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Honor rang in 2020 by launching the Honor 9X in India, alongside the Honor Magic Watch 2 smartwatch and the Honor Band 5i. The Honor 9X succeeds the Honor 8X, and brings some notable upgrades equivalent to a quicker SoC, a full-screen show, higher cameras, and a bigger battery, to call just a few. Beginning at Rs. 13,999, the Honor 9X affords a compelling package deal when it comes to {hardware} and design. Nonetheless, it goes up towards some well-received rivals from Xiaomi, Realme, Nokia, and Vivo. Does the Honor 9X have what it takes to face out and disrupt the phase? Learn our in-depth evaluation of the cellphone’s deserves and demerits to search out out.
Honor 9X design and construct high quality
Design is among the key promoting factors of the Honor 9X. The 3D geometric sample on the Sapphire Blue evaluation unit that we’ve appears to be like like an X when mild falls on it. Every adjoining line seems to be a distinct shade of blue, making a depth impact, and it does look distinctive in comparison with the gradient patterns on a variety of telephones on the market. On nearer inspection, one can see small diamond-shaped blocks throughout the entire rear panel that shimmer underneath the sunshine. Whereas the aesthetics are undoubtedly flashy, this does give the Honor 9X an identification of its personal. The corporate additionally affords the Honor 9X in a extra sober Midnight Black end as effectively.
Honor 9X’s rear panel is product of plastic with a shiny end, and it will get smudged shortly
The rear panel is made out of plastic and has a shiny end. For sure, your entire again can get smudged simply, and our unit had fingerprint marks throughout it very quickly. The edges are curved and meet easily with the rim, which additionally has a shiny end in an identical color. Fortunately, the cellphone just isn’t too slippery. The three digicam lenses are housed in a vertical strip, and your entire module protrudes ever so barely.
The fingerprint sensor is positioned comfortably inside attain, and was pleasantly fast at unlocking the cellphone. The USB Sort-C port, speaker, and three.5mm jack are on the backside, whereas the SIM tray is on the prime. The amount buttons have a clicky really feel, however the energy button is a bit too small in proportion and feels a little bit mushy.
Over on the entrance is the 6.59-inch full-HD show that has a notch-free design. On this value bracket, the Honor 9X is among the many solely few telephones that supply a full-screen expertise, and we’re undoubtedly not complaining. Honor instructed Devices 360 that the show is protected by a fabric developed by Huawei and utilized in its telephones, however didn’t reveal the identify. The cellphone comes with a pre-applied display protector, nevertheless it received scratched and picked up smudges throughout actually shortly. Additionally, we discovered it a bit troublesome to succeed in all elements of the display with one hand.
Honor 9X specs and software program
The Honor 9X suffers from an identification disaster of types, which might be attributed to the Huawei-Honor relationship and a few complicated advertising selections. As we identified in our first impressions of the cellphone, the Honor 9X is sort of an identical to the Huawei Y9 Prime (2019) which was launched in India in August final 12 months, the one distinction being rear digicam resolutions, and even shares the identical mannequin quantity.
Honor 9X comes geared up with a 16-megapixel pop-up selfie digicam
It additionally shares {hardware} similarities with the Huawei P Smart Z bought in China, and even has the very same dimensions. To complicate issues much more, the Honor 9X bought in India is the cellphone’s world variant, and has fully completely different specs in comparison with the gadget of the identical identify bought in China.
Speaking about specs, the Honor 9X packs a 6.59-inch full-HD (1080 x 2340 pixels) show with a notchless full-screen design. That is an IPS LCD panel licensed by TÜV Rheinland for decreasing blue mild publicity. The cellphone is powered by Huawei’s in-house Kirin 710F processor, and has as much as 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage which is expandable by as much as 512GB utilizing a microSD card. The bottom 4GB 128GB variant is priced at Rs. 13,999 in India, whereas the 6GB 128GB configuration will set patrons again by Rs. 16,999.
The rear digicam setup features a 48-megapixel most important shooter with an f/1.Eight aperture. There may be additionally an 8-megapixel wide-angle digicam with a 120-degree discipline of view and a 2-megapixel depth sensor for portrait photographs. On the entrance is a 16-megapixel digicam housed in a pop-up module. The juice is offered by a 4,000mAh battery, and there is 10W charging assist.
