Best Honor phone 2025: Tried and tested by us
We’ve tested out the best phones that Honor has to offer and the results might surprise you
The Honor smartphone brand feels like something of a hidden gem, like that brilliant band that no one is listening to yet, or the fantastic neighbourhood restaurant that hasn’t yet caught the attention of the influencer pack.
Honor rarely gets a mention as a major player in the smartphone market, often lumped in with ‘Other’ in the power rankings below Samsung, Apple and Xiaomi. For that reason, assembling a list of the best Honor phones might seem like a strange thing to do.
But after parting ways with parent company Huawei, Honor hit the ground running, making the most of the experience gained as a sub-brand without losing sight of its original purpose – affordability with minimal compromises. The result is that grabbing an Honor phone, whatever your budget, will likely get you immensely impressive hardware at a very competitive price. But which Honor phone is right for you?
Below you’ll find our pick of the best Honor phones we’ve tested. If you’re not sure where to begin, or you have reservations about Honor as a brand, check out our detailed buying guide at the bottom of the page.
JUMP TO: Buying guide
Best Honor phone: At a glance
| Best flagship | Honor Magic 7 Pro | Check price at Honor |
| Best for most people | Honor 200 Pro | Check price at Amazon |
| Best value | Honor 200 Lite | Check price at Amazon |
The best Honor smartphones you can buy in 2025
1. Honor Magic 7 Pro: Best Honor flagship
Price when reviewed: £1,100 | Check price at Honor
- Great for… outstanding performance and flexible cameras
- Not so great for… fewer OS updates than rivals and gimmicky AI
The Honor Magic 7 Pro demonstrates that it’s learned a trick or two from its old parent company Huawei, offering the kind of cutting edge hardware that must keep Samsung up at night.
Its 6.8in 120Hz OLED display is up there with the very best, and it houses that rarest of things outside of an iPhone – a secure facial recognition system that makes all those other phones using fingerprint sensors look clunky and old hat.
When we put it to the test, Honor’s Snapdragon 8 Elite processor delivered incredible performance, massively improving upon the previous generation. The Magic 7 Pro’s battery life is also truly outstanding: it ran for a whopping 31 hours in our tests, earning it a privileged spot on our ranking of the best phone battery life. Rivals offer more software support and the new AI features aren’t worth the price of admission, but the Magic 7 Pro is generally capable of mixing it with its big-hitting rivals.
Read our full Honor Magic 7 Pro review for more details
Key specs – Processor: Snapdragon 8 Elite; Screen: 6.8in, 1,280 x 2,800; Cameras: 50MP, 200MP (3x zoom), 50MP (ultrawide); Storage: 512GB; Operating system: Android 15
2. Honor 200 Pro: Best Honor phone for most people
Price when reviewed: £700 | Check price at Amazon
- Great for… brilliant display and outstanding portrait shots
- Not so great for… no 4K/60fps video and poor software update promise
For most people the Honor Magic 7 Pro will simply be overkill. You don’t have to pay top dollar for a classy and capable Honor-branded phone, with the Honor 200 Pro covering all of the necessary bases for well below the typical flagship price.
Its 6.78in AMOLED display is top drawer, performance is as smooth as you like, and we took some stunning AI-enhanced portrait shots with the 200 Pro’s accomplished rear camera. Elsewhere, a 5,200mAh battery goes above and beyond – it lasted 26 hours in our tests – as does 100W wired and 66W wireless charging. Most people won’t need anything more.
Read out full Honor 200 Pro review for more details
Key specs – Processor: Snapdragon 8s Gen 3; Screen: 6.78in, 2,700 x 1,224; Cameras: 50MP, 50MP (2.5x zoom), 12MP (ultrawide); Storage: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB; Operating system: Android 14
3. Honor 200 Lite: Best-value Honor phone
Price when reviewed: £168 | Check price at Amazon
- Great for… slim and light design and outstanding main camera
- Not so great for… mediocre performance and bloated software
Honor has a pretty impressive flagship offering these days, but it’s in the affordable space that it’s most at home. This is where the brand cut its teeth, and the Honor 200 Lite is the most recent addition to that lineage. It’s very well presented, with an unusually slim and light design and a punchy AMOLED display that we particularly loved. The latter even houses an iPhone-like Magic Capsule feature offering discrete notifications around the selfie camera.
Talking of cameras, the Honor 200 Lite punches well above its weight in the photographic department. We took some extremely competent-looking shots with its 108-megapixel main camera, and even managed to look vaguely professional in the highly detailed selfies we captured with the 50-megapixel front-facing cam. Battery life, meanwhile, is as good as we’ve ever seen from a sub-£300 phone, lasting for 25hrs 17mins in our standard test.
Read our full Honor 200 Lite review for more details
Key specs – Processor: Mediatek Dimensity 6080; Screen: 6.7in, 1,080 x 2,412; Cameras: 108MP, 5MP (ultrawide), 2MP (macro); Storage: 256GB; Operating system: Android 14
4. Honor Magic V3: Best folding Honor phone
Price when reviewed: £1,700 | Check price at Amazon
- Great for… super slender design and big bright displays
- Not so great for… camera inconsistencies and very expensive
If you thought that Samsung led the way with foldable phone design, you clearly haven’t seen the Honor Magic V3 yet. We were taken aback by the relatively low weight and unobtrusive design; it’s impossibly thin at just 4.4mm when unfolded, which means that it feels a lot like a normal phone when folded.
