What is the Honor 9?
The Honor 9 is one of the most affordable phones that looks, feels and acts like a top-end mobile. It even beats the OnePlus 5‘s price.
At £379, the Honor 9 is £70 cheaper than the OnePlus 5, and just over half the price of the Samsung Galaxy S8.
Given it’s also a rock-solid Android phone in almost every respect, it’s a no-brainer for those looking for a low-compromise mobile at a friendly price. You’ll find better low-light camera skills and more consistent battery performance elsewhere, but the Honor 9 is one of the best mid-range buys of the year so far.
Honor 9 – Design
For those with a budget that tops-out at the Honor 9’s £370, the main big-brand alternative to this phone is the Samsung Galaxy A5. That’s a nice phone. A great one, even.
However, the Honor 9 makes it look pretty plain. This phone has a multi-layered structure that reacts to light, making its body shine. In sunlight, eye-catching gradients streak across its back.
The Honor 9 also has proper curved glass on its back, swooping around at the corners for a smooth feel. Compare this to the block colour and only 2.5D glass of the Samsung Galaxy A5 and the Honor clearly seems the more striking phone.
Granted, the blue version I’ve been using may be a bit much for some of you. The Honor 9 also comes in silver, grey and gold.
There’s Gorilla Glass 3 on its front and back, and aluminium coated to match the colour of the rest of the phone on the sides. The Honor 9 may not have the very latest generation of Gorilla Glass, and the Galaxy S8 uses Gorilla Glass 5 instead, but if that’s what it takes to add up to a £300 saving, I’m happy with it.
One of the many positive things about the Honor 9 is quite how easy it is to handle and hold. As long as you’re not a person who complains glass phones are always slipping out of their hand like a clumsy cartoon bear fishing for salmon, that is. The screen isn’t huge so the footprint is fairly small and at 7.5mm thick it’s slim.
It’s shown up by the Samsung Galaxy S8, which fits a much larger screen into a narrower frame. However, it’s unrealistic to expect Honor to be able to shoehorn in the very latest ultra-thin screen surround design in a phone at a mid-range price.
That said, the Honor 9 is out to court precisely the people who think the cost of Samsung Galaxy S8s and iPhone 7 Plus phones is ridiculous. The look, feel and most of the specs of the Honor 9 are those of a top-end mobile, and this year Honor has even undercut the usual price champ OnePlus.
Any compromises aren’t immediately apparent either. All the usual trapping are here. There’s an extremely quick fingerprint scanner below the screen, an excellent 64GB of storage with microSD expansion, and build quality in general is comparable to that of the top Samsungs. The fingerprint scanner can also be used as an alternative to the soft keys with swipe gestures along the pad replacing them.
There’s even an IR blaster on the Honor 9’s top edge. I was surprised to see this as they’re about as fashionable as bumbags, but in this case they have the utility without the apparel embarrassment. For those who haven’t used one before, it’s the same tech used in TV remotes, and is just a little black dot on the top of the phone.
A preinstalled app lets you programme the Honor 9 to take on the role of several remotes at once. Like every phone IR blaster to date, hardly anyone will probably use it, but it’s a godsend when even a sofa dissection doesn’t help you find the TV remote.
Honor 9 — Screen
The Honor 9 has a 5.15-inch screen, very similar to that of last year’s Samsung Galaxy S7 in terms of size. This is one part where Honor again has used sensible rather than mind-blowing tech, to get you 90 per cent of the result for around half the price.
It’s a 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD screen, rather than an ultra-high resolution OLED. At this size, though, you have to try to see the difference in sharpness between 1080p and the 1440p used by the Galaxy S8 and LG G6. It looks sharp.
This is also an all-round excellent IPS panel, with great viewing angles and very good contrast. A cheaper LCD phone can often look a bit dim from an angle, or make its image appear recessed below the surface. The Honor 9’s screen image is bold and seems so close to the display surface it might be about to crack through the glass.
Colour is on the oversaturated side, similar to the Sony Xperia XZ Premium in this respect, and there’s no way to tone this down. However, tones don’t look flat-out unrealistic and it’s in-line with how other high-end phones appear when first turned on. Deep colour is on trend.
Like other Honor phones, there’s a colour temperature control that lets you tweak how warm the display looks, and an eye comfort mode that makes it appear very orangey to cut down on blue light. The idea is to reduce eyestrain and attempt to stop late-night Facebook binges ruining your sleep.
Honor 9 – Software
The Honor 9 runs the same Emotion UI software you’ll find in Huawei phones, and underneath it there’s Android 7.0.