On the software program facet, the Honor 9X runs EMUI 9.1 primarily based on Android Pie. Honor has instructed Devices 360 that an Android 10 replace needs to be launched quickly, “maybe by next month”. It’s attention-grabbing to notice that this cellphone would not report the software program identify as Magic UI, which is the rebranded model of EMUI that Honor fashions often run. The UI is much like what we got here throughout in our Honor 20 review. To begin with, there isn’t a app drawer. Swiping left opens the Google feed, whereas swiping proper reveals extra pages of app icons.
Honor 9X has a triple rear digicam setup with a 48-megapixel major digicam
A few of the preinstalled apps equivalent to Trip Mode, Downloads, and Optimiser for file administration are helpful. Nonetheless, there’s method an excessive amount of bloatware. First-party apps equivalent to App Gallery, Honor Membership, Honor Retailer, and iTips are barely helpful. As for the third-party apps, the likes of Opera Information, Reserving.com, Wego Flights & Motels, and Helo aren’t going to attraction to everybody.
Fortunately, the third-party apps might be uninstalled, however the in-house ones cannot. The navigation gestures labored flawlessly for us, and there is an App Twin characteristic for creating two cases of an app.
Honor 9X efficiency
Efficiency is an space through which the Honor 9X proved to be a combined bag. App-switching was clean even with 10-15 functions operating within the background. Apps loaded shortly as effectively, however some jitter was have been noticeable when video games have been operating within the background. The UI was usually lag-free, however the RAM administration proved to be a bit too aggressive on just a few events.
The Kirin 710F feels underpowered when it comes to graphics. PUBG Cellular defaulted to the Medium graphics preset, however the visuals regarded uneven, and body drops and stutters have been simply noticeable. Name of Responsibility: Cellular was set to the low graphics settings by default, and regardless that the expertise was higher than PUBG Cellular, we’ve seen higher efficiency from different telephones on this value vary. We want Huawei had gone with a extra highly effective SoC.
This lack of firepower displays in artificial benchmarks as effectively. The Honor 9X scored 320 and 1,310 in Geekbench 5’s single-core and multi-core assessments. This efficiency is corresponding to that of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 and MediaTek Helio P70. Nonetheless, within the graphics-intensive 3DMark Sling Shot and Sling Shot Excessive assessments, the Honor 9X might solely muster up scores of 1,111 and 864 respectively, that are considerably decrease than these of the 2 aforementioned chips. Here is a chart to depict the Kirin 710F’s benchmark efficiency:
Honor 9X’s Kirin 710F SoC lags behind in terms of graphics energy
As for show high quality, Honor 9X’s LCD show is among the many higher ones on telephones we’ve seen on this value bracket. The complete-HD decision signifies that this panel is sufficiently sharp. Color replica is on level, and viewing angles are acceptable as effectively. The notchless design is nice for watching movies and taking part in video games.
The one shortcoming is sub-par brightness, which hampers outside visibility and makes colors look muted underneath direct daylight. The show part within the Settings app lets customers alter the color profile and temperature, however we discovered that the ‘Vivid’ mode imparts a bluish tinge to whites, and makes colors seem washed-out.
The Honor 9X comes geared up with a sufficiently long-lasting 4,000mAh battery. With our common utilization, which concerned intermittent social media utilization and messaging all day, a few hours of music streaming, and round an hour of gaming, the Honor 9x lasted a day and a half on common. When paired with a smartwatch with Bluetooth and placement monitoring enabled all through the day, the cellphone’s battery life went down nevertheless it nonetheless had round 20-25 % left on the finish of the day.
Your mileage will range relying upon utilization patterns, however even with heavy utilization, the Honor 9X will simply sail previous a day on every cost. In our HD video battery loop check, the Honor 9x lasted a barely underwhelming 12 hours and 37 minutes earlier than the battery discharged fully. The cellphone comes with a 10W charger, which takes over two hours to totally cost the cellphone. We’ve got seen telephones from Xiaomi and Realme provide quicker charging in the identical value bracket.
Honor 9X cameras
On paper, the Honor 9X affords pretty spectacular cameras for its value, however the precise output is a combined bag. The principle 48-megapixel digicam takes 12-megapixel pixel-binned images by default. These photographs regarded okay, with first rate distinction and dynamic vary, however common particulars at finest The digicam app’s AI mode tends to spice up distinction and saturation, so we needed to manually flip it off to seize correct colors.
Within the case of precise 48-megapixel images, particulars have been higher, however at the price of noise. What we did not like was the oversharpening accomplished to the images, making them seem noticeably comfortable. We additionally typically received blander colors in images captured on the full 48-megapixel decision underneath direct daylight. Autofocus was dependable in daylight, however in low-light eventualities, we needed to cope with some focusing errors.