Despite this, Honor has somehow managed to squeeze in a battery that lasted an impressive 21 hours in our tests (a stellar result for a foldable). We pushed the Magic V3’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with a bit of Genshin: Impact and noted steady frame rates (near or bang on 60fps) and gorgeous visuals from those big, bright, colour-accurate AMOLED displays. Camera quality is a tad uneven – and there’s no getting away from that huge price tag – but generally, the Honor Magic V3 is one of the very best foldable phones around.
Read our full Honor Magic V3 review for more details
Key specs – Processor: Snapdragon 8 Gen 3; Screen: 7.92in, 2,156 x 2,344 (cover: 6.43in, 1,060 x 2,376); Cameras: 50MP, 50MP (3.5x zoom), 40MP (ultrawide); Storage: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB; Operating system: Android 14
5. Honor Magic 5 Pro (renewed): A refurbished bargain
Price when reviewed: £430 | Check price at Honor
- Great for… outstanding display and secure facial authentication
- Not so great for… busy software and underwhelming charging speeds
We’ve already seen that Honor phones don’t have to cost the Earth, and further savings can be had if you pick up a slightly older refurbished model. Honor itself runs such a certified refurbished programme on its website, where you can pick up the Honor Magic 5 Pro for just £430. That’s way less than half the price it was selling for brand new last year.
For mid-range money you’re getting a phone that can still mix it with the best phones on the market. Its 6.81in OLED display is big, sharp and extremely colour-accurate, while Honor’s triple 50-megapixel camera set-up is as well balanced as they come and took brilliantly clear and rich shots when we tried it out.
Read our full Honor Magic 5 Pro review for more details
Key specs – Processor: Snapdragon 8 Gen 2; Screen: 6.81in, 1,312 x 2,848; Cameras: 50MP, 50MP (3.5x zoom), 50MP (ultrawide); Storage: 256GB, 512GB; Operating system: Android 14
Not at all. Honor is now a completely separate company, and one that has full access to Google Play Services. This means that it is authorised to install the Google Play Store on all of its phones, meaning you can run all of your favourite apps.
Unlike Huawei, Honor also has unrestricted access to all of the best internal components designed in the West, such as ARM’s chip architecture and Qualcomm’s speedy system-on-chips (SoCs). This means that Honor phones will perform as well as any equivalent device from Samsung or Xiaomi.
READ NEXT: Best mid-range phone
How much should I spend?
Unlike Samsung and Apple, Honor is perhaps best known for its more affordable phones. You can be assured of getting a good solid experience for £300 or less under the Honor banner.
However, you shouldn’t discount Honor’s more recent premium efforts either. Seemingly borrowing some of the hardware expertise from its former parent company, Huawei, Honor packs its high-end phones with cutting edge components.
If you see an Honor phone selling for closer to £1,000, you can rest assured it will live up to its price in the quality stakes. Indeed, the company’s most expensive phones burst well past that price, thanks to its contributions to the foldables market. Honor is comfortably a match for Samsung in this bleeding edge category, and is arguably ahead of it on design.
READ NEXT: Best Samsung phone
What features should I look out for?
As well as providing well-specced phones in each price category, Honor likes to offer something a little different from its rivals. We can’t think of many non-Apple phones that provide a truly secure facial recognition system, but Honor does with its flagship provisions. Otherwise, look out for the following specs.
Display: Honor nearly always offers excellent screen technology for the price, with top notch colour accuracy. Again, it’s not afraid to tread a different path, and was among the first brands to adopt a so-called 1.5K resolution with its flagship line-up rather than the standard QHD+. That’s less pixel overkill and better efficiency. Refresh rates are pretty locked at 120Hz right now, which is the industry standard.
Cameras: Honor generally goes the extra mile with its camera tech. In its flagship phones, expect well-balanced offerings that pay as much attention to the secondary sensors as the main one. They take some of the very best pictures in the business. For more affordable Honor phones, expect all of Honor’s attention to be on a (relatively) high quality main sensor, and maybe even an impressive selfie cam. The secondary cameras almost certainly won’t be so impressive.
Performance: Honor broadly sticks to industry standards when it comes to performance, which means its flagship and upper-mid-range phones carry the latest Qualcomm chips. Its affordable phones often dip into MediaTek’s chip bin, which tends to offer a higher bang-to-buck ratio. The latter phones are rarely the fastest in their class as a result, but they tend to be well optimised and competitively priced.
Battery life: When it comes to battery life, we measure capacity in milliampere-hours (mAh), and the bigger the better. Honor’s more recent phones often give you a little more capacity than usual, ensuring strong stamina across the board. Check out our individual reviews to make doubly sure.
Software: If we were to identify one unifying weak spot for Honor phones, it’s the company’s approach to software. It’s far from bad, but MagicOS is certainly an acquired taste – at least if you’re coming from a cleaner interface that’s closer to stock Android. Indeed, Honor seems to borrow more of its UI ideas from iOS than Android, with features like its large folders and split notification/Control Center menu. It’s a little prone to preinstalled app bloat, and Honor’s software update promise isn’t among the best.
Storage: Whichever Honor phone you go for, it’s a safe bet you won’t be lacking for internal storage. Its very cheapest phone offers a solid 128GB, while anything further up the price scale will start from 256GB. That should prove plenty for most people. Honor’s more expensive phones will generally let you bump the spec up to 512GB or 1TB. Like many other Android phone makers, you shouldn’t expect anything in the way of microSD expansion.
