Honor 400 Pro review

Android 15 with MagicOS 9

Honor 400 Pro is running the latest Android 15, with the in-house MagicOS v9. Honor has promised Honor claims the 400 series will receive six years of security updates and six major Android upgrades.

MagicOS v9 looks a lot like v8, with minor graphical improvements and a lot of new AI options. The basics are covered in more or less standard ways, with the most notable generational change being the now rounder and more bubbly quick settings buttons.

Magic OS basics

MagicOS also has some features that we don't get to see everywhere, like the iOS-like pill-shaped Magic Capsule notification - useful for stuff like timers, and background music and video playback.

Another iOS-inspired feature is the system-wide Search button, which sits right above the icon dock on the homescreen.

Magic Capsule interface

Large folders can be seen on most Android builds by now, but in MagicOS v9 you can even resize them.

The cards functionality is also present - the widgets that you can add for in-house apps, indicated by a bar under the app icon.

More Magic OS

Then there's the Magic Portal functionality - Honor's system wide copy-paste solution. You long-press on, say, an image, and a bar appears on the side with pre-selected apps and actions allowing you to search, email, and put down a note about the highlighted item.

The Magic Portal also allows you to extract any text you have on your screen, which is quite convenient.

Magic Portal

Naturally, you get Google's Circle to search feature, as well as the Gemini assistant, and a live translation capability. AI summary for texts and AI minutes for voice recordings are also available.

Google AI bits

Finally, the Honor 400 models have some new cool AI tricks in the Gallery. For starters, there is this neat little feature called Photo to Video, driven by Google's Veo 2 AI video generation model. Note that this is a trial version that consumes tokens and after you deplete the free ones, you will have to purchase more.

AI Photo to Video

It can create a 5-second video from any still photo you give it. It takes about a minute to complete the video generation, and there's no sound, but the results are photorealistic and look impressively life-like. Below is a video we generated from a few photos.

Other features include background change, removing reflections, removing people, AI upscale (of old photos), image expansion (AI Outpainting), background removal and change with another, plus AI Eyes open for people that blinked in the wrong moment.

AI Editor

AI Call Translate is another interesting feature, which listens to your call and displays text translation in real time.

Honor also offers AI Deepfake Detection feature for video calls - this feature should supposedly detect when your video call is actually a deep fake one.

Oh, and one final interesting bit - Honor has made cross-device share easier with the Honor Share app - if installed on an iPhone you can AirDrop different files easily.

Performance and benchmarks

The Honor 400 Pro runs on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (4nm) chipset, one of the most powerful mobile chips on the market. It packs an octa-core CPU with the following clusters: 1x3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 & 3x3.2 GHz Cortex-A720 & 2x3.0 GHz Cortex-A720 & 2x2.3 GHz Cortex-A520. The GPU tasks are handled by the Adreno 750.

The Honor 400 Pro comes with 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB UFS 3.1 storage. There is also a version with 256GB storage for some markets.

Let's see some benchmarks now.

With its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the Honor 400 Pro is among the most powerful Android devices, scoring around the top of the charts, and it is bested only by the Snapdragon 8 Elite platform that's powering the most expensive phones on the market.

The Honor 400 Pro sustained 64% of its CPU and 75% of its GPU maximum performance during the stress tests we ran. Those are some solid numbers.

CPU test • GPU test

Overall, the Honor 400 Pro not only has the guts for gaming performance, but it can also do it pretty well and pretty long. And that's all you need to know about it.

Outer temperatures during heavy workloads

We also measured the outer temperatures of the device. Both the upper part of the back panel and the frame easily go over 50 degrees, which still feels comfortable to touch.