This is the new Honor 200 Pro, a phone that got lost in the flood of launches this month. But considering the specs that it has and the price that it’s launched at, I feel that the Xiaomi 14 CIVI has the same value proposition. Is this one? So we decided to do what we do best, compare these two folds and let you guys know which one is the better pick of the two.
Hi, I’m Purnendu and you’re reading a Taza Morning blog. Your destination for teething insists on capturing views.
Table of Contents
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – Design Battle
Design is always subjective but in the case of these two phones, there’s one clear winner and that is the Xiaomi 14 CIVI because it uses more premium materials in its construction compared to the Honor 200 pro. So you get patent leather, you get glass, you also get an aluminum frame couple that with the quad curve displays the relatively smaller size, and the lightweight Xiaomi 14 civil in-hand feel is incredibly better but now the Honor 200 Pro has a glass back.
It has a glass front as well on the side is plastic because you know what the ergonomics are slightly off because the phone is wide and it is slim, so it’s kind of uncomfortable to hold for long usage. And if you ask me concerning the camera modules, I don’t like this oval shape design. But yes, it does make the phone stand out and it has a distinctive identity as well, just like you know, practicing English is a distinctive identity.
Yeah.OK, please don’t punish me for those bad jokes because I keep making them hurt. We did all the other things that were advertised in our usage and the tactile feedback of the hardware buttons like the power button and the volume rocker is better on the Xiaomi 14 Civi compared to the Honor 200 pro. As for the ports and.
On the flip side, Xiaomi’s front glass is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2. Honor uses its solution and it says that it’s equally scratch-resistant and equally strong as well.
Other connections again tie into the type C 2.0 port at the bottom for both. It should have been USB Gen. 3. I don’t know why they persist with USB Gen 2.0. What are you getting out of that Cost-cutting? And apart from that you also get an infrared blaster on board, and you get stereo speakers. There are mikes of course, and there’s a dual nano SIM card trays. However, Honor has IP65 whereas Xiaomi has IP 54.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – Display Battle
The display of the Xiaomi 14 Civi is smaller than the Honor 200 Pro, but the technical specs are all the same so you get the same 1.5 K resolution OLED panel and you also get a 120 Hz refresh rate. The one thing I love about both these is the micro quad curve design.
Yes, it strikes a nice balance between a flat display and a curved display. Now when we tested these four side by side, we noticed that Xiaomi offers closer to neutral color tones compared to the warm tones of Honor. Now both these points also support HDR video playback on YouTube and Netflix.
But when you look at the HD video side by side, the specular highlights are definitely brighter on Honor because Honor has 4000 nits of peak brightness compared to 3000 nits on Xiaomi. But when you take them outdoors and regular usage, the brightness difference between the two displays is negligible.
Now both phones offer PWM dimming so if you are sensitive to low light flicker that shouldn’t be a problem on this which is very very good but the honest rating is slightly higher at 3840 Hz compared to Xiaomis 2160 Hz. Now while the in-display fingerprint scanner is fast and responsive on both the haptic feedback experience is better on the Xiaomi 14 Civi. It’s tighter it’s more precise it’s just better.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – Audio Battle
Now talking about audio you can connect external tags to these phones they work fine and if you’re somebody who owns a pair of high-risk Bluetooth, you know true wireless buds they are NSDC and Codex are also supported. Now when you talk about the speaker experience, I don’t know if it’s because Honor is a bigger phone and it has more space, but the stereo speakers do sound louder and they sound richer as well.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – Performance Battle
Now let’s talk about the performance of both these phones, both the powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip and they also come with LPDDR 5X RAM type but on a cheap doubt of the storage. You get UFS 4.0 on the Xiaomi 14 Civi but you get UFS 3.1 on Honor. Now talking about the benchmarks.
