The Honor 400 is a good phone left hiding in the shadow of AI

Ben Schoon | Jun 21 2025 - 8:15 am PT

More affordable smartphones have been good for years now, but it’s also getting harder to tell them all apart. With the new Honor 400, a good smartphone is the backdrop for a heavy focus on AI features. Truly a product of its time.

The Honor 400 is a mid-range Android smartphone that costs £400. With Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, a 200MP camera, a huge battery, and the promise of software support for years to come, it’s a good deal across the board. In many ways, it’s similar to the Pixel 9a, but where both companies use AI to make their devices competitive, Honor feels as though it left behind the charm.

Prior Honor devices I’ve tested – including Magic 6 Pro and the Honor 200 Pro I used last year – are decisive devices. They have a set thing that they want to be and focus on being that thing. The Honor 200 Pro, for instance, wanted to be the ultimate portrait mode device, and it lived up to that despite its mid-range status.

Right now, though, Honor is all-in on AI, and the Honor 400 series pretty much only cares about that.

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The unique design and features of the previous series gives way to something more ordinary, and on this basis, the Honor 400 I’ve been using, AI can’t break through. Honor’s “big” feature is image-to-video generation, but that doesn’t work on the base model, only the more expensive Pro.

So, what is it like to use the Honor 400?

Honestly, it’s not bad. Performance from the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 and 8GB of RAM – with Honor’s MagicOS skin on top of Android 15 – is quick enough. What really bogs it down is just the “dynamic” refresh rate of the display. This is a 120Hz panel, but it won’t feel like that at its default setting which locks things to 60Hz in most cases. While Honor’s headlining AI feature is missing, there’s no lack of AI on this device. Gemini features are readily available, and Honor provides plenty of AI “Retouch” features through its Gallery app. They work well enough, though I’m still unsure what the practical application is for some of it.

The hardware itself is middling. The all-plastic build feels good enough in the hand, but nothing about it stood out. Battery life is also stellar, with this phone easily able to power through a full day with power to spare.

The cameras were certainly a redeeming factor. While low-light processing leaves some room for improvement, the overall experience is good, and it’s a decisive camera that takes shots to fit its own aesthetic – it feels like one of the few places that Honor’s older phones still shines through.

But the more I used the Honor 400, the more I realized that it’s just “a phone.” There’s nothing stand-out about this device. Where Google has a clear pitch with the Pixel 9a – flagship-tier chip, clean software, years of updates –, the base Honor 400 just feels like the equivalent of Samsung’s Galaxy A devices. It exists just to be an affordable phone for the masses. It’s a good one, sure, but I can’t help but feel that if Honor hadn’t been so focused on AI, something more interesting could have broken through. Honor has shown it has some great ideas, AI or otherwise, but this phone just doesn’t prove that. Rather, it just feels like the bare-bones foundation of something better.