I tested the Honor 400 Lite and found this cut-price phone doesn't have (too many) cut-down features

Life hasn’t often been easy for Honor. Previously a sub-brand of Huawei, it struggled to stand out from its bigger sibling, with devices that didn’t have much of an identity of their own.

Then came Covid and everything changed. Tariffs and blocks were hurled into the mix and killed Huawei’s presence in the west, forcing the brand to divest Honor into a full-fledged company.

And so Honor has continued, hewing away, working to build a name for itself through a wide variety of tech, including smartwatches, smartphones, laptops and tablets. Throughout, there’s been a sometimes rigid focus on hitting a budget, but more recently the firm has shown a little more ambition.

There’s software designed to look good, which has ambitions to stake a position of its own, and can be found in its new hardware too. What ‘Honor’ is in the public mind is something that it wants to concretely establish.

It is through phones like its new Honor 400 Lite that it hopes to achieve that. At just under £/$300, it has a full AMOLED screen, a 108MP camera and a focus on AI, but also something more - a real emphasis on design. This is a phone made to take knocks and scrapes, but one that also has a large battery, is thin and light, and looks good - not an easy combination to pull off.

The proof, as ever, is in the pudding. Does the 400 Lite do enough to live up to its lofty promises? Is design important enough to win a war in which specifications play an incredibly important part? And will it make our list of the best budget camera phones?

Read on for our full review.

Key specifications

Design and display

It’s an impulse that many possess, to look at what’s popular and to then live up to the idea that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In mobile phone terms, that translates to, typically, finding some discreet and other not-so-discreet ways of lifting ideas from Apple.

With the 400 Lite, Honor has fallen on the latter; in the right light, it could be an iPhone. The camera ‘island’ is a triangle; however, from the placement of the lenses through to the presence of a camera button, this is something between an iPhone 16 and 16 Pro in terms of looks.

From a standpoint of pure originality, it isn’t a good look. There’s no statement here, at least on the surface, it’s not possible to see what the real thrust was here. But then you use the device for a few days, and a myriad of small things add together neatly.

To start, it’s made from plastic, but a pleasant, brushed, grippy plastic. Plastic at the budget end isn’t a big deal (except perhaps from an environmental perspective, for all the copying of Apple, there are no claims of recyclability), as it has some positive tradeoffs. At the expense of feeling ‘premium’, you get better drop resistance, a phone that doesn’t slide and, most crucially, reduced weight.

Though at 6.7 inches the 400 Lite screen is large, the device weighs only 171g, and at 7.3mm thick, it is fantastically easy to use in one hand. That isn’t something which can be said about a great number of more expensive devices, and is helped in large part by some helpful weighting.

Design is about more than flashy strokes, about making something that can be used by anyone, anywhere, and the 400 Lite succeeds with aplomb on those metrics.

Coming to the display, it succeeds on all of the metrics that are generally set for a smartphone in 2025. That means that at 1080p, the display is sharp enough for most use cases, and that with AMOLED tech, it has nicely saturated colours and infinite contrast.

I found it became bright enough to combat the brittle spring sun, while also getting dim enough for bedtime reading. At 120Hz, the screen refreshes fast enough to keep the device feeling smooth in everyday use.

It’s a display that won’t win any awards, but which has a tick against every box required to be considered ‘good’, not outclassing the competition in any particular way but definitely keeping pace.

Features

It’s been an odd experience, seeing the return of the camera button on smartphones. After their appearance on the iPhone 16 series, it was only a matter of time before they surfaced elsewhere, and the 400 Lite is one of the first to take the jump.

The button used is the same as found on the iPhones, which is to say there’s no real ‘click’ to it, and it is depressed slightly into the frame of the device. You can use it to launch the camera with a quick click, as might be expected. You likely won’t find yourself using it all the time; however, when pulling the device from your pocket, it’s definitely faster to launch this way than by using on-screen controls.

As for the other main play for attention, it’s a classic, the camera megapixel count. With a full resolution of 108MP, in theory, the sensor will capture a frankly ridiculous level of detail, though in practice, that’s hardly likely. As is to be expected from a budget smartphone, measured against the hyperbolic claims of some very excited marketing, the picture, as it were, is a little more complex.

Software

If there’s one thing that a certain sub-set of Android manufacturers has become known for over the years, it’s slightly heavy-handed software skins. And of those, Honor is among the most committed to reinventing the whole experience from the ground up, with ‘Magic OS’.

Forget everything you know and expect of Android, for functions like the app drawer are no longer to be found. Instead, Magic OS plays out as a mishmash of ideas cribbed from iOS, some from stock Android, some completely new.

And for the most part, that isn’t a bad thing. The days of Android being a ‘pure’ experience are long gone, the best devices recognise that having a little flavour of their own is important - like with the Pixel experience or with Samsung’s OneUI.

