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.
