise to shop around and consider your options at this price.
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Honor 400 Pro: Pricing and availability
The Honor 400 Pro retails in Australia for $999 AUD.
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