Magic OS is pleasant to use, has some nice visual touches and thanks to distinctive design choices, feels thematically coherent in ways that many of the competition doesn’t. There’s some annoyances, such the lack of an app drawer, and the split of the notification shade into a ‘Control Centre’ and a notification area, but on the whole it just about balances as a value-add rather than an outright negative.

Cameras

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the smartphone marketing book - stick a megapixel count on the sensor and the people will come. Back in the days of yore, it was a 8MP sensor which ruled the roost, then the infamous 41MP Lumia 1020, and nowadays we are spoiled by a bevy of cameras overstuffed with megapixels. Some say 48MP, others 108MP, others 200MP, but all share a secret which proves to be true too with the 400 Lite, regardless of the count, the image output each time is 12MP.

So while the promise of the same level of detail as found on a medium-format camera is there, you won’t be getting anything remotely close in practice. That isn’t to say that the camera isn’t capable however.

Beginning with the app, using the camera button I found it was very quick to launch as well as to operate, so thankfully you won’t miss too many quick shots as a consequence.

Coming to photo quality, it’s something of a mixed bag. Images captured are generally very lively, with saturated colours and a lot of brightness, however they do tend towards the cool side. Images can often come across as a little cold as a consequence, and dynamic range was a little less wide than offered by some of the competition, such as the Poco M7 Pro.

Detail was also something of an issue. Some have a proclivity towards over sharpening, and Honor is definitely among that number. Images with lots of straight lines, such as of buildings aren’t an issue, but where there’s foliage there’s sharpening halos, which is unfortunate to see.

When the lights go down, performance doesn’t improve, instead staying in the middle of the road. While the 400 Lite is capable of capturing relatively detailed night mode images, they tend to lack in pop and contrast, which is reflective of the price point but still unfortunate.

What’s more unfortunate still are the options for video capture. There’s no 4K here, or 1080p at 60fps, or indeed any kind of enhanced audio recording or the like. Instead, you’re stuck with specifications from 2016 - if you are a budding content creator you’ll want to look elsewhere.

That said, there are a few Instagram-friendly modes, including multi-camera capture and a built-in ‘story’ editor, but the effect remains the same. This is a camera system which focussed a little too much on the gimmicks and not enough on the core execution, which is unfortunate. The 400 Lite is by no means ‘bad’ from a photographic perspective, however it isn’t on the level of some of the competition, which is unfortunate to see.

Performance and battery

Though it has come to a point where certain smartphone monikers no longer mean a great deal (here’s looking at you, ‘Pro’), but some still have very definite connotations - with ‘Lite’ meaning, well, lighter, but also cut back.

The Honor 400 Lite certainly isn’t as powerful as some others, however the key is in producing something that might be a little cheaper, but which doesn’t feel cheaper.

In real world use, and especially for the price point, there was very little I could find to fault the performance of the 400 Lite. Switching between apps, using GPS, streaming music, anything that might constitute ‘normal’ usage gave it no issue, and it felt as though it more than kept up each time.

For most people, it will constitute more than enough. There may be those people who intend to run a social media empire from their smartphone, and if you are one of them then this will likely not be for you. If you are the kind of person who uses social media, sends email, instant messages and listens to podcasts, you’ll be served well.

That isn’t to say that it has no grunt at all. Running the artificial benchmark Geekbench 6, it achieved a single core score of 956 and a multi core score of 2256, placing it roughly around the same level as devices running the Snapdragon 860, an old but still powerful chip. That speaks well to the power of the Mediatek Dimensity 7025 Ultra contained within, paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage by default.

I did encounter one slightly odd quirk, there were many apps which claimed not to have compatibility with the device. Fortnite, for example, stated that it didn’t meet minimum requirements to run (not true), while other benchmarking apps refused to install. This is something which could likely be fixed with a software update, but it’s still unfortunate to see in what should be a finished product.

The general impressions of performance are borne out in gaming. Playing the likes of PUBG, I was able to achieve stable, playable frame rates with graphics options set to ‘balanced’ and ‘smooth’. Anything more turned the experience into a pop-up slide show.

Coming to the battery, at 5,230mAh it is still substantial despite the light weight of the device, and paired with a power-efficient modern processor, all of the ingredients for great performance were there.

Thankfully, the promise turned out to be true. This is one, of many, devices, which will make it through a full day of medium to heavy usage, only lasting to a second with light use cases.

Starting at 7am, with an hour of GPS, texting and emailing throughout the day, an hour of streaming music over bluetooth and watching video in the evening, by 7pm I had around 45% left in the tank, which is a decent showing indeed.

When the time comes to top up, the 400 Lite does so at up to 35W, which is far from the fastest speed on the market. I found that it took around an hour and ten minutes to reach full capacity from zero percent, which is enough to make a difference, but lagging behind some of the competition, especially the parts branded ‘Xiaomi’.

Who is it for?

• Basic camera phone users on a budget

Buy it if...

• You want a phone that is similar to an iPhone
• You need something that isn’t built like a brick
• You want good battery life

Don't buy it if...

• You need something with lots of power
• Camera quality is a dealbreaker
• You want the fastest charging