The Xiaomi 14 Civi was better than the Honor 200 Pro. We got higher scores on Antutu. We also got higher scores on Geekbench. Even in our CPU throttle test, the Xiaomi 14 Civi throttles as much as the Honor 200 Pro. But now while the GPU stability was slightly lower on the Xiaomi 14 Civi, it didn’t push more frames, that’s something we noticed.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – GAMING EXPERIENCE
Now if you’re talking about gaming, you can play BGMI at 90 FPS and Call of Duty at 120FPS on both phones. However, when we played Genshin Impact at the highest graphics at 60 frames per second on Honor gave us a higher average FPS compared to Xiaomi. How and what did get equally hot in the tests shopping Helping us feel hotter when you held it in the hand, but that could be because of the aluminum that’s there now.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – NETWORK
We also tested the networks. We tested both Jio and Airtel 5G works fine. The call quality is fantastic, earpiece quality, is great. You also get support for Wi-Fi 6 and NFC on both phones. But Xiaomi does have Bluetooth 5.4 support compared to Bluetooth 5.3 on Honor.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – BATTERY
Now when we talk about the battery life, the Honor 200 Pro lasted longer compared to the Xiaomi 14 Civi. Now in the interest of transparency, I must say that we couldn’t capture the SOT on the Honor 200 Pro. But I mainly because FKM, which we generally use, wasn’t working properly on this and it was giving us some wonky numbers. And within the settings page, you only get daily SOT data and not from the last charge of 200%.
Regardless, we found it very difficult to drain this phone and there are a couple of reasons for it, one is that it uses a larger 5200 Mah battery and that battery uses the new tech as well. So it uses silicon carbon batteries, which is a higher density battery compared to lithium-ion and that is why it is also slim as well. Now the second reason for that is because when you use the adaptive refresh rate honor is very smart in many apps that we use, including the Internet browser, it runs at 60 Hz most of the time, thereby saving battery life.
Charging speeds are faster on Honor compared to Xiaomi, but you do not get a charger inside the box. Currently, Honor is bundling it for free, but it won’t be the same later. So to make things simple, the Xiaomi 14 Civi has better performance whereas the Honor has better battery life.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – SOFTWARE
Now software and both are actually Android 14 based, but you also get their own custom skins on top of it. Of course, Xiaomi has Hyper OS and Honor has a magic OS, the one advantage for Xiaomi. Is that the company promises 3 + 4 years of software updates whereas you get only 2 + 3 years on Honor, which is a leg down.
Concerning the UI design, I think that Xiaomi has a slightly more mature design compared to Honor and that’s high praise for Xiaomi because we generally don’t like Xiaomi here either. So basically the magic OS, icons are too spaced out. There’s a lot of white space, there’s a lot of empty space. It doesn’t look very, you know, modern in 2024. But when you look at the animations of the way they’re tuned, they’re extremely iOS-inspired and very smooth as well.
And it’s not just the animations. A lot of things on both these operating systems are iOS-inspired. And that’s understandable considering in their home market of China, they want to pull all the iOS users to use their phones. So basically the Control Center and the notification panel both look like this. Now both also come with preinstalled apps, Some of them are bloatware apps as well. But the problem with Xiaomi is that there are dark patterns in the software when you set it up. And apart from that, there’s also that glance at the definition for lock screen wallpaper.
Now concerning features there are a ton of features on both these operating systems, but I think there are slightly more on Magic OS compared to Xiaomi. Two specific software features are light on Magic OS. Air gestures work well and then are implemented well. So basically you can, you know, swipe up and down to scroll.
You can also take screenshots with your air gestures with your hands. It’s just crazy stuff and there are a couple of AI features called magic portal and magic text. In magic text, you can extract text from images. In magic portal, you can take any you know BLOB of text and it will tell you where to sort of you know share it. You get similar if it is just in the photos app on Xiaomi, where you get this AI image expansion, AI sky changing you know magic is all of those things.
So you have both are very feature-rich in terms of software. The animations are also very similar. They’re also both iOS-inspired. But what sets Xiaomi apart is that an extra year of software update that Xiaomi is promised and of course the fact that the design is slightly more modern.
Honor 200 Pro vs Xiaomi 14 CIVI – Camera Battle
I know it’s been an excruciating weight, but it’s time to talk about the cameras I’m not jumping into the specs you can see that on the screen right now. Let’s just jump into the picture quality comparison. Which one takes better pictures? Which one takes better videos? Now honest primary camera has a larger sensor so it captures more details. Xiaomis algorithm over sharpened slightly to compensate for the lack of details which is done tastefully too, especially in daylight. But overall the Honor 200 Pro is technically more proficient especially when you look at the corners of the image.
