If more devices like the Honor 400 Lite came our way at this price tag (or less), we'd probably find ourselves inventing things to complain about to keep the snarky Stuff soul alive. Being one of the few exceptions to the mid-range smartphone rule, the 400 Lite backs it all up with a generous AMOLED display and overachieving battery that'll more than make up for the underperforming innards and camera.
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Design
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Display
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Performance
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Camera
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Battery
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Features
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Value
Impressing the cynical bunch that is Stuff’s editorial team is no easy feat, especially when we’re dealing with a sub-R10k smartphone. Against all odds, Honor has managed just that with the newly launched 400 Lite. Demanding only R7,500 of your bucks, we fully expected to be met with another passable mid-ranger from the brand that usually saves its best for flagships. Instead, we had our hair blown back by a smartphone that’s punching far above its weight.
Alright, you’ll need to make some concessions at this price, but the overall effect is still stunning. The 400 Lite does struggle when it comes to some serious gaming, and the plastic build doesn’t exactly scream ‘premium’ – but the metallic edges and impressive battery do their best to make up for it. It’s also got the sort of features Apple would spend an entire development budget marketing. Looking at you, dynamic island and dedicated camera control.
Is this iPhone?
That R7,500 pricetag immediately makes a lot more sense the moment you get a grip on the 400 Lite’s almost entirely plastic build, save for the metallic edges and glass coating the 6.7in AMOLED display. It never stopped feeling budget during our time with it, but its resultant 171g weight turned out to be an absolute pleasure.
From the rounded corners and flat edges to the shiny 6.7in AMOLED up front, the 400 Lite borrows more than a couple of pages from Apple’s playbook. All it takes is one look at that rear camera bump to see what we’re talking about. Honor ditches it when it comes to button placement, opting instead for a basic Android skin– apart from the dedicated camera control on the device’s right side.
It’s all well and good to copy the hottest thing from other industry leaders, but you risk copying flaws too. We had our issues with the iPhone 16 Pro’s camera control — particularly the positioning — with our larger-than-average hands having trouble acclimating to the iPhone’s too-small body. At 6.7in, the 400 Lite isn’t as problematic — but still felt unnatural using the button with the phone upright, pushing us to use it horizontally only.
It’s got the usual USB-C port, planted next to the SIM slot and underwhelming mono speaker that did nothing to further Imagine Dragons’ plight on humanity and in that specific instance, we’re grateful. When it came time to hear stuff we actually wanted to hear, however, it scraped by — assuming our belly wasn’t blocking the only downward-firing blaster that might’ve performed better had it been paired with something up top.
On the opposite end of the spectrum comes the 6.7in AMOLED display, more than capable of keeping up with a 120Hz refresh rate, though it rarely ever got to stretch its legs quite that far. It’s an FHD+ affair that held up well for daily use (after turning off the default ‘Vivid’ colour profile) and even performed well in the sunlight with the 3,500 nits peak brightness.
You might’ve been convinced that Apple’s Dynamic Island (which got its start with the iPhone 14 Pro and up) was impossible to recreate on a budget, but you’d be wrong. Honor first tried it out with the Magic 6 Pro and is now bringing it to its mid-range devices. It worked wonders handling the basics, and even provided a pretty decent selfie light when we wanted it to. Listen up, smartphone makers.
Definitely not iPhone
If the lightweight plastic design hadn’t already tipped you off that this is a mid-ranger, the 400 Lite’s innards certainly will. Where Apple’s tech is powered by the home-grown A-something Bionic chips, Honor’s efforts are instead bolstered by a more ordinary 6nm MediaTek Dimensity 7025 Ultra and 8GB of RAM, both of which proved more than capable of keeping up with basic everyday tasks when it got down to it. More or less, anyway.
We’re talking about bouncing between one, two, or three different streaming apps, social media platforms, and only noticing the occasional stutter if you’re looking for it. You’ll need to turn off the device’s ‘dynamic’ refresh rate and suffer the subsequent battery loss for a fully 120Hz experience, but it’s worth the payoff. Its Geekbench 6 scores put it behind even the Galaxy S20 Ultra, performance-wise, but at this price, it’s difficult to complain.
As such, the 400 Lite struggles when you give it something a little more complex, like gaming. We tried it anyway, just to see what the 400 Lite would do, and we weren’t very impressed by the results, with the lower-than-30fps frame rates having us reach for the nearest bucket on the advanced games. Chuck it something simpler and it’ll put up a fairly competent showing, assuming you keep those expectations low.
The Honor 400 Lite may be exceptionally ordinary when it comes to the hardware under the hood, but even this technically budget option outranks the big boys in terms of battery. The 5,230mAh battery may not seem particularly groundbreaking, but pair it with with the modest internals and AMOLED display, we easily managed to get a little over a day (and then some) with moderate usage. Charging at 35W is again nothing special, but it got us more than enough charge in just a few minutes when in a pinch.
Not one for the scrapbooks, yeah?
To keep costs down, Honor’s shaved off the 2MP macro lens that completed the trio on last year’s 200 Lite, instead leaving behind a more competent duo that consists of the same 108MP and 5MP main and ultrawide shooters. It’s here where the 400 Lite stumbles hardest (not the macro lens that we never missed), but the device’s lack of consistency to repeatedly nab some good shots. Something even the flagship Magic 7 Pro struggled with — although to a much lesser extent.
On a good day, the 400 Lite put up a decent effort with some tweaking in the settings, capturing both the lighting of the situation (assuming it was bright enough, of course) and a level of clarity and colour reproduction we didn’t expect in this price range. Give it a low-light shot, however, and that 108MP shooter crumbles, hard. It fails to capture most of the detail — a sentiment echoed by the poor 5MP ultrawide lens.
We never exactly mourned the lack of a macro lens — mainly due to the main sensor’s ability to keep up with our close-up shots, delivering a respectable level of detail that’ll still pale in comparison to the real thing. We’d hoped the 16MP shooter on the other end was up to scratch, but it falls short with too little detail — made up for slightly with the ‘magic capsule’ notch adding a hint of lighting to the proceedings.
Honor’s tacked on the usual horde of AI features standard with every smartphone these days, which we promptly ignored, mainly because these achieved what we didn’t think possible: taking some half-decent images and making ’em look worse. Your Tinder profile might need spicing up, but believe us — you won’t find what you’re looking for under Honor’s dodgy AI smarts.
You won’t find yourself hurling after an encounter with the 400 Lite, but you won’t be tripping over yourself to retrieve the group sesh pics after the fact, either. Still, these are the sorts of gripes you’d hear attached to phones with far larger price tags. At R7,500, we’ll admit it’s a little more difficult to take aim at the 400 Lite when it’s still putting up half-decent results.
Honor 400 Lite verdict
It wouldn’t really be an Honor review unless we started, uh, moaning about the MagicOS 9 Android reskin. As ever, it’s still a bloated mess that’s too controlling about the sort of apps you can and can’t enjoy from the get-go. Put ’em out of your mind (and locked inside a folder you’ll never open again), and the Honor 400 Lite presents itself as one of the best-value mid-rangers we’ve had the pleasure of testing for a while – even considering the underwhelming cameras and performance. Not to mention the R7,500 pricetag that speaks for itself, no matter what the hardware is saying.