Emotion UI is perhaps the most commonly-criticised of the third-party manufacturer interfaces, but the latest version makes a real attempt to address the long-standing complaints. Top of the list is the structure of the system.
Until recently, Emotion UI made you just use your home screens for apps, as there was no apps menu, like iOS but less tasteful. The Honor 9 lets you choose between this old style and a layout much closer to standard Android 7.0, with a vertical apps menu that stops you having to tidy your home screens as often as your bedroom.
You need to dig into the Settings menu to find this option, but it’s there. Much of the old awkwardness of Emotion UI is gone, and I now find it a perfectly pleasant piece of software.
The Honor 9 can be customised with themes, available through a Themes app, but just like those of HTC and Samsung, these can often make the phone look worse rather than better. The option of wildly stylised app icons is there for those who want it, though.
One slightly bitter part to the Honor 9’s software is quite how many preinstalled apps there are. As well as some basic Huawei utilities, there’s a folder full of Gameloft games and another full of recommended apps like TripAdvisor and eBay.
It’s particularly noticeable if you enable the apps menu as it end up clogged with the stuff, rather than being hidden in folders. It seems churlish to complain too much if this is what it takes to get the Honor 9 under £400, though. Apps can be deleted.
I’ve also rather enjoyed Huawei’s Health app, which works well as an everyday step counter.
Honor 9 – Performance
Crucially, the Honor 9 software also feels very fast. App loads are quick, I encountered no strange bugs and the very responsive fingerprint scanner only adds to the slick sensibility.
In recent years I’ve often recommended phones like the Moto G4 because they offer a satisfying Android experience for a fraction the price of a top-end phone. Phones like the Honor 9 remind you there is still a day-to-day difference between a truly powerful phone and an OK one.
This phone has the same CPU as the Huawei P10, which is currently around £170 more expensive, in the form of the HiSilicon 960, a high-end octa-core chipset.
It has four Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53s, where a cheaper phone will tend to use all Cortex-A53 cores. Those A73s are in a league above: true performance cores with a lot more power.
Interestingly, the most popular high-end Qualcomm chipsets like the Snapdragon 835 use Kyro cores instead of the Cortex-A73 kind. The difference? The Cortex-A73 is a core designed by ARM where the Kyro is a “semi-custom” core designed by Qualcomm, but based on the building blocks of the Cortex-A73.
They’re different, but in the same league.
We see this in the Honor 9’s Geekbench 4 scores too. It earns 6160 points, a mammoth score only a few hundred points below the OnePlus 5 (6719) and Sony Xperia XZ (6492). Those phones use the Snapdragon 835 and 820 CPUs respectively, showing that the HiSilicon chipset isn’t too far behind despite using standard cores rather than the trendy Kyro kind.
I would not suggest the HiSilicon 960 is a match for the best from the Snapdragon series, though. It uses the 8-core Mali-G71 graphics chip, which is not as powerful as the Adreno 540 of the Snapdragon 835. And the Exynos 9985 seen in the UK Samsung Galaxy S8 has the 20-core version of the same graphics chipset.
As the Honor 9 has an ‘ordinary’ resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, the difference doesn’t seem to translate to any obvious real-world deficit, though. Games like Asphalt 8 run extremely well on the phone.
It is perhaps one reason to consider the OnePlus 5, however, if you really like to plan for the future.
The Honor 9 does have a generous 4GB RAM, so we can’t see that becoming a day-to-day performance roadblock any time soon. It’s DDR4 RAM, too.
Honor 9 – Camera
The Honor 9 has dua cameras on the back linked together as a team, and as usual there’s a single selfie camera on the front.
Phone fans may be familiar with this setup already. Dual camera phones popped up originally four years ago before being dismissed as a bit of a gimmick, only to resurface more recently with extra reasons to exist.
The Honor 9’s dual cameras have three justifications. First, the original use for dual cameras: it lets the phone map out a quasi-3D view of any scene, to discern between the foreground and background. A wide aperture simulation mode can then blur out parts of the image further away from the subject for an arty look.
A few years ago these bokeh modes were fairly wonky, but like the iPhone 7 Plus, the Honor 9’s is now quite useful and can make portraits and close-ups look far more dynamic.
The second use for the dual cameras is low-loss zooming. Its strategy is different to that of the iPhone 7 Plus, though, whose second camera actually has a more ‘zoomed-in’ field of view. The two Honor 9 rear cameras have the same focal length.
