Honor 200 Pro review

Magic OS 8 and Android 14

The Honor 200 Pro runs Android 14 with a layer of Honor's MagicOS on top, v8.0. It's got the full Google apps suite - nothing like the Huawei software situation. Honor promises 4 major OS updates and 5 years of security patches, so the 200 Pro's software future seems secure.

MagicOS 8.0 is a lot like older MagicOS versions in terms of look and feel. That includes neat little things like large folders and cards - another name for the widgets that you can add for in-house apps, indicated by a bar under the app icon.

MagicOS 8.0

The iOS-like pill-shaped Magic Capsule notification is present in MagicOS - it is useful for timers, background music and video playback that you get around the front-facing camera cutout.

Magic Capsule

There are some features made possible via on-device AI. For instance, you can tap a message that briefly mentions a place you'd like to visit, and the phone will look up the address on Google Maps without any copy-paste.

Or take the new Magic Portal functionality - you can drag anything on your screen onto the bar, allowing you to search, email, and put down a note about the highlighted item. For instance, you could search online for any item you see pictured on a shopping site like eBay.

The front-facing camera assembly can also be used for air gestures - a familiar capability also found on the previous model. Smart sensing, meanwhile, keeps an eye out for... your eyes, and will keep the screen on while you're looking at it - also nothing new.

Magic Portal in action • Air gestures

Some other things haven't changed, with one in particular annoying us to no end. When you long-press on an app icon on your homescreen, there's no "App info" shortcut to take you to the app's details page where notifications and permissions settings live - instead, you need to go to the system settings menu and find the app in the list.

Performance and benchmarks

The Honor 200 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, which is not a "soft" version of the flagship 8 Gen 3 chip, but a fundamentally different chip. The 4nm manufacturing process is the same, though.

The chip employs a 1+4+3 processor configuration. The main Cortex-X4 core is still at the helm, ticking at a lower 3.0 GHz frequency (compared to the original SD8 Gen3), while the cluster of 4 Cortex-A720 cores runs at 2.8 GHz. The high-efficiency 3x Cortex-A520 cores are clocked at 2.0 GHz. The GPU on board is the Adreno 735, and the model's name implies it sits lower than the Adreno 740 found in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.

The available memory options are four - 12GB/256GB, 12GB/512GB (ours), 16GB/512GB and 16GB/1TB.

While the Cortex-X4 delivers admirable performance in single-core tasks, the multi-core performance is a bit behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. This means that the Honor 200 Pro has inferior performance to the one offered by the previous Honor 100 model.

The new Adreno 735 GPU is quite powerful, almost as much as the Adreno 740 inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but noticeably behind the Adreno 750 of the 8 Gen 3 Chip. Once again - the Honor 200 Pro scores below the Honor 100 Pro.

Finally, the AnTuTu test puts the Honor 200 Pro on par with other 8s Gen 3 phones such as the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra and Poco F6.

Of course, general stability is important, and we also ran the usual stress tests. The phone scored 68% CPU and 78% GPU stability, which is what most smartphones with high-end chipsets and passive cooling score. The phone becomes warm around the camera island, but nothing worrisome.

Stress tests

Overall, the Honor 200 Pro offers excellent performance as it employs one of the most powerful platforms on the market even if it is not chart-topping.