The Honor 9 is Honor’s newest flagship phone. While It strongly resembles last year’s honor 8 it comes with it’s share of noticeable improvements making it stand out from its predecessor but can it hold up to competition?
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The Honor 9’s Design Refined from last year’s Honor 8
The design of this phone certainly has a premium feel with It’s curved glass back and beautiful glass finish consisting of 15 layers of class to give an aurora effect. The only negative we found with this design is the fact the glass back slides on just about any surface you put it on although the phone comes with an included case to protect from drops and scratches and makes the phone ever so slightly less slippery. The phone comes available in honor’s distinctive blue color but also in gray and black depending on your preference.
Specs and Features
Specs wise this phone is a clone of honor’s parent brand huawei’s P-10 flagship but at a cheaper price point. It sports Huawei’s own octa-core Kirin 960 processor backed by 4gb of ram. Storage wise the phones ships with 64gb of storage expandable to 256gb with an sd card.
The phone supports either dual nano sim cards or one sim and one micro SD card in the sim tray although it should be noted you can use only one for calls and one for data when 2 are inserted.
The display is a 1080p 5.15 inch ips panel, not amoled like on the oneplus 5 but still looks sharp with it’s 428 ppi and sports great colors and contrast. Brightness levels are decent in broad daylight. Battery life is great with the 3,200 mAh battery with it comfortably lasting a day with normal use. Charging is speedy thanks to the phone’s quick charger. The phone hosts a wide array of connectivity options. On top of the phone we have an IR blaster while the left hand side we have an ejectable sim tray and on the side opposite to that we have a volume rocker and power button. On the bottom we have a headphone jack, USB type C connector and a decent enough although not exceptional speaker. The fingerprint reader is now on the front of the phone and has no noticeable delay. The phone supports most cellular bands, WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC.
Software
The honor 9 runs on android nougat with Emotion UI 5.1. This skin heavily mods the android experience such as by default having no app tray but in exchange offers huge customization options and dozens of actually useful options such as the ability to include the app tray, and the ability to have 2 copies of the same app such as Facebook running on different accounts as separate icons on the phone, a feature as of right now only exists on honor and Huawei devices. Overall the UI, although different from stock android, isn’t only bloated up with useless features. It includes many useful tools and features to improve and customize the experience to the user’s content.
Camera
The phone sports a dual rear camera, almost the same as the one on the p-10 but without the Leica branding. It works by taking monochrome images from the 20mp camera and using the 12 mp sensor to overlay colors on the image. The end result is pretty great although with auto mode night shots can be hit-or-miss. The camera app offers a huge amount of features and shooting modes as well as full manual photo and video controls. Video can be shot at up to 4k resolutions at 30fps although without stabilization as the phones electronic stabilization is only available in 1080p and the phone has no optical image stabilization.
See some image samples here:
Conclusion
All in all this phone packs a pretty hefty punch for it’s 430 euro price tag. With it’s decent dual rear cameras great performance beautiful display and decent battery life, this phone is tough competition in the mid range market. At 70 euros less than the 500 euro oneplus 5 this phone rivals neck and neck with its more expensive rival and even with high end flagships. If you are in the market for a phone at this price range we strongly recommend you consider this phone.