One of the Honor 9’s cameras has a 12-megapixel sensor, the other a 20-megapixel one. Shoot at 1x or 2x zoom and the phone takes 12MP photos regardless, but it’s able to lean on the higher-resolution sensor when using the zoom so it’s not just relying on the standard digital zoom trick of cropping, expanding and smoothing the image out.
Is it effective? It’s not close to the iPhone 7 Plus in terms of bringing out more detail in zoom shots. However, there is a slight improvement, making the digital zoom seem less like a compromise.
The third argument for dual cameras is general image quality, because the Honor 9 can use the information from both sensors to make a photo. While this makes sense in principle, it doesn’t appear to have much effect on the results here, which are comparable with those of a normal good-quality 12-megapixel phone camera.
Dynamic range and detail are fairly good and the Honor 9 recreates very natural-looking colour. This is a phone I’d be happy to use as a holiday camera, particularly on those days when lugging around my FujiFilm X-T10 seems like a bit too much effort.
Among its high-end peers the Honor 9 is a solid middle-pegging contender. I’d rather use it than the Sony Xperia XZ, but the LG G6, Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8 beat it on a few fronts.
Up-close the Honor 9’s image could be a little cleaner and in low light its performance is only OK, largely because it does not have optical image stabilisation and has a slower lens than the rest with an aperture of f/2.2.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 (and S7) in particular produces much better low-light images as they really max-out the use of stabilisation to keep sensitivity levels low for better image quality. I’ve also found that the Auto mode doesn’t bring out as much shadow detail as it could, but you can always fix this in the edit.
Consider the price difference and you can only conclude the Honor 9 is still a winner. It also benefits from good close-up focusing and plenty of modes that let you get more creative with your photography. Its monochrome mode produces high-contrast dramatic-looking shots, and there’s a manual mode too.
It can also shoot video at up to 4K resolution.
This isn’t the best phone camera in the world, but is among the very best at the price. The Honor 9’s selfie camera is also good, capturing a good amount of detail even indoors.
Its rendering of skin tones is sound, and typical of Honor there are some extra modes to play around with. A portrait mode attempts to blur out the background just like the rear camera’s wide aperture effect and there’s a Beauty slider that smooths-out your wrinkles and sucks in your cheeks for you.
In Tinder terms, that’s called cheating.
Honor 9 — Battery Life
The Honor 9 has a 3200mAh non-removable battery using high density lithium polymer tech. That sounds good when it’s 200mAh more than both the Honor 8 and much higher-res Samsung Galaxy S8.
In use I’ve found it to offer fair, but not particularly notable, longevity. I tend to stream a lot of audio, listening to podcasts and Spotify a good deal most days, and this seems to eat away at the battery more rapidly than some.
On days I’ve spent a lot of time plugged into headphones, the Honor 9 tends to drain down before bedtime.
If you don’t live your life like a Baby Driver wannabe with a soundtrack running in the background a lot of the time, you should be able to get to the end of the day with a little charge left. However, two-day use, or even a day and a half, feels a long way off for most enthusiastic phone users.
Charging is reasonably quick, getting you most of a refill within 40 minutes. However, it doesn’t use the quickest standard out there, with Honor’s own 9V, 2A solution. As with other elements of the Honor 9, charging speed is good but there’s better out there, if you’re happy to spend quite a lot more.
Honor 9 – Speaker
The same is true of the Honor 9 speaker. It has just a single driver that fires out of the bottom of the phone. Some recent phones that appear to have the one speaker actually use a second one in the earpiece area.
Sound quality is decent, with enough volume and bulk to the sound to make listening to all those battery-killing podcasts enjoyable. However, the sound dispersal isn’t the best if you’re playing a game or watching a video on the device. That said, if you’re watching something for more than a couple of minutes I’d hope you’d plug-in some headphones anyway.
Should I buy the Honor 9?
The Honor 9 is an interesting case. It takes over from the Honor 8, a phone released in 2016 that sold at the same price and didn’t seem like an amazing buy at the time.
Since then, the outlook has changed. Phones have become more expensive. The £70 gap between the Honor 9 and OnePlus 5 (£449) is the most important comparison, these two being the two obvious choices for those after a high-end phone at a lower price.
The Honor 9 isn’t a world apart from the Honor 8, but is does have a more attractive design, a somewhat-improved camera and double the storage. Changes made to Emotion UI also make it less polarising, as it can now be made to feel a lot more like ‘normal’ Android.
It’s enough to turn this range’s fortunes around. The Honor 8 was a fair buy, the Honor 9 is about the best you’ll find at the price.
Verdict
An antidote to £600 phones, the Honor 9 is a refreshingly good deal
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