Honor 200 Lite Review: Your Next Cheap Phone?

The most important spec about the Honor 200 Lite is its low price.

At £279 at launch in the UK, it’s somewhere between mid-range and budget phones based on our criteria. If you’re interested in the Honor 200 Lite it’s likely to be because of its affordability, but it does have other selling points too.

Like a lot of other phones around the same price point, you get a better display, better cameras, and better battery life than you might expect. The compromises typically involve performance and extras such as wireless charging and waterproofing, and that’s the case with the Honor 200 Lite.

Design & Build

• Appealing design
• Matte finish on the back
• No waterproofing

I like the look of the Honor 200 Lite a lot: it’s thin, light, and easy on the eye. Something I would change is the rather oversized camera bump on the back, but I can live with it. Your colour options for the phone are a pale blue, a darker cyan, and the black unit that you can see below.

You’ve got dimensions of 161.05 mm x 74.55 mm x 6.78 mm, and it weighs in at 166 grams – bigger and yet lighter than the iPhone 15. It’s a bit plasticky for sure when held in the hand, but the matt finish on the back is nicely done and adds a touch of style too. Also noticeable are the corner curves, which are more rounded than the norm.

The matt finish on the back is nicely done and adds a touch of style

There’s no kind of official IP rating for water and dust resistance here – as is often the case on cut-price phones – and Honor hasn’t mentioned anything particular in terms of sustainability or durability, either. Note that the fingerprint sensor is conveniently placed on the power button, and works well enough.

Screen & Speakers

• 6.7-inch AMOLED screen
• Display is sharp and bright
• Single loudspeaker

The brightness and crispness of the 6.7-inch, 1080 x 2412 pixel AMOLED display is definitely one of the highlights of the Honor 200 Lite.

Ramp up the brightness and everything on screen shines – Honor hasn’t specified the maximum brightness level, but to the naked eye it’s not noticeably less than the best phones on the market.

With a refresh rate up to 90 Hz, speeding around menus and apps is smooth and slick, and while the bezels aren’t super-thin, they’re definitely not offensive in their size. Colours look rich and uniform across the screen, though there’s no HDR support: this means video content doesn’t look quite as good as it does on the top-tier flagships.

The brightness and crispness of the display is definitely one of the highlights of the Honor 200 Lite

We’ve got a single loudspeaker at the bottom, which is fine. It’ll do for watching movies and listening to podcasts, though you probably wouldn’t want to play your favourite tunes through it – they won’t sound fantastic (use some wireless or USB-C headphones instead).

Specs & Performance

• Acceptable budget specs
• Plays most games fine
• Supports Wi-Fi 5 and 5G

The Honor 200 Lite is fitted with a MediaTek Dimensity 6080 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage on the one and only configuration available – so we’re very much in budget-to-mid-range territory here.

Performance is mostly fine and snappy, though you do occasionally see a moment’s delay if you’re doing something complicated (like launching picture-in-picture or jumping between apps).

Relatively demanding games such as Real Racing 3 run comfortably enough, and in most day-to-day use you’re not going to notice any significant slowdowns. Of course, the risk of buying budget phones is they can gradually grind to a halt sooner than flagships as the years go by, but that’s something that will only emerge over time.

Performance is mostly fine and snappy, though you do occasionally see a moment’s delay if you’re doing something complicated

Considering the low entry price, you certainly get bang for your buck as far as performance goes. Perhaps the biggest problem for the Honor 200 Lite in this regard is that there are so many other good value phones out there.

Honor 200 Lite benchmarks

In terms of connectivity, the Dimensity 6080 chip includes 5G as standard, and it’s joined by Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.1 and NFC for contactless payment.

Cameras

• Triple-lens rear cameras
• 50Mp selfie camera
• No telephoto sensor

I was largely impressed by the photos and videos the Honor 200 Lite produced from its 108Mp + 5Mp ultrawide + 2Mp macro rear camera setup, plus its 50Mp selfie camera.

Even in low light, the camera does well, and while it can’t match the Pixels and iPhones of this world, you’ll get good results almost all of the time.

As usual from Honor phones, there are a host of photo modes to pick from, most of which I imagine most people won’t bother with.

Some modes, like those specifically for night shots and HDR processing, don’t seem to be hugely different from the standard photo mode. There’s also an interesting multi-video mode you can use to record split-screen clips using the front and back cameras at the same time.