Indoor pattern taken with the Honor 9X (faucet for full-sized picture)
Shut-up HDR pattern taken with the Honor 9X (faucet for full-sized picture)
Daylight pattern taken with the Honor 9X (faucet for full-sized picture)
Selfie pattern taken with the Honor 9X (faucet for full-sized picture)
We’ve got seen noticeably higher color replica, sharpness, and dynamic vary captured by the 48-megapixel cameras on the Redmi Be aware Eight and the Realme 5 Professional. Honor has not specified the make of the sensor it has used.
The 8-megapixel wide-angle digicam turns out to be useful for bringing extra objects right into a body. The pictures captured are once more simply common, however there was a noticeable distinction between the color tone of images captured by the principle digicam and wide-angle photographs of the identical scene, significantly when it got here to dealing with greenery and vivid colors. Distortion was additionally a difficulty. Honor says that the Honor 9X makes use of distortion correction algorithms, however warping was evident in wide-angle images. In addition they turned out much less sharp.
The two-megapixel depth sensor does a good job at delivering a depth-of-field impact in images. There’s a devoted aperture mode within the digicam app that lets customers alter the depth of the blur impact. It does a great job of highlighting an object or particular person within the foreground, however edge detection just isn’t at all times correct. Different digicam modes embrace slo-mo, mild portray, transferring image, and stickers.
The largest shock to us was the devoted evening mode. Pictures captured utilizing the evening mode exhibited higher particulars and colors have been introduced out extra, however they appear grainy on zooming in, and are comfortable across the corners. Relying upon the ambient mild, the evening mode takes as much as 4 seconds to seize a number of exposures at numerous ranges, and delivers a last composited picture that’s considerably higher than what you possibly can seize in the usual picture mode.
The usual picture mode may detect low-light eventualities and lift the ISO degree, however this blows away the true colors. In truth, the Honor 9X’s evening mode is among the higher implementations of this characteristic within the sub-Rs. 15,000 value bracket.
Low-light pattern taken utilizing the usual picture mode (faucet for full-sized picture)
Low-light pattern taken utilizing the evening mode (faucet for full-sized picture)
Low-light pattern taken utilizing the usual picture mode (faucet for full-sized picture)
Low-light pattern taken utilizing the devoted evening mode (faucet for full-sized picture)
The 16-megapixel pop-up selfie digicam is once more simply common. We famous that the digicam module pops up slower than what we’ve seen on the likes of the Realme X and the Redmi Okay20, though these fashions are costlier. As for picture high quality, selfies have a wholesome quantity of element, however even with beautification and AI deactivated, the Honor 9X does smoothen pores and skin textures. Within the case of portrait selfies, the digicam typically erratically blurred elements of our ears. Portrait photographs, regardless of wanting vibrant, lacked depth and infrequently had background parts blown out, particularly these shot in daylight.
The principle digicam can seize video at as much as 1080p at 60fps, whereas the wide-angle one is proscribed to 30fps. Fortunately, the first digicam doesn’t battle with focus looking and the AIS (“AI image stabilisation”) does a good job at negating actions. Nonetheless, dynamic vary might have been higher and colors seem barely hotter than these of the true objects. But once more, movies shot by the principle digicam and the wide-angle one confirmed a discernible distinction in color profiles.
Verdict
The Honor 9X’s notchless full-HD show is a welcome characteristic at its asking value, and the cellphone’s design additionally stands out. Nonetheless, it’s a bit on the bigger facet which might make dealing with a little bit awkward for some folks. The efficiency of the Honor 9X is sweet for day-to-day duties, however a greater processor with extra graphics prowess would have improved the gaming expertise.
Regardless of packing three rear cameras, the Honor 9X doesn’t provide something noteworthy when it comes to picture high quality or options. Pictures turned out nearly common when it comes to high quality, apart from these taken in low mild. That is the place this cellphone rises above equally priced opponents. Battery life is sweet, and customers can simply recover from a day of normal utilization.
The Honor 9X is an efficient sufficient cellphone and can attraction to those that worth type, nevertheless it lacks what it takes to decisively edge out its rivals, and even some fashions priced a bit decrease. The likes of the Redmi Note 8 (Review), Realme 5 Pro (Review), Vivo U20 (Review), and Nokia 7.2 (Review) are higher all-rounders and provide extra worth for cash.
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