Honor 200 Pro
Just start with a brief summary. The new Honor 200 Pro Global Edition reinforced Honor’s strengths like extreme eye-comfort display, elegant look, easy-to-use software. and, imrpessively, upgraded the camera with the best portrait shooting that we’ve ever seen on a smartphone. The phone has the strongest camera hardware at its price (mid range), and offers a co-branding portrait mode with the famous Studio Harcourt Paris, which even challenges some more expensive camera phones.
Unbox
The Honor 200 Pro comes in a white packaging, inside including a 100W charger and an A to C cable along with the phone. It is worth mentioning that the phone not only supports the 100W Honor super-charge protocol, but also well-support high-power PPS charge. For charging, Honor has always been ahead of most brands, retaining the brand’s optimal charging efficiency while competible with most of the fast-charging accessories on the market. More detailed test results will be shown in the battery and charging section.
Design
The Honor 200 Pro continues the family design from its predecessor, the Honor 100 Pro. A similar capsule shaped camera module, which is advertised with term ‘Realm of Art’. Personally, I would take it as a better design that balances aesthetics and practicality. In 2024, the ‘cookie-cutter’ round camera island is more of a no-win solution for huge camera modules, which ruins the comfort of holding the phone in hands.
The Honor 200 Pro in hand is a white variant. If you look closely, the white back cover has water-flow-like texture underneath. The unique texture is far away from being boring, and rejects to be over-fancy as well. The finish of the back cover is also very commendable. The matte & anti-glare glass adds a bonus to the texture. And when I hold it in the hand, it provided a unique touch that is similar to velvet. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the truth is that it does deliver a wonderful tactile feel, so much so that I often unconsciously fondle it.
The 200 Pro uses a 6.78-inch Quad-edge-curved Display screen, with very little curvature on the top and bottom, and being slightly more curved on the left and right sides. When compared to most phones with similar edge-curved display, the Honor phone’s screen is visually better with less impact on edges’ true color presentation.
It weighs less than 200g, yet amazingly it comes with a 5200mAh battery. Here we have another phone that weighs close – Xiaomi Civi 4 Pro. However, it only has a 4610mAh battery. It’s even more interesting that a wireless charging coil is set in the thin & lightweight phone, and with up to 66W of power. So how do they stuff such a big battery into this thin and light body? must be another engineering marvel then.
Although the Honor 200 Pro does look very polished, my only complaint is that it has a plastic outter frame. If it is a phone that isn’t about the looks, I wouldn’t care if it’s metal, plastic or other eco-friendly recycled materials. But the Honor 200 Pro is a different story, and the plastic bezel feels slightly dissonant to me personally.
I’ve also compiled a list of features that we all care about here, so you can take a closer look HERE.
Performance
This time the Honor 200 Pro is powered by an Snapdragon 8s Gen3 chipset. In Genshin Impact, when set to the highest graphics to test the phone in Fontaine, the average power consumption was only 5.5W. so it’s clear that the phone is running a more conservative strategy. This performance is close to that of the Xiaomi Civi 4 Pro. But the Honor 200 Pro lags a bit behind in some benchmarks’ scores. Maybe some phones are perticularly optimized for those benchmarks?
The conservative strategy is not a negative optimization. One, because the 8s Gen3 isn’t really efficient at high loading due to cache degradation. And two, because the cooling capacity on such a thin & lightweight phone would obviously struggle. Therefore, I’m not going to complain about this, since it is a common trade-off on almost every thin and light phone on the market.
After all, for everyday use and most games, the Honor 200 Pro performs well with the 8s Gen 3 – smooth and fast responded, and there’s almost no difference from most thicker phones running the same chipset.
Screen
I’m sure quite a lot of people who chose phones from Honor for its Eye Comfort Display. This time around the 200 Pro still excels. Starting with its basic specs: it’s a 6.78-inch OLED screen with a manual maximum brightness of 600nits, a full-screen peak brightness of 1,200nits, and an peak window brightness of 4,000nits.
In terms of dimming strategy, when it’s raising up to 35% brightness, the phone applies the ultra-high Duty Ratio DC dimming, while below 35% it would switch to the 3840hz PWM dimming. And because this screen supports LTPS, so compared to LTPO, it has better flicker control. So for the display part, nothing really needs to concern. You would get one of the best phone screens on the market.
In addition to hardware-level low blue light, this display also supports HONOR Oasis Eye Protection. In short, it will colour temperature of the screen, based on the time, the use scenarios, and the ambient light. It is worth noting that, the front and rear camera would test the ambient light at the same time to make the best settings. So if you are sensitive to eye-comfort issues like flickers, the Honor 200 Pro is indeed a safe option.
Camera
The Honor 200 Pro’s camera gets a big upgrade. With the Main Camera using the H9000 flagship sensor (1/1.3″ size, F/1.95, 50MP, OIS), the 200 Pro got a close shooting experience to their flagship model, Magic 6 Pro; And the 68mm telephoto camera is debuting the new Sony IMX856, which features an aperture of F2.4 and 50MP resolution with OIS supports. In terms of hardware, I’d call it one of the most powerful cameras among mid-range phones.
For comparison, I chose the Xiaomi 13, with the same main camera+ultrawide+telephoto combo, very close in focal length. At first I thought it was going to be a close race, but when the samples were put together for comparison, the gap is quite huge.
First of all I really like the Honor’s AUTHENTIC colour mode. As the samples shown, this colour mode helps me to get more textured colors easily. The HDR performance of these twos is completely different. in samples taken by ultrawide camera you can see that Honor has just the right control over the bright poster. The Honor 200 Pro’s sample just correctly presented the poster details, while the Xiaomi phone lost almost all.
The same thing occurs in the telephoto camera. In addition to this artificial light, the better HDR effect also helps the Honor’s sample. The clouds in the 200 Pro’s photo clearly have better texture with being more layered and dynanic.
In terms of sharpness, the bigger and newer sensor also gives the 200 Pro a huge advantage. More samples were shown in the review video. Please take a closer look there if you are interested.
For portraits, the Honor 200 Pro has 3 different portrait modes, all from the collabs with the famous Studio Harcourt Paris, an art studio that specializes in portrait photography.
I personally prefer the Harcourt Classic, which offers a black&white color similar to the High Contrast of the Wet plate processing, allowing me to ignore the colors and focus on the lighting and the model. It’s really a fun way to shoot portraits. And now, it’s for everyone, just choosing one of the three modes and clicking the shutter. You also can make your portrait photography “professoinal” without any post-editing.
Battery & Charging
As mentioned, the Honor 200 Pro has a 5200mAh Silicon-Carbon battery, for everyday use it is a huge improvement over other lightweight phones. The 200 Pro supports up to 100W wired charging and 66W wireless charging. In our 0-100% charging test, it takes about 48 minutes to complete the charging task.
In addition to Honor’s charging Protocol, it also supports the High-Power PPS protocol, which has a maximum input power of around 50W as we tested, meaning that a random high power charger will be able to achieve decent charging speeds for this phone. But the charging port is not without drawbacks. As a transfer port, it only supports USB2.0, which makes it not yet perfect.
Verdict
The Honor 200 Pro is a very unique phone. It does not compromiose much with the thin&lightweight solution. Instead, it brings together a few features that are missing from mid-range phones, such as an excellent telephoto lens, high-powered wireless charging, a large battery and a balanced decent design. The Honor 200 Pro is so well-balanced that it would be hard to find a competitor at its price that matches it on all fronts. We are happy to see it being launched to international market. Predictably, the phone could be a milestone for Honor to make a breakthrough in the global market.
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