FoneTips-Phone Expert Review And Tech Tips: Huawei

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Honor 9X Review: Budget smartphone with best in class camera performance

10:22:00

Design

The Honor 9X has a dual 3D curved panel at the back, made of plastic but has a glass-like finish. The back of the phone is slippery, however, the curved edges give you a good grip. The glossy back also has quite smooth and fingerprint marks. So, it is best that you use the transparent case that comes bundled with the phone.

The Honor 9X has a 6.59-inch FHD + LCD display with a notch-less design. Honor has avoided the notch with a pop-up selfie camera making 9X the first device to adopt this popular 2019-trend in smartphones.

The best part about the design of the phone is that it sports both a USB-C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Honor 9X also has the option of dual nano-sim or nano-sim and a microSD card. The smartphone has a physical fingerprint sensor on the rear.

Display

The Honor 9X packs a 6.59" LTPS IPS LCD screen with impact-free rounded corners, and notch-less display.

The screen has an extended 1080p resolution - 2,340 x 1080 pixels - making for a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 391ppi density.

Honor 9X posted good numbers for brightness and contrast ratio - 464 nits and 1285:1 -but not best in its class.

The color representation of Honor 9x is very accurate to original. The viewing angles are very good but in sunlight, it seems to struggle but very little and unnoticeable. Overall display is good.

Battery

The Honor 9X is powered by a 4,000 mAh battery. It supports 10W charging, and the provided 5V/2A adapter refills about 27% of a depleted battery in half an hour, which is not that hot. Since phones like Realme 3 pro comes with 20W fast charger we felt that Honor 9x had to push itself more in this area.

The Honor 9X scored an excellent rating in our battery life test with a 99h endurance. It did great on all tests - you can talk for more than a day, watch videos or browse the web for half a day, and the frugal standby consumption helps a lot, too.

Performance

The Honor 9X has a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, and it's performance is the best in terms of speed and accuracy. As it contains pop up front camera, face Unlock was not available on our Honor 9X

Magazine lock screen nowadays are becoming popular so Honor 9x also packs magazine lock screen style that changes the picture every time you wake up the screen.

The Honor 9X is powered by Huawei's own midrange Kirin 710F chipset. It's made on a 12nm process (its efficiency was already proven in the battery chapter), and it features an octa-core CPU in a 4x2.2 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4x1.7 GHz Cortex-A53 configuration. The GPU is a Mali-G51 MP4. The international Honor 9X is available only with 6GB of RAM but Indian version contains 4 GB RAM. The Kirin 710 chipset also performs well. Whether powering through day-to-day tasks or running more intensely demanding games, we found no hint of lag or sluggishness. The Kirin 710F doesn't make the Honor 9X hot so you don't feel any problem with multitasking and moderate gameplay.

When we put the phone through a benchmark test on Geekbench 4, it returned a multi-core score of 5,246, which is actually lower than the 5,552 we got for the Honor 8X. On Geekbench 5, we got a score of 1,264. These benchmarking scores are not best in this price range as we have seen better scores in some Realme and Redmi devices.

The Honor 9X contains EMUI 9.1, which is based on Android 9 Pie. It has all Google services and complete access to Play Store. And in future, you don't have to worry about updates as you will be provided latest Android updates and security patches.

Overall performance is good but not the best in its class.

Camera

The Honor 9X has the same triple camera on its back as the Huawei P30 Lite. The primary is a Sony IMX582 48MP PDAF f/1.8 snapper, an 8MP fixed-focus, f/2.4 ultra-wide, and a 2MP, fixed-focus, f/2.4 depth sensor with LED flash.

With a default shooting resolution of 12MP, the Honor 9X can capture plenty of detail even without ramping things up to the sensor’s maximum 48MP resolution.

Just like the OnePlus 7T Pro, it down-samples the pixel-count to deliver better noise-handling and dynamic range in challenging conditions, though in good lighting or manual mode with a long exposure, you can afford to shoot at the camera’s full resolution.

The 9X’s primary camera is incredibly competent in well lit environments given its price. Detail is sharp, and it’s able to handle high-contrast scenes relatively well. That said, the ultra-wide camera can struggle; 8MP is the lowest resolution we’d expect from a secondary camera on a phone these days, and the ultrawide doesn’t give you much room to play with shots once captured.

When the lights drop, things across both cameras can get muddy, with detail in shadows being completely lost. This is particularly noticeable when capturing tricky objects like black cat fur, but it even struggles with typical scenes like night skies.

Fortunately, the night mode comes to the rescue for the main camera, helping out with exposure times of in-excess of 20 seconds if you can steady the Honor 9X on a surface. That said, the long-exposure trick also works when shooting handheld, grabbing a roughly 4-second exposure, though this doesn’t work nearly as well.

This night mode also doesn’t engage the ultra-wide camera, which is a shame and relegates the secondary camera’s use exclusively to well-lit conditions.

Fortunately, the depth sensor seems to work across a range of conditions, from well-lit to indoor. It was able to generate respectable separation between background and foreground, and if you shoot in aperture mode, you even have the option to adjust the focal point after a shot is taken.

With a maximum video resolution of 1080p at 60fps, the Honor 9X falls behind on this front. Significantly cheaper phones like the Redmi 8T feature 4K capture now, as does the Oppo A9 (2020). Still, capture is held together well, with electronic stabilization helping things along, and unless you’re shooting in middling to low light, detail is on-point.

The Verdict

The HONOR 9X prudently justifies its tagline #UpForExtra by promising some extraordinary features along with a powerful performance at an affordable price. All in all, it is currently the best-budgeted smartphone in India to feature a pop-up selfie camera and bezel-less display.

Huawei