The new HONOR 200 Pro is one of the earliest phones to hit the Malaysian market featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, a not-so-flagship high-end chipset meant for upper mid-range devices. With it, the phone is being offered with a RM2,699 price tag, which is a tad more expensive that some of its rivals in this class, but it does come with an advantage.
Specifications
The 200 Pro sports a 6.78-inch 1.5K OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 4,000-nit peak brightness for HDR content. The global peak brightness is unspecified but tests by other outlets revealed that it’s around 1,100 nits.
Underneath the chassis, you’ll find the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 paired with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The phone is powered by a 5,200mAh battery with support for 100W wired and 66W wireless charging, although like most high-speed wireless charging, you’ll need to buy the proprietary wireless charger separately.
For imaging, it gets a 50MP main camera with OIS, a 50MP telephoto lens with 2.5x optical zoom and OIS, a 12MP ultra-wide lens, and a 50MP selfie snapper. Additionally, the phone comes with an IP65 rating for dust and water resistance as well as an infrared blaster to use as a remote controller.
Looks & Functionality
I feel torn about the design of the 200 Pro. On the one hand, I actually like the look of the dual finish on the back; surprisingly, even the glossy part is subtly textured so as not to collect a lot of fingerprints. On the other, it has curved sides, which I fully detest for practical reasons such as accidental touches and image distortion.
Putting that aside, it’s a very sharp, high-quality display and while it’s not really close to the brightest screen around (outside of HDR content), it gets just bright enough for pleasant outdoor usage. Similar to a lot of recent Android phones, it has wet touch technology that allows you to still use the phone as normal even with soaking wet hands. To HONOR’s credit, it does work well, but it still registers raindrops as touches.
The under-display fingerprint scanner is pretty quick but like many phones, it’s placed way too low for comfort. For face unlocking, despite the appearance of the front camera pill similar to the Magic6 Pro, it doesn’t have a 3D depth sensor but instead a regular depth sensor. This means that it’s less secure and less accurate and it shows, as there were plenty of times it didn’t unlock for me in poor lighting conditions.
On the software side, it comes with all same the AI-centred features of MagicOS that we previously saw on the Magic6 Pro. My two favourites, like before, are the Magic Capsule feature that actually opens up a widget when you tap it instead of long-pressing, and the Smart Folder tool, which automatically creates shortcuts for popular actions of an app when you expand it on the home screen.
There’s Magic Portal, something I never use, which is sort of like Samsung’s Circle To Search tool but worse because it’s honestly just as fast or even faster to open up Google and type it. Finally, similar to Apple’s Live Text, Magic Text can recognise text in photos in the Gallery app and makes them copy-able. Notably, it lacks an in-house AI eraser tool unlike several of its competitors such as OPPO and Xiaomi.
Performance & Battery
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, despite the 8 moniker, is not actually a flagship chipset. When comparing benchmark scores to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the last-gen flagship processor from Qualcomm, it falls behind by a noticeable amount, at least in the multi-score segment.
However, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 does outperform the 8 Gen 2 in single-core performance as well as GPU performance, so it can still be labelled as a high-end chip without a doubt. The processor is also more stable and is less prone to overheating.
Synthetic benchmarks aside, how does the HONOR 200 Pro perform in the real world? Well, as you would expect, everything on the phone runs smoothly with no lag or jittering, making it an ideal phone for regular everyday usage. It even has air gesture support, which isn’t the most accurate for the back gesture, but is still helpful when you want to use the phone but don’t want to touch it (like when you’re cooking).
Battery-wise, the 200 Pro can easily give you a whole day’s worth of usage and then some. It can even last two full days, but only if you’re a very light user. Combined with the super fast 100W charging, it’s the kind of phone that will rarely give you phone anxiety. Even if you forget to charge it before bed, you can do a quick top-up in the morning and it will be more than enough to get you through the day. On the YouTube streaming endurance test, it lasted just over 19 hours, which is commendable but nothing extraordinary.
Camera
The HONOR 200 Pro gets a pretty decent camera setup for a phone under RM3,000. The main camera easily takes ultra-sharp portraits with well-balanced colours in daylight. It’s especially good at taking portraits, even of animals like my kitty cat.
For night time photos, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. While the sensor clearly takes in a lot of light, allowing objects and landscapes in dark environments to show up clearly in the photos, the post-processing does go a bit too hard sometimes to the point where any nearby light sources look too bright. That being said, “night photos are too bright” isn’t a significant problem with a smartphone camera.
The ultra-wide doubles as a macro lens and while it doesn’t allow you to get a microscope-like view or anything of that sort, it still results in some relatively beautiful pictures of small objects and insects. As for the zoom lens, it surprised me at how sharp it can get even at around 5x-10x, retaining a decent picture quality with minimal noise as long as there’s good lighting. It can only go up to 50x but in most everyday situations, you wouldn’t really need to zoom in that far.
Camera Samples
Competition
POCO F6 Pro
The POCO F6 Pro is the latest high-end smartphone from the Xiaomi sub-brand, offering last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It features a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, a global brightness of 1,200 nits, and a peak HDR brightness of 4,000 nits.
For the 12GB+512GB configuration, the F6 Pro actually costs RM200 less than the 200 Pro at RM2,499, while the base 256GB trim retails at only RM2,299. It gets a lackluster 50MP camera, an 8MP ultra-wide, and a macro lens, with no telephoto lens in the setup. Powering it is a 5,000mAh battery with support for 120W charging.
POCO F6
The vanilla POCO F6 is also a major competitor for the 200 Pro as it is fitted with the same Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip. It sports a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with a 120H refresh rate, a global peak brightness of 1,200 nits, and an HDR peak brightness of 2,400 nits.
Despite having the same processor, the F6 is a whopping RM700 cheaper than the HONOR phone at RM1,999 for 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. On the optics front, it uses a 50MP camera with OIS and an 8MP ultra-wide lens, while the battery has a 5,000mAh capacity with 90W charging.
Conclusion
The HONOR 200 Pro comes packed with plenty of high-end features, bringing with it efficient performance with a good battery life as well as a commendable camera setup at this price point. It’s not exactly the cheapest Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 smartphone — that crown goes to the POCO F6 — so out of the two, the HONOR device is more worth it only if the camera is a high priority for you.
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