We've seen better headphones that hover around this price point, though they'll be tough to locate in 2026. Honor's Choice Headphones Pro do some things right. Others... less so. It's too often swapped between what would benefit buyers. Who needs these looking like flagships when the ANC isn't up to scratch? Still, if you're planning to sweat them to death while running or lifting, they'll serve their purpose.
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Sound
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Design
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Battery
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Features
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Value
The Honor Choice Headphones Pro, otherwise known as the Honor VZ Sport Mate Headphones Pro, are a highly budget set of over-ears from the Chinese brand. They’re priced towards the lower end of the spectrum. Unfortunately for bargain hunters, they’re built that way as well.
You can pick a pair up for under a grand. Just… pay no attention to the Takealot listing markdown. There is no universe where Honor’s Choice Pro cans were ever worth R3,700. A thousand bucks is too expensive. We’d even prefer to see these closer to the R600 mark. That said, there is some upside.
Look the part
There’s no denying that Honor’s budget headphones look good. They’re based on the style Sony and other premium headphone brands have popularised in recent years. The ear cups are generous enough, with good-looking padding. Said padding is covered with a rather thin artificial leather and the sponge pads are also just a touch too soft, but they look decent.
The build is entirely lightweight plastic. We’ve seen budget cans do this better, with thicker, more durable plastics, but they’ll serve for what we have in mind for them. Comfort is enough story, though. The Honor Choice Pro on-ears are uncomfortable from the outset. That’s not true for every person, but we’re rather generic in terms of head size and shape.
The twist-and-fold cup design just never seems to angle enough to make these sit comfortably on a skull. If you’re fond of leaving an ear exposed, the problem becomes even more pronounced. Too much tightness across the head would have made it all unbearable. Thankfully, Honor has missed that misstep. For R900 bucks or less, this is a mixed bag. Good looks, poor fit — we know how we’d rather have these overs arranged, and it’s not this way.
That’s fair
Honor’s Choice Pro headphones pack 40mm drivers, active noise cancellation, and transparency modes. We’ll get into the software/mic-assisted functions in a second. First — the sound. The headphones have a soundstage that’s just a little too far out for comfort, leaving some tracks feeling washed out. There’s a decent amount of low-end, but no consistency in its implementation. Clean separation of lows, mids, and highs is sometimes a feature, but other occasions will see your audio turn to mush.
Noise cancellation, as promised by Honor, is supposed to offer an adaptive experience. In practise, we kept the cancellation off. Audio playback was measurably worse when ANC was active. Transparency mode, while better, was also heaved over the side in favour of staying as far away from the microphone processing as we could possibly get. ANC overcompensates, intruding into tracks in ways the tech was never supposed to. Odd volume dips, uneven playback, even the soundstage rotating around our heads in a disorienting manner were the result. Bass pretty much disappears with ANC on, to boot.
Having it shut down may be a blessing, though, since you’ll get the best of the Honor Choice Pro’s battery that way. Honor reckons you’ll get 80 hours with ANC off (40 with it on), but actually maintaining it is up to you. There’s no automatic shutoff that we could see, but they’ll disconnect to save power that way. Uptime is pretty impressive though, even with the need to manually turn them off. We only chewed through about 10% of the battery during the review.
Honor Choice Headphones Pro verdict
It’s very easy to look at these over-ears and scoff. Even at the sub-R1,000 price point, there’s still a fair amount of utility here. The clue’s in the name. Not the Honor Choice Headphone Pro name. The other one. We’d consider the Honor VZ Sport Mate Headphones Pro disposable if we were frequent gym goers. There’s plenty of battery, in case you forget them in the boot. The lightweight, low-cost build makes them perfect sacrificial cans when you don’t want your ‘proper’ headphone ruined by sweat. And if someone happens to drop a kettlebell on them, you haven’t lost much.
