Honor Play 40 Plus Smartphone Review – The Honor Play lineup is by far one of the best smartphone lineups that generate money for the company. Basically, there are two main reasons why the Play series phones are popular in the budget segment. First of all, they provide impressive specs, and secondly, offer amazing build quality. Both of these factors make their phone more interesting and appealing to the users.
Not too long ago, the company unveiled the Honor Play 40 Plus in mainland China, around October 2022. Alongside this, the company also expanded the smartphone lineup in other countries with the Honor X6 lineup. For today’s review, we have the Play 40 Plus. The first impression does give an overview of this phone as you are getting a decent display, colossal size battery, 5G connectivity, and many more things. Let’s head toward the Honor Play 40 Plus review to find out more details about this phone.
Table of Contents
Honor Play 40 Plus Smartphone Review
Highlights
- The Honor Play 40 Plus offers a standard tall aspect ratio of 6.74-inch TFT LCD panel.
- Alongside this, you will obtain the Android 12 interface based on Magic UI 6.1 custom skin.
- In terms of performance, the company added the Dimensity 700 chipset for better processing speed.
- A 50MP dual camera island will be noticed on the back panel, while a 5MP selfie camera at the front.
- The phone support 22.5W fast charging speed to fuel the massive Li-Po 6000 mAh battery.
Design and Display
The Honor Play 40 Plus smartphone comes with a curved back panel that makes the phone’s holding experience smooth. Besides this, the camera module comes with a new design layout that looks superb. Furthermore, the company also provides a wide range of shade options from which you can choose anything that best suits your preference.
There are blue, silver, black, and purple. All of them look pretty astounding, if you are in search of fancy color options, you can check out the purple. Besides this, the rest of them also look premium and classic. It will provide a 196-gram body that doesn’t feel that heavy. Although, the phone might feel a bit thick with an 8.3mm body.
Hopefully, you are getting a decent security feature to lock the phone using the side panel fingerprint scanner or PIN. Moving to the front display, the Honor Play 40 Plus comes with an HD resolution display with a TFT LCD panel that will grant decent colors. Furthermore, you are getting a 90Hz refresh rate that will handle the screen usage smoothly. But at the same time, it lacks corning gorilla glass protection and suffers outdoors due to low brightness.
Memory and Internal
Under the hood, you will find the 7nm MediaTek MT6833 Density 700 chipset, which is designed for the budget tier 5G smartphone. Apart from providing 5G connectivity, you are not getting anything out of the box. The overall performance is mediocre, but still, you won’t face any trouble in your daily routine. Besides this, the company also renders Mali-G57 MC2 for a casual gaming experience.
Although, the phone doesn’t design to support advanced graphic games in the first place. But you can try out games like Call of Duty without much hassle. Though, it will be unavoidable to face heating issues during long gameplays. As for the software layering, the Android 12 with Magic UI 6.1 interface, does bring interesting features to the table.
So that you can easily customization the interface according to your wishes. Furthermore, the company also offers various storage options that varied from 128GB to 256GB internal space that will accompany 6GB to 8GB RAM support. But sadly, you won’t find any SD card slot inside this phone. But when you are getting 128GB space in the base variant, you don’t have to worry about running about storage soon.
Camera
The Honor Play 40 Plus smartphone might not get lots of camera lenses on the back panel. But at the end of the day, image processing is matter most when you are clicking photos. If the phone got a decent AI software that improvises the colors, contrast, and saturation, there’s no problem with low-megapixel lenses. In the Play 40 Plus case, you will find a dual camera setup.
The camera island includes a 50MP primary lens that will provide immersive colors with proper exposure and fine details in most of the shots. The contrast might fall behind standards sometimes, but the overall daylight photography is not that boring. Speaking of the lowlight photos, the noise management is good so that you will obtain clear images without any hassle.
On the other hand, it also includes a 2MP depth lens for better portrait images. Although, having an ultra-wide lens would have improved the dynamic range. But anyway, you can easily record up to 1080p videos properly with both sides of the camera. Though, the 5MP selfie lens does drastically decrease the camera quality.
Battery and Others
The Honor Play 40 Plus got amazing battery life as the phone equips a Li-Po 6000 mAh battery configuration. With that much battery life, you don’t have to worry about running out of screen time and enjoy streaming content and casual gaming. In general, the phone will receive more than 8 hours of screen time in the best condition of the battery.
But eventually, the battery life decrease, while you are getting 22.5W fast charging support that will ensure the device can refuel in less than an hour and a half. As for the sound output, the single loudspeaker performance is above great with a dedicated 3.5 mm jack port. Lastly, the Honor Play 40 Plus smartphone costs around $240 (Rs 19,990 in India) approx. At this price point, the phone looks like a decent deal.
Honor Play 40 Plus Pros and Cons
Honor Play 40 Plus Specifications Detail
Down below you can see the full specifications of the Honor Play 40 Play smartphone.
| Specifications | Honor Play 40 Plus |
| Network | 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G |
| Announced | October 2022 |
| SIM | Dual SIM |
| Dimensions | 6.59 x 3.03 x 0.33 inches |
| Weight | 196 g |
| Size | 6.74 inches |
| Display | TFT LCD 90Hz 20:9 ratio ~260 PPI density |
| Protection | No |
| Resolution | 720 x 1600 pixels |
| OS | Android 12, Magic UI 6.1 |
| Chipset | 7nm – MediaTek MT6833 Dimensity 700 |
| CPU | Octa-core 2×2.2 GHz Cortex-A76 6×2.0 GHz Cortex-A55 |
| GPU | Mali-G57 MC2 |
| Card slot | No |
| RAM | 6GB, 8GB |
| Internal | 128GB, 256GB |
| Camera | 50 MP (wide), PDAF 2 MP (depth) LED flash, HDR, panorama Max – 1080p@30fps |
| Selfie | 5 MP (wide) Max – 1080p@30fps |
| Loudspeaker | Yes |
| 3.5mm jack | Yes |
| WLAN | Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot |
| Bluetooth | 5.1, A2DP, LE |
| GPS | Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS |
| NFC | No |
| Infrared port | No |
| Radio | No |
| USB | USB Type-C 2.0, USB On-The-Go |
| Sensors | Side-mounted fingerprint, accelerometer, proximity, compass |
| Battery | Li-Po 6000 mAh Fast charging 22.5W |
| Colors | Blue, Silver, Black, Purple |
| Expected Price | $240 (Rs 19,990 in India) approx |
Conclusion
The worst parts of this phone are the below-average selfie camera and TFT LCD screen, as it doesn’t feel that great over this phone. But for the fact that this phone is released in the affordable 5G segment, all of those are pretty much expected. On the other hand, the Honor Play 40 Plus smartphone is a fabulous deal for users who want a decent smartphone on a budget.
Although, the phone is exclusive to China, at the time we are reviewing this phone. In that case, you can check out a smartphone that is offering on the global stage that is offering similar value. If you want proper performance with a good custom skin OS, check out Infinix Hot 20 5G. It can be considered a brilliant deal for your money.
