Honor 200 Pro review

Market alternatives

The Honor 200 Pro turned out to be a superb smartphone with a unique design, an excellent display, good battery life and fasts charging, incredibly solid all-round imaging experience, and pretty good performance and software kit.

Something only Honor 200 Pro offers is the portrait focus thanks to the collaboration with the Parisian Harcourt photo studio. You can style your portrait shots in various ways and it excels when it comes to such sort of photography, having in mind the results are not always great because of software hiccups.

The Honor 200 Pro launches at £700/€800, which is an excellent positioning considering the phone's specs, premium features, and 16GB/512GB memory.

The first offer to consider, if you liked this Honor, is the cheaper £500/€600 Honor 200 model. It is more or less the same phone with a slightly less powerful chipset (still speedy), smaller primary camera sensor and no wireless charging. It's a solid offer.

Then we have the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra. It has a classier design with better ingress protection, be it the wooden or leather version, longer zoom, better speakers, cleaner Android OS, and even faster charging. The widespread 1TB model costs at least €100 over the Honor 200 Pro and cannot offer the same portrait experience, but it does have a longer zoom camera and its Smart Connect (the unified Ready For and Moto Connect) is a standout feature that few phones have.

The €800 Xiaomi 14 is worth exploring for its similar price, better protection against the elements, the fastest chip on the market, and, of course, the lovely camera quality and the Leica colab. In fact, if you don't mind the smaller display, this one should be at the top of your shortlist for this price range.

Maybe you want to consider the Huawei Pura 70 for its similarly good camera quality and longer zoom, but you will be trading off your Google Mobile Services and top-notch performance.

Honor 200 • Motorola Edge 50 Ultra • Xiaomi 14 • Huawei Pura 70

Our verdict

The Honor 200 Pro is an impressive smartphone with a price tag that matches its high aspirations. It has an attractive design with splash resistance, an excellent display, powerful hardware, good battery life, fast charging, loud speakers. The camera quality and its versatility are great, and its focus on Portrait mode is commendable.

There is a lot to like about the 200 Pro, including the highly customizable software and its iOS-like Magic Capsule. The fast wired, wireless and the option for reversed wireless charging are very much appreciated.

There were a couple of things that rubbed us the wrong way, though. Let's start with the pill-shaped notch, which is not that of an eyesore as the iPhones', but a big one if you are used to small punch holes. The lack of autofocus for the otherwise amazing selfie camera is another moment.

Most importantly, the highly advertised portrait mode, while producing great photos, is a mixed bag as it doesn't always produce accurate bokeh, or bokeh at all. And the camera is reluctant to remember our preference of having Night mode on by default.

Overall, the Honor 200 Pro steps in an over-saturated market and price segment, but it can score easy wins with its great cameras, screen and gaming performance.And once the price sets a bit lower, it will have every right to be called a flagship killer.

Pros

• Unique glass design, IP65-rated.
• Excellent OLED screen, HDR10.
• Fast wired and wireless charging, reversed, too.
• Top-notch photo and video quality across all cameras.
• Great portraits, selfies.
• Android 14 with MagicOS 8 is a powerful combo.

Cons

• Longer zoom would have been nicer.
• The portrait mode can be hit and miss when it comes to bokeh.
• Pill-shaped notch.
• Unreliable auto Night mode implementation (still very nice Night mode photos).