Honor 200 Pro review

Honor really moves from strength to strength, constantly upgrading and delivering new devices that bring flagship features to mid-range prices. The Honor 200 Pro is the brand’s latest phone that fits that bill, packing a top-tier Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 into a slimline, stylish 6.78-inch body, backed up with an excellent triple-camera array featuring an interesting and unique Harcourt portrait mode – more on this later.

The nature-inspired rear panel is smooth and delightful to the touch – though it’s a bit of a slip-hazard due to this – and there is some slight curve at the edges of its 4,000 nit brightness screen, contained in the largely plastic housing. Even with the plastic, though, the Honor 200 Pro is a tidy-looking smartphone that’ll suit gamers and regular users alike. So, how does it fare compared to the best mid-range phones on the market? Let’s find out.

Price and availability

The Honor 200 Pro (and the regular Honor 200) launched in Paris on June 12, 2024, for the European market. As a Chinese company, Honor first launched the 200 Pro in China on May 27, 2024, with sales beginning on May 31.

At the time of writing, there is no news of a US launch for the Honor Pro 200, though as Honor devices aren’t bound by the same restrictions as former parent company Huawei, I suspect it could appear stateside before long. For example, the Honor Magic V2 works perfectly fine on US networks, and you can find Honor smartphones at all major retailers.

Still, you might have to wait a short period for the Pro 200 to land, with pre-orders now available in the UK through the official Honor site and other retailers joining in later this month. The Honor 200 Pro costs £699.99 and has 12GB RAM and 512GB storage, coming in Ocean Cyan, Moonlight White, and Black colorways. You can read more about the specific specs below.

Specs

Features and software

Honor has packed the 200 Pro with heaps of new features. It’s the first mid-range device to feature MagicOS 8.0, a layer on top of Android 14.

As such, a bunch of software from the Magic6 Pro is available on the 200 Pro, including Magic Portal, the AI-powered app that lets you drop text or images from one app into another. For example, say someone sends you an address in WhatsApp, but not Google Maps link. No worries, with Magic Portal, you just drag the whole address into Google Maps, and the instructions begin appearing. You can also search for the image you’re looking at on eBay with a swift drag to the app. It’s pretty nifty once you start using it.

The Magic Capsule is also a good addition, helping group your playing media, timers, and other notifications around the selfie camera. iOS users should find it a familiar experience, as it replicates the Dynamic Island in some ways.

Other features like air gestures are a bit more hit-and-miss. I like the idea of air gestures, but when I’m already holding my hand up to use the phone, why not just scroll the screen as usual? It’s not like we can use air gestures while driving either, as you’d still be focusing on the screen to make sure you’ve moved to the right page. Similarly, Parallel Screen is useful, but using the Parallel Screen side-swipe launch as a quick launcher was more useful, so I quickly reverted to using Swiftly Switch to enable my favorite app circle.

Elsewhere, those accustomed to regular Android will find certain quirks of MagicOS frustrating; I’ve never met an Android user who dumps all their apps onto multiple home screens (à la iOS), yet the app drawer is disabled by default. Why is there no App Info shortcut when you long-press an app? Furthermore, Honor has packed several extra apps into MagicOS 8.0, which can be frustrating and take time to remove; it’s a little bloatware-ish, but at least Honor allows you to remove apps without a complicated process.

Overall, though, MagicOS 8.0 gets better with each iteration, and it’s great to see Honor developing its features with every version that arrives. Furthermore, bringing the features from its flagship devices to its mid-range options is also a great shout, and while the iOS influences are clear to see, that’s absolutely not a problem.

Encouragingly, Honor says it will deliver four major Android updates and five years of security patches, which means you’ll be able to hang onto the 200 Pro for a good few years.

Design

I’m also a fan of the Honor 200 Pro’s physical design, though I have some reservations about a couple of features.

Let’s start with the good: it’s a great-looking smartphone. The ever-so-slightly curved screen gives the 200 Pro quite a slim feel, making it feel more compact than its already slender 75.2mm width. Combined with the 8.2mm thickness, the 200 Pro is on the verge of being compact, though its 172.2mm screen makes up for it. I’ve really enjoyed how thin and lightweight the 200 Pro feels.

It’s not a super lightweight smartphone, mind, as it weighs 199g. For context, the iPhone 15 weighs 171g, while the Xiaomi 14 Ultra weighs 229.5g, making the 200 Pro bang on average among modern smartphones. What that does tell me is that the 200 Pro is well-balanced, as it feels great in your hand without a case.