Even in low light, the camera does well – you’ll get good results almost all of the time

Video recording maxes out at a 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second, and there’s nothing fancy here like optical image stabilisation (OIS) – another sign that we’re dealing at the budget end of the market here. But for point-and-shoot convenience, the Honor 200 Lite scores rather highly.

Battery Life & Charging

• Long-lasting battery
• 4500mAh battery capacity
• No wireless charging

The Honor 200 Lite brings with it a 4500mAh battery that for me was comfortably getting to the end of each day – sometimes with 30-40% of a charge left.

I’m not the most demanding of phone users, and this is a brand-new battery, but that’s still quite impressive. The only day I came closer to needing a recharge the same day involved a bit of gaming and an hour or so of map GPS use, but again there was plenty spare.

Streaming a movie at full brightness and a low volume drained the battery by 7% every hour, so you’re looking at about 14 hours of video playback in total – a very decent score. Of course this is one of the benefits of a phone with fewer power demands and a lower resolution display attached to the front.

Standby battery life seems good too – I would come back to it after an hour or two of not using it and the battery level would have barely dropped.

There’s no wired charging here, just 35W wired charging, which juices up the phone from zero to 12% after 15 mins and 26% after 30 mins. Not bad for a cheap phone, but nothing special.

Software & Apps

• Android 14 and MagicOS 8
• Some bloatware
• A few nice UI touches

Out of the box, the 200 Lite is running Android 14 with Honor’s own MagicOS 8.0 layered on top, and there are a fair few of Honor’s own apps here: an email client, a calculator, a weather app, a video player and a music player, a notes app, and a gallery for your photos and videos.

It’s a fair bit of bloat, but Android being Android, hiding these Honor apps away and using alternatives isn’t difficult. In general, the interface is a little more bright and busy than I would like, but that’s largely down to personal choice, and of course Android offers plenty in the way of customisation options.

I do like the cute always-on display options you can pick from – a deer in a forest (shown above), for example – so that’s a plus point.

The interface is a little more bright and busy than I would like, but that’s largely down to personal choice

A minus is that Honor hasn’t said how many years of updates this particular handset is eligible for, though three major Android upgrades are promised for the Honor flagship phones.

Price & Availability

At the time of writing, you’ll pay precisely £279.99 for the Honor 200 Lite in the UK.

It’s available direct from Honor or via Amazon. No networks are selling the phone on contract, so you’ll have to buy it outright and pair with a SIM-only deal. Find one that suits you in the widget below:

As usual, the phone isn’t available in the US. That outright UK price makes it slightly more expensive than most budget phones, with the likes of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 5G, Samsung Galaxy A25 5G and Motorola Moto G84 5G.

Should you buy the Honor 200 Lite?

When it comes to getting as much bang for your buck as you can, the Honor 200 Lite is definitely one of the better options available right now. Of course there are compromises – otherwise there would be no market for the Galaxy S24 Ultra – but on the whole, they’re compromises a lot of people will be able to live with.

What are you really after from a smartphone? If it’s a decent display, satisfactory performance, good battery life, and photo and video quality that won’t let you down most of the time, the Honor 200 Lite delivers. If you need the very best components available on a smartphone and the latest AI software tricks, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Do be sure to check out the competition at this price point before buying: phones including the Nothing Phone 2a, the Motorola Edge 40 Neo, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy A35, and the Poco X6 are all clustered around the same price point, and there’s not a whole lot to choose between them. In the end it comes down to which handset you like the aesthetics of – both in terms of hardware and Android design.

Specs

• Android 13, MagicOS 8
• 6.7-inch AMOLED display (90 Hz, 1080 x 2412 pixel resolution)
• Mediatek Dimensity 6080 with 8GB RAM
• 256GB storage
• 5G
• Bluetooth 5.1
• Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
• 64Mp f/1.8 main rear camera
• 5Mp f/2.2 ultrawide camera
• 2Mp f/2.4 macro camera
• 16Mp f/2.1 wide selfie camera
• Power button fingerprint reader
• USB-C port
• 4500mAh battery
• 35W wired charging
• plastic body
• 161.1 x 74.6 x 6.8 mm
• 166g
• Available in black, blue, and cyan