Honor 200 review: The biggest threat yet to the Pixel 8a?

The Honor 200 is the middle child of the Chinese brand’s latest trio of handsets, offering a more affordable alternative to the Honor 200 Pro while still being a step up from the Honor 200 Lite. That middle ground can be tricky to occupy as it often results in feeling like it’s neither as good value as the cheaper model, nor as fully featured as the pricer one.

While there are certainly some sacrifices being made, the Honor 200 mostly manages to avoid falling into that trap. It balances its specifications well enough to be a solid mid-range phone that still packs in some impressive features – not least of which is one of the most affordable telephoto cameras on any phone to date. Some software wobbles and middling performance keep it from surpassing the excellent Google Pixel 8a, but it’s terrific stamina and robust camera suite that make the Honor 200 a stylish silver medalist.

Honor 200 review: What you need to know

The Honor 200 feels like a fairly big jump from the Honor 90, and I’m not just talking about the numbering. It’s so rare to see a telephoto camera at this price that I had to double-check my notes. It may just be a 2.5x optical zoom but that’s more than any other £500 phone is offering right now.

Joining the telephoto camera is a 50MP (f/1.9) main lens and the same 12MP (f/2.2) ultrawide that we get on the Pro variant. The battery and wired charging are also the same, with the 5,200mAh unit supporting up to 100W, though there’s no wireless charging on this model.

The processor is a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 platform, backed up by either 256GB or 512GB of non-expandable storage space and 8GB of RAM. Finally, the whole thing is fronted by a 6.7in OLED display with a 2,664 x 1,200 resolution and a swift 120Hz refresh rate.

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Honor 200 review: Price and competition

Launching priced at £500, the Honor 200 finds itself butting heads with our favourite mid-range phone, the Google Pixel 8a. The Pixel 8a has some of the best mid-range cameras around (though no telephoto lens), it gives a terrific performance and comes with a massive seven years of software support. You can get a 128GB Pixel 8a for a bargain £449 right now, but the equivalent 256GB Pixel 8a is currently down from £559 to £509.

The only real competition on the cheap telephoto front is Motorola’s Edge 50 Pro, which usually retails for £600 but is currently going for just £549. The telephoto camera on the Edge 50 Pro has a marginally further reach – offering a 3x optical zoom – but the performance isn’t any better than the Honor 200, and I wasn’t thrilled by the rest of the camera suite either.

Finally, there’s a solid alternative in this price range from Samsung: the Galaxy A55 5G. This starts a little cheaper, at £439 for the 128GB version, while the 256GB model will set you back £489, but there’s no 512GB option. Performance and battery life on the A55 are both punching above their weight, but I did find the build felt a little too chunky.

Honor 200 review: Design and key features

The Honor 200 takes plenty of design cues from its bigger sibling, with mirrored edges – though they’re plastic here, instead of metal – a curved display, and the new ovaline camera housing on the rear. However, it’s a little slimmer and lighter, measuring 75 x 7.7 x 162mm (WDH) and weighing 187g, compared to the Pro’s 75 x 8.2 x 163mm and 199g.

There are three similar colours on offer too: the black model, with a plain frosted plastic rear; the Emerald Green that I reviewed, which has a swirling, Damascus-steel effect; and the Moonlight White, with the same pearly look as available on the Honor 200 Pro. The Moonlight White is also the only model that comes with 512GB of storage, for the slightly higher price of £550.

As well as the aesthetics, the feature set also carries over from the Pro model, with an optical fingerprint sensor under the display and face recognition via the selfie camera handling the biometrics. You don’t get a microSD slot or 3.5mm headphone jack but there is at least one unusual feature in the top-mounted IR blaster, which allows you to use the phone as a TV remote. Very few phones still include this, so it’s a welcome addition.

There’s always a big “but…” coming when I praise Honor phones, and that’s due to the software. MagicOS is easy enough to use once you’re used to it but it has some irritating, obtrusive quirks: the Apple-style split notification bar just feels like extra steps to me, and the lack of an alphabetically organised app drawer as standard is baffling – though perhaps it’s to hide AliExpress, booking.com and all the other unwanted apps that come preinstalled.

There are some bits I like, of course. For example, Magic Capsule is particularly handy, expanding the area around the selfie camera to show notifications, timers, alarms or your current Spotify listen, in much the same vein as Apple’s Dynamic Island.

The software support isn’t bad either: the Honor 200 launches with Android 14 and will receive three OS updates and four years of security patches. Of course, the seven years of support that the Google Pixel 8a comes with casts a heavy shadow but, other than that, the Honor 200’s roadmap is decent enough for this price.