I’ve been sent the Moonlight White colorway with a pearlescent white rear panel. It’s a nice touch, and you’ll find the pearlescent effect across the other color options, Ocean Cyan and Black. Oh, and this velvety-feeling material means you’ll never leave a fingerprint smudge on the back of the phone!

Also lurking on the Honor 200 Pro rear is the oval-shaped camera housing, standing a couple of millimeters tall. I’ll talk more about the 200 Pro’s excellent cameras in a moment, but I’m not a huge fan of the camera housing being so prominent and its shiny silver bezel. Apparently, Barcelona’s Casa Milá served as the inspiration for the design, but it doesn’t really fit the aesthetic of the smooth and sleek pearlescent rear panel and somewhat sticks out in terms of design.

As said in my Nothing Phone 2a review, all of my smartphones go straight in case, which balances out the protruding housing, so it’ll be fine in the long run. But Honor should have gone for a black or dark-colored metal to help it blend in.

Note that the Honor 200 Pro comes with a slimline silicone case, which is super handy for a newly released phone as you can’t buy them anywhere, but I prefer something more substantial to keep devices in prime condition.

This brings me to the high-gloss metal silver frame holding the 200 Pro together. From afar, it looks completely fine, and once I get a case on the phone, it’ll be covered, but it has a bit of a plastic edging vibe that lets the design down a little. Still, it should withstand the general wear and tear of life – though I wouldn’t be volunteering to drop test it any time soon.

Display

The Honor 200 Pro’s display is another one of its standout features. The vivid 6.78-inch curved screen is sublime, featuring an adaptive refresh rate between 60Hz and 120Hz, with a massive peak brightness of 4,000 nits. It’s plenty bright while gaming, that’s for sure, but it still looks really good if you turn the brightness down to conserve some battery. It also boasts a 1,224 x 2,700-pixel resolution, 10-bit color depth, and supports HDR10.

I don’t have the means to test Honor’s brightness claims specifically, but the screen remained completely readable in bright sunlight, which is exactly what you want.

Honor is also pushing the 200 Pro’s screen as an Eye Comfort Display, which focuses on reducing flickering at low light levels, in turn reducing eye strain. In fairness, the PWM dimming rate of 3,840Hz is remarkable and is easily now the class leader in this area. You’ll also find the other standard options for eye protection, like blue light adjustment, dark mode, and so on.

Two extra features I like are Natural Tone 2.0, which optimizes screen color based on ambient lighting (surprisingly useful as the UK was experiencing a period of good weather during the review!), and the Circadian Night Display, which uses AI-tracking to adjust screen color based on your circadian rhythm.

Cameras

Honor is clearly proud of the 200 Pro camera configuration. And so it should be; I’ve snapped some lovely scenes with the Honor 200 Pro, and there is some top-quality hardware under the hood to back it up.

The 200 Pro comes with a 50MP f/1.9 main camera with a 1/1.3-inch sensor and OIS, a 50MP f/2.4 telephoto with 2.5x optical zoom and OIS, and a 12MP f/2.2 112˚ ultrawide to round it out. It’s quite the collection and delivers across the full spectrum of shots.

Perhaps most impressive of all is the Studio Harcourt-developed portrait mode, which uses 100,000 portraits from the legendary Parisian studio to algorithmically adjust the lighting. It breaks down into three modes:

• Harcourt Classic aims to recreate the studio’s classic black-and-white shoot, adding amazing depth and subtle emphasis to the subject
• Harcourt Colour is similar but brings a warm color palette to the portraits
• Harcourt Vibrant delivers extra saturation compared to Colour, but it isn’t over the top.

The first two modes work best, and I managed to snap (or rather, have pictures taken of me) some nice shots across both. The only downside is that the Harcourt Studio portrait mode isn’t available on the 50MP selfie camera, so you’ll have to rely on Honor’s regular Beauty mode to iron out any blemishes.

Outside the Harcourt Studio mode, I found the regular camera modes accurate and delivered good-quality zoom. The main camera has a 2x and 2.5x optical zoom setting, which sounds a little odd, given that most smartphone cameras opt for 3x. But the images shot using 2.5x look fantastic.

Video performance and capture are also good, with the main and telephoto cameras able to capture 4K60. The ultrawide is slightly more muted at 4K30, which also applies to the selfie camera.

Performance

For a mid-range smartphone, the Honor 200 Pro performs extremely well. As it should, considering it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip, with an Adreno 735 GPU for graphics. The “full-fat” Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 performs ever so slightly better in key areas, as you’d expect. But then again, you’d also expect to pay at least three or four hundred dollars or pounds more for the privilege, and for my money, the Honor 200 Pro is an excellent pocket companion.