Now both phones have different color modes. Honor has natural, vivid, and authentic. Xiaomi has Leica vibrant and Leica authentic. And despite using all of these modes, neither of these two captured close to what my eyes saw. Honor has a tendency to add extra brightness to images which changes the colors along with it. Xiaomi’s vivid mode is too vivid and authentic is too contrasting. So neither get it right.
And you know what? I do not like Honors HDR tuning. It’s flat and too bright. Basically, the shadows have no dynamics whatsoever, Xiaomi is definitely better here because you can see highlights and you can see shadows. It’s not like a flat image. And the fun fact is that Xiaomi could be better for HDR performance if you ask me, because sometimes it messes up the highlights more into pictures of people.
Both get the skin tones wrong. Honor is too contrasty and Xiaomi is too bright. But if you ask me, I think Honor looks better. Again the light when HDR fires somehow Xiaomi picks up its skin. It’s better. However, what I did notice is that dusk is the skin tone right when you zoom into the subject at 2x or 2.5x and this is the right way to approach it primarily because if you’re shooting people, you should shoot it at the focal length that you get with 2x or 2.5x, which is 54mm and 68mm because you’ll get the right size of the face.
And of course, the skin tones are better than Xiaomi, I didn’t have to say that. Portraits on Honor thanks to that hardcode collaboration is better than Xiaomi, It’s awesome. So for those who don’t know, hardcode is this studio that captures photos of Hollywood celebrities and you get 3 different hardcode-specific styles. But the only thing is that I couldn’t find a way to switch off the hardcode option. So you will have to stick to it.
Regardless of whether it is the details, whether it is the edge detection or the vocal drop-off portraits from Honor took better than the ones captured by Xiaomi, but I did notice some color variance in the 2x and the 2.5x portrait samples that I shot with Honor. That’s something you have to keep in mind. All right, now talking about the ultrawide camera on both these phones in low light both are really bad, but in daylight, Honor captures more details than Xiaomi does.
But when you look at the color sense consistency between the primary and the ultrawide, again Xiaomi does it better than Honor because Honor seems to be inconsistent with the colors on ultrawide, on telephoto, everywhere there seems to be some consistency issue. Looks like it’s not just a phone launch in India problem for Honor, it’s also a camera problem. They need to fix it now.
When you look at zoom performance, what I notice is that at 2x Xiaomi does it better because it’s got a physical sensor, but at 2.5x and slightly longer zoom ranges Honor does it better, and even in low light telephoto, Honor pictures are more usable compared to Xiaomi. As for the selfies, I like Xiaomi’s captures because they offer true-to-life skin tones and more details as well. The same is true for portraits.
Xiaomi drops the ball in HDR selfies plus low-light selfies in the night mode, it’s terrible. Now both phones can shoot 4K60FPS videos. While Xiaomi does offer higher bitrate video recording and the order recording is largely similar on both, Honor has more stable footage and it doesn’t keep focus hunting like Xiaomi does.
Even in low light, Honor has better exposure, far less noise, and overall better quality video recording. In selfie videos, both are largely similar in quality with their 4K30FPS video recording, but the skin tones are more accurate on Honor and you get a wider field of view along with electronic image stabilization.
So it’s just better in my opinion. See Honor 200 Pro is priced very weirdly. You’ve got a sticker price and a massive cash back and some, you know, crazy odd discounts as well. And I don’t see a reason why Honor should do that. The discounted price should just be the sticker price. Just call it a day, right? No, let’s confuse consumers more. And for somebody who’s gullible or doesn’t have a credit card, they end up paying more for it.
Conclusion
Come on, Honor. Anyway, that’s just an industry-wide rank. As for the product itself, I liked using it. So for under 50,000, it’s got a competing display. It’s got great battery life. You get decent performance and a palatable software experience as well. But more importantly, I genuinely liked using the cameras on this phone. It’s better than the Xiaomi 14 Civi definitely for photography and videography both.
So if you had to choose between these two, Honor 200 Pro for camera and battery and Xiaomi for better design better performance and better software experience. I hope this clears things if you were confused, what do you guys think of the new Honour 200 Pro? I would love to know your thoughts. Let me know in the comment section below and I will see guess the next one. Until then, keep tracking and stay safe.
