Honor 9X Price in India

Honor 9X Price in India

The well-documented Huawei ban debacle in mid-2019 saw the future of Huawei thrown into question, but a relatively forgotten victim of Google’s ban on Huawei using its apps was Honor, the youthful sub-brand of the Chinese company. Future phones from this brand, including its main range as well as the Honor V and Honor X series, will no longer have Google apps.

The last Honor phone to be confirmed to have Google Mobile Services (GMS) is the Honor 9X, from the affordable X range of handsets, a phone which succeeds the Honor 8X. Affordable certainly is the name of the game here, with a modest camera array (well, at least compared to something like the Honor 20), and a middling chipset and screen.

Although the Honor 9X’s designers likely didn’t know it, the phone could be the last from Honor (outside China, where Google apps aren’t used anyway). So is it a decent final offering, and a reason to jump on the Huawei ship before it crashes, or should you turn down this last opportunity?

Design and display

For an affordable smartphone, the Honor 9X has a big screen. It’s a 6.6-inch display, which is a little on the large side for a smartphone, so unless you have rather big hands it may be hard for you to properly use the device.

The screen resolution is 1080 x 2340, so it’s a fairly sharp display, but the fact it’s LCD may put some people off. LCD screens are generally considered lower quality than more popular OLED-based displays, as they have relatively poor black reproduction and flatter looking colors. Saying that the Honor 9X has one of the best-quality LCD screens we’ve seen, with colors that seem to ‘pop’ more than competitors. Max brightness isn’t too high, though.

Thanks to the Honor 9X’s pop-up front-facing camera (which we’ll get to in a second), there’s no notch or ‘punch-hole’ taking up valuable screen space. Sure, there’s a fairly noticeable chin at the bottom of the screen, but generally, the 91% screen-to-body ratio is commendable.

The phone has a rather conventional design – it’s quite big, as previously stated, and feels a little heavy too at 197g. It has a Gorilla Glass front, and what feels like a Gorilla Glass back with plastic frame, however, Honor hasn’t confirmed its body materials.

There’s a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor quite high on the back of the phone, which we found rather convenient to reach, but this, of course, depends on hand size, so if you’ve got a smaller hand it may be out of reach. We used a UK release of the Honor 9X, but the device in China had a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, so if you’re importing the device from Asia, you might find it looks a little different.

Just next to the fingerprint sensor is the tri-lens camera array. It’s housed in a bump, but it’s a small bump compared to similar mounts on other phones and wasn’t as inconvenient as a result.

Back to that front camera – it’s fine, with a square design that’s pretty conventional as pop-ups go. The built-in drop detection system automatically recalls the pop-up camera when the phone is falling, so you’re not at risk of damaging it, but the pop-up takes a little longer than others to fully extend, so it is possible you could damage the camera if you dropped it from a low height.

You’ll find the volume rocker and power button on the right edge of the Honor 9X, and the bottom has a USB-C port. This type of port is industry standard, but some budget phones still use micro USB ports, so the presence of USB-C here is a treat, as it makes charging a lot quicker. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack. These are appearing in fewer and fewer phones, so if you still like using wired earphones this is one of the few recent handsets you can pick up that will still have a port for them.

The titular feature here is the rear pattern – when viewed at certain angles, the back of the phone has a 3D gradient ‘X’ pattern, similar to how the Honor View 20 has a ‘V’ pattern on the back. It’s a nice touch, and it makes the Honor 9X look that much more distinct, but the design can easily be concealed by smudges from fingerprints.

Battery life

The Honor 9X has a 4,000mAh battery, which is pretty decent as smartphone batteries go, and you’re never going to have to worry about running out of power halfway through a day with it.

We found that no matter how we used the handset, whether it was just to check Instagram now and then, or for streaming music and playing games, it could last a full day of use with ease. In fact, with light use, we could even get through two days without having to power up overnight, though we needed to turn off Bluetooth and avoid media playback to get this result.

When we put the Honor 9X through our battery test, which involves playing a 90-minute video at full brightness with Wi-Fi on and accounts syncing in the background, the charge dropped from full to 82%, so a fairly large drop of 18%.

Camera

Since Honor is a subsidiary of Huawei, we usually find devices from the company have pretty decent cameras; this isn’t the case with the Honor 9X though, as pictures we took with it felt decidedly ‘fine’ instead of the ‘great’ we’d expect from the company. Sure, the camera is a step up in terms of resolution from the Honor 8X, but there aren’t any huge new features.

The main rear camera is a 48MP snapper, which is joined by an 8MP sensor with an ultra-wide-angle lens, and a 2MP depth assist camera for improved portrait shots.

Let’s start with the main camera. Pictures taken with this generally looked good, as they were bright and detail was captured fairly well. Autofocus was pretty quick for close-up pictures, however, we did find that some shots looked fairly washed-out when we took them with the main camera.

Next is the ultra-wide snapper, which we had a few problems with. Firstly, there was notable distortion around the sides of ultra-wide pictures, which made some look a little bizarre. Also, ultra-wide snaps we took looked noticeably darker than standard wide-angle pictures, even if it was the same scene. This isn’t totally a bad thing, as ultra-wide pictures actually had richer colors, but it did lead to inconsistent snaps when varying between the lenses – and if you shoot a video which uses both, you’re going to find the colors changing constantly.

Finally, there’s the 2MP depth assist camera, which slightly helps for portrait shots for creating accurate background blur. However, we remain unconvinced on the benefits of a portrait-centric sensor when there’s no telephoto lens as a result, which is slightly more common on smartphone cameras.

Without a telephoto or periscope lens for zoomed pictures, there’s no optical zoom and a rather limited 6x digital zoom. Pictures taken at a zoom didn’t look awful, but since it’s quite a low max zoom, we found it easier just to take standard pictures and crop them ourselves.

There are some extra features and modes at play in the Honor 9X camera to enhance pictures you take – it’s not as wide a range of features as Huawei has been known to use, but it’s something.

The first is an ‘improved’ night mode, which takes low-light pictures with more detail and color. It works well, however, pictures taken in this mode looked almost identical to pictures taken with the main camera when AI scene optimization is on, as that applies a similar effect without you having to hold your phone still for ages. In short, the night mode felt a little redundant thanks to software advancements.

Our Verdict

The Honor 9X is a fine phone for its price range, and while it won't blow you away with its performance, cameras or display, it still works perfectly well as your day-to-day smartphone.

For

Durable pop-up camera
Has a headphone jack
Long battery life

Against

Rather big build
Cameras are okay, not great
Slow charging speeds

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