Honor 9X Review – Price, Specs and Much More
The Huawei ban fiasco in 2019, which has been well reported, came to jeopardize the future of Huawei but Honor, the young Chinese company’s brand, was fairly forgetful about Google’s ban on Huawei by using its devices. However, Google apps will not be included in Honor series in future.
The last Honor smartphone that will have Google Mobile Services (GMS) is Honor 9X, a phone that replaces Honor 8X from the inexpensive X series of mobile phones. It’s an affordable smartphone with its small camera array (at least compared to Honor 20), midsize chipsets and displays.
Although the developers of the Honor 9X probably did not know that, it will be Honor’s last phone (outside of China, where Google apps will not be used in future). So is this a decent final offer and a reason to sail on the Huawei before it crashes, or should you reject the last chance?
Display and Design
The Honor 9X has a large screen for an inexpensive smartphone. It’s a 6.6-inch display that’s a bit larger in the mid-range price, so it might be difficult for you to use the device properly unless you have rather big hands.
The display is 1080x 2340 in resolution. That means, it’s pretty sharp, but some people may not find it interesting because it’s LCD. Generally, LCD screens are considered to be of lower quality than most popular OLED screens. It is considered of poor quality because of the relatively low reproduction of black and its flatter colors. The Honor 9X has one of our highest quality LCD displays with colors that look more like pop than competitors. The maximum brightness is not, however, too high.
Due to the pop-up front camera of Honor 9X, there is no screen room for a punch-hole or notch bezels. Indeed, chin is rather prominent at the bottom of the screen, but the display-by-body ratio of 91 percent is generally commendable.
The mobile is quite conventional in nature–as I have already said, it is quite big, and also a bit heavy at 197g. It has a glass back and front of the Gorilla, but the material of its body has not been confirmed by Honor yet.
Camera
As Honor is a subsidiary of Huawei, it is usually found that the phones of the company are quite great, but that isn’t the case with Honor 9X, as the photos that we took certainly do look nice but not best. The camera of Honor 9X is similar to Honor 8X as no new features are included in the 9X.
The rear camera is powered by a 48MP snapper with an 8MP sensor with a wide angle lens. The camera also has a 2MP depth sensor that helps to enhance portrait image. The photos taken from the main camera looked good because of the detailed colors. Autofocus was pretty quick for close-ups, but we noticed a little washed-out when we took pictures with the main camera.
We’ve had a lot of difficulties with the ultra-wide snapper. Firstly, the sides of ultra-wide pictures were weird, making it somewhat distorted ones. We also took ultra-wide snaps, the scenes looked remarkably darker than conventional wide-angle photos.
Battery Life
The 4000mAh Honor 9X is a very good battery and you will never be concerned about power failure by half a day.
Whether you just check out Instagram from time to time, or stream music and play games, you might have a full day of easy use. We used Honor 9X two days without charging, but we had to turn Bluetooth off to achieve that goal.
The charge fell from total to 82 percent, a relatively high decline of 18 percent, when the Honor 9X was checked, which involves playing a 90-minute video with full brightness and synchronization with Wi-Fi in the background.
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Performance
A Kirin 710F chipset is assembled in the Honor9X. The Kirin 710F is improved version previously installed in devices like the Huawei P30 lite, the Honor 20 Lite, and Honor 8X. This means that it does not differ greatly from last year’s flagship Honor 8X, The result: This is a decent mid-range smartphone.
The phone scored a multi score of 5,246, lower than the Honor 8X of 5,552, when measured on Geekbench 4. On Geekbench 5, it scored 1,264 the lowest one we recorded yet. Because Geekbench 5 is so brand new, we haven’t checked many smartphones on this benchmark.
The Geekbench 4, however, is not the lowest score in 2019 and typically not too slow to use.
Availability & Price
The price of 9X in most regions has yet to be announced by Honor but in Russia, the price has been declared. It costs 18,990RUB (approximately £230, $300, AU$435) and shows that the smartphone is at the same value as the Honor8X.
The 8X can be purchased in the UK for £229.99 (approximately AU$435, $310). We estimated the launch price of the Honor 9X to be equivalent to 8X on the basis of the Russian Rubles conversion.
Honor did not announce the release date, but we do not expect the release date to go too far because in European countries as in the Netherlands and Russia, the phone is about to launch.
Final Words
For its price tag, the Honor 9X is a decent handset. You can easily get a better smartphone, if you are willing to put in a bit more money. There is a decent battery life, a 3.5 mm earphone jack to keep it going for a long time. Saying that, at this price tag, there are a few phones that can be taken into consideration and they are more valuable than the Honor 9X.
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