Honor 200 Pro Review: The first dedicated Portrait phone

We've all heard of camera phones. In fact, the first one dates way back to the year 2000 (it was the Sharp J-SH04), almost a quarter of a century in the past. Of course, modern camera phones are different and much more sophisticated, borrowing tips and tricks from professional cameras.

What we haven't heard of, at least up until now, is a dedicated Portrait phone, and that's exactly what Honor is giving us with the Honor 200 Pro.

"The Portrait Master" offers a neat collaboration with one of the most famous art photography studios in Paris, Studio Harcourt, renowned for its black-and-white portraits of stars such as Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dali, Marion Cotillard, Jean Dujardin, Zinedine Zidane, and many more.

According to Wikipedia, a single portrait at Studio Harcourt back in 2010 cost 1,900 euros (that's around $2000). Can a phone pull this off without the need to pay a mortgage on your portrait shot and without going to Paris? Today, we're going to find out!

 

Let's start with an overview of the Honor 200 Pro specs:

Phones are far from unique nowadays, there's so much you can do with an all-display front and a glass-metal design. Honor has done a great job at giving some character to the 200 Pro, mainly in the camera isle department.

The symmetrical design of the camera is inspired by Gaudi and one of his iconic architectural masterpieces - Casa Mila. According to Honor, the "rear camera design pays homage to the patio windows of Casa Milà, demonstrating a harmonious fusion of organic geometric outlines with naturalism."

I don't know much about Gaudi and naturalism, but I can say the design looks fresh and elegant. The back has two distinct design parts: a slightly frosted one reminiscent of a mother-of-pearl and a glossy one. These two are separated by a stylish S-curve. Overall, the design of the Honor 200 Pro is very elegant, visually pleasing, and quite ergonomic as well.

There are three colorways available: Ocean Cyan, Moonlight White, and Black. I find Ocean Cyan to be the most attractive, it's a fresh lagoon-like blue-green shade, very summery.

Even though the industry is fast moving toward removing everything but the phone from retail boxes, Honor has stubbornly kept the package solid. In the box, there's a 100-watt fast charger, a cable, and a silicon case. Furthermore, there's also a screen protector pre-applied, so you don't have to buy anything extra to be able to use the Honor 200 right away. Good job.

The Honor 200 Pro comes with a quad-curved, 6.78-inch AMOLED display. The resolution is 2700 by 1224 pixels, resulting in a respectable 437 PPI pixel density. As the smartphone world is slowly moving away from curved screens, the quad-curved display may be a disadvantage for some people, but the curvature isn't too aggressive.

The quality of the screen is great, and it can be seen at first glance. Even on a bright and sunny day (88F here for the past couple of days), I could read the display no problem. Colors are good, and there are several modes to choose from, alongside bells and whistles such as 3840Hz PWM Dimming, TUV-certified Flicker Free and Low Blue-light, plus, of course, an Always on mode.

The display tests only confirmed my initial impressions. The maximum brightness we were able to measure was almost 1,200 nits, and we're talking real-life brightness across the whole display. The color accuracy, color temperature, and minimum brightness were all excellent.

In terms of biometrics, the Honor 200 Pro offers two options: a fingerprint scanner (under the display) and facial recognition. Both work fast and accurately, although I'm not sure how secure the facial recognition really is, as it appears to be just a regular snapshot and not a 3D scan (there's no moving your head in a circle to complete a scan when setting this option up).

The Honor 200 Pro can record video with up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. I thought the 4K@30fps sample I recorded looked decent, with good natural colors, nice detail, and smooth and consistent focus. The image stabilization works well, too, and you can pause your video and resume it and switch between the cameras as well.

Any doubts about the midrange status of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 are evaporated by the synthetic benchmark results. You can think of this chip as a last year 8 Gen 2, performance-wise, with some improved efficiency. That being said, the phone performs more than admirably in everyday tasks, and there's no perceivable lag in the UI.

The Honor 200 Pro comes with Android 14 out of the box, layered with MagicOS 8.0 on top. There are some clever bits in Honor's UI, and even though I wouldn't call them AI-abundant, they're more useful than you might think.

Magic Capsule is the front camera cutout functionality, very similar to Dynamic Island. You can get contextual information about things like songs playing, timers, alarms, screen casting, and more. It can be useful, depending on your habits, but nothing groundbreaking.

Magic Portal is a composite feature that enables you to extract text and imagery and drag-and-drop it into different apps. You can quickly drop addresses in Google Maps, send photos to Facebook (or TikTok if you're not a millennial like myself), plug text into emails, etc.

This is still far from other large language model-equipped AI systems, such as Galaxy AI, which can transcribe and translate in real time but is still relatively useful.

Speaking of LLC, if you long-press the power button, Google's new AI kid pops up. Gemini is on duty on the Honor 200 Pro, and to me, it comes as a surprise. It's a strange AI mashup at the moment - there are AI algorithms working in the background when it comes to photography, AI-based features such as Magic Portal, and a third-party LLC in the form of Gemini on a hot key. You can also enable Microsoft Copilot from the Swift keyboard! How about that!

The Honor 200 Pro comes with three years of major OS updates and four years of security patches.

Now, synthetic benchmarks paint a different picture. I wouldn't call this battery life weak or something, but I expected more from a 5,200mAh cell and an efficient chipset. We might have to run those again, as Honor phones have a peculiar way of dealing with constant screen brightness. But even with these results taken at face value, the Honor 200 Pro is on par with flagships such as the vanilla iPhone 15, the Galaxy S24, and the Pixel 8.

When it comes to charging, Honor is among the champions in the industry, and the Honor 200 Pro is no exception. The phone supports 100W fast wired charging, 66W wireless charging, and reverse wireless charging for all your small QI-equipped gadgets.

It takes just 45 minutes to fill the 5,200 mAh from zero to full using the bundled charger, which is an impressive result.