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Honor 200 review: Display

In a stark 180-degree turn from my software complaints, I have nothing but good things to say about the display. The 6.7in OLED panel has a crisp resolution of 2,664 x 1,200 and a breezy 120Hz refresh rate. As well as the essentially perfect black and contrast levels you would expect from an OLED panel, the brightness is terrific here: I measured a peak of 568cd/m2 on manual, while the adaptive brightness reached a massive 1,150cd/m2. HDR content wasn’t quite as bright, but still managed a more than respectable 1,122cd/m2.

As usual, it has a Vibrant colour profile that was great for gaming and streaming, when I really wanted the colours to pop, while the Natural colouring had some incredible colour accuracy – I recorded a total sRGB gamut coverage of 98.8%, with a total volume of 101.2%. However, the average Delta E colour variance score was the most impressive, coming back at just 0.79, with anything under one being about as good as you can get.

Honor 200 review: Performance and battery life

I’ve not been massively impressed by the 2.63GHz Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset thus far and the Honor 200 doesn’t do much to change my opinion. As you can see in the chart below, it achieves nothing over the Honor 90, sitting roughly level with its predecessor, as well as the Motorola Edge 50 Pro.

The Samsung Galaxy A55 manages to push slightly further ahead in the multi-core portion, but even that is dramatically overshadowed by the efforts of the Google Pixel 8a, which landed a massive 47% ahead of the Honor 200 in the single-core benchmarks, and 38% in the multi-core.

The Pixel had a similarly epic lead in the GFXBench tests, with the Honor 200 once again performing roughly the same as the rest of the pack. In practice, these results are decent enough for a phone at this price point, and they will allow you to play 3D games relatively smoothly so long as you keep the graphics settings on the lower side.

I had to run the battery life test twice because the Honor 200 delivered a suspiciously good result the first time around. However, the second try came back roughly the same so, while I might still take this with a grain of salt, it looks like the Honor 200 is one of the best mid-range phones you can get for battery life. A result of just over 32 hours certainly blitzed the rest of the immediate competition, and landed the Honor 200 comfortably near the top of our best phone battery life list.

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Honor 200 review: Cameras

The camera hardware in the Honor 200 isn’t quite as premium as the Honor 200 Pro’s but it’s impressive just how close the two are, particularly considering the £200 gap between them. The 50MP (f/2.0) main lens and the 50MP (f/2.4) 2.5x telephoto shooter both get optical image stabilisation, and the latter can use Studio Harcourt’s unique portrait styles to create some striking images.

The Harcourt Colour profile switches the aspect ratio to 5:4 and throws a warm, vintage shade over the shot. The Harcourt Vibrant gives a more traditional look in 4:3, which doesn’t feel quite as standout, but the Harcourt Classic more than makes up for this. This striking black and white style, also in 5:4, is excellent for moody portraits, with deep shadows and a stark contrast that effectively emulates professional lighting.

Unfortunately, the 50MP (f/2.1) selfie camera doesn’t get these filters, so selfie portraits are a little less impressive. I also wasn’t blown away by the main camera’s performance in low-light conditions: there’s a reasonable amount of artificial brightening but the sky becomes very noisy as a result, and detail capture on buildings or trees isn’t particularly strong either.

That said, the main camera really comes into its own in good lighting conditions: the dynamic range on display here is terrific, balancing the shadows in the trees with the bright summer sky, and the detail in the leaves and on the brickwork is excellent as well.

Video is solid enough – quite literally, thanks to the presence of OIS here – with my only criticism being that it doesn’t allow for 4K recording at 60fps. This isn’t really a massive defect, as neither the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G nor the Motorola Edge 50 Pro offer this either, but since the Google Pixel 8a does include it, it’s still a slight mark against the Honor 200.

Honor 200 review: Verdict

There are a couple of areas in which the Honor 200 is outshone by the Google Pixel 8a: software experience and support, general performance and low-light photography are all better on the Pixel. If those things are most important to you, you’ll want to turn your attention to the Google Pixel 8a.

That said, it’s not been a clean sweep for the Pixel as the Honor 200 has a couple of very interesting tricks up its sleeve. Its battery life is nothing short of phenomenal for the price, the display is sharp and wonderfully colour-accurate and the affordable telephoto camera (along with Studio Harcourt’s style) produce incredible portrait shots. I can’t say that it’s the best you can get for this price, but for portraits and battery life, the Honor 200 is unmatched.