I first took the Honor 200 Pro for a spin with Final Fantasy 10 and God of War 2 in AetherSX2. A PS2 emulator is always a good way to stress test a new phone and see where its performance lies, and I’m happy to report the Honor 200 Pro lapped it up, pushing up to 5x times scaling. I took Need for Speed Most Wanted Black Edition for a spin, too, and it was just like playing the original (albeit on a smaller screen!), but it also handled up to 5x scaling before showing any issues.

You could probably push it further, too, but there is always a balance between increasing scaling resolution and battery life. AetherSX2’s GPU and CPU display remained relatively low, which is a good sign. From that example, you can probably guess that PS1 and Nintendo Wii emulation was also an absolute breeze for the Honor 200 Pro.

Now, I’ve only just started playing Honkai: Star Rail, but it all ran very smoothly, without any issues during transitions, turns, menus, and so on. I must admit I’ve not really played much of it before, so I don’t have much to base it on, but for a first dive into the series, it felt pretty solid to me. Similarly, tried and tested Grid: Autospot was also smooth.

The Honor 200 Pro stands up to any game you throw at it, hands-down. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, with its Adreno 735, is a proper upper-mid-range smartphone chip, and it delivers the goods (and is faster than the Diminesity 8300 Ultra in the Poco X6 Pro, which is a boon in this ultra-competitive mid-range Android market).

Battery

I’m impressed with the Honor 200 Pro’s battery life. It comes with a decently sized 5,200mAh battery, which depending on your usage, can translate into multi-day use.

Notably, on a particularly heavy day, using the 200 Pro for recording, photography, navigation, hot-spotting, and all the regular day-to-day stuff, I ended up with a really excellent 30 percent battery. Now, if I were heading out for the evening after work and hadn’t had a chance to charge, I’d still be very much okay with that much juice.

I also found the 200 Pro idle battery life excellent, taking nearly a week to run out of power (without a SIM card, but connected to Wi-Fi). It’s impressive when left to its own devices, without any apps or otherwise running. Of course, that’s far from how we use our smartphones, but the Honor 200 Pro’s 5,200mAh delivers an all-day battery for most folks.

Now, you’ll also be glad to know the Honor 200 Pro supports 100W fast charging (provided you have the right power delivery, like the 100W bundled charger). You can fast charge the 200 Pro to nearly full in about 30 minutes. Honor advertises fast charging of 60 percent in 15 minutes, which I feel is slightly off – it was closer to 50 percent in my experience. Furthermore, unlike the regular Honor 200, the 200 Pro supports 66W wireless charging.

Should you buy the Honor 200 Pro?

The Honor 200 Pro has absolutely everything you want from a mid-range Android smartphone. Excellent battery life, fantastic software and features, brilliant camera, fast charging, 512GB storage as standard – the list goes on. It’s an all-around great device that’ll suit anyone who wants something offering a little bit more than you’ll find elsewhere but doesn’t want to pay the more premium flagship prices.

There aren’t really many downsides to the Honor 200 Pro. The curved screen takes a little getting used to, but it has been many years since I had a curved-screen smartphone, so that could be on me. Honor’s MagicOS 8.0 skin for Android 14 isn’t always the most intuitive, and there were some settings I simply couldn’t figure out how to change (app drawer icon size without downloading an alternative launcher, for one).

Still, if you’ve ever considered Honor’s flagship Magic6 Pro, launched at MWC 2024, but want to keep some pennies in your pocket, the Honor 200 Pro is just what you’ve been waiting for.

Alternatives

Not sold on the Honor 200 Pro? Check out these two alternatives instead.

Poco X6 Pro

The Poco X6 Pro is one of the mid-range Android performance beasts, and if you’re looking for pocket gaming on a budget, this has to be the choice. It doesn’t come as stacked with features as the Honor 200 Pro and lacks some of the finesse, but it’s a great-looking smartphone packed with a MediaTek Dimensity 8300-Ultra chip, a 6.67-inch 120Hz AMOLED screen with 1,800 nits brightness, a 5,000mAh battery, and a triple-camera setup. For more details, see our Poco X6 Pro review.

Google Pixel 8

Okay, hear me out: the Pixel 8 is actually a decent, cheaper alternative to the Honor 200 Pro. Sure, the Pixel 8’s Tensor G3 isn’t as good as the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, but it’s still a solid overall smartphone that can deliver gaming performance when required. It features a 6.2-inch 120Hz OLED with 1,400 nits brightness, a 4,575mAh battery, and a dual-camera setup. Another downside to the Pixel 8 is that it only comes with 8GB RAM, which could be restrictive depending on your gaming preferences, productivity, multitasking, and so on. If you want the full lowdown, see our Google Pixel 8 review.