Honor recently launched their successor to the Honor 8X in India the honor 9X, while honor 9X was earlier launched in China and Europe. The Europen variant of the honor 9X is launched in India with rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and ancient Kirin 710F. The honor 9X is priced at Rs 13,999 for 4GB +128GB variant. Here are our first impessions with the device.
Design
In terms of design, the Honor 9X Looks very good. The device is made of glass and metal and has light curves on the corners and at the back, so you can hold the phone well. Because of the pop-up selfie camera, the front consists of just a (large) and almost borderless screen. There is no LED light for notifications present. On the right side, you will only find the on / off and volume button. At the top, you will find a SIM card tray and the pop-up selfie camera, and at the bottom a regular headphone jack, a USB-C charging port and the speakers. The back of the phone is the busiest with a triple camera, an LED flash and a fingerprint scanner.
Hardware
The most striking feature of the phone is the 6.59-inch LCD screen with a 1,080 x 2,340-pixel resolution. The screen is clear, sharp and responsive enough for a mid-range device.
The Honor 9X is powered by an ancient Kirin 710F, with 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage memory. The performance of the device isn’t great. The Kirin 710 uses an old ARM Mali-G51 MP4 GPU.
The performance isn’t great considering the SOC that are compared with are old and it still looses to them, while the current mid-range SOC Snapdragon 665 and Snapdragon 712.
The performance when compared to the competitors in the market is below average and just a mediocre performance.
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The camera performance is good but it is not good enough to make the device stand out of competition. The 4000 mAh battery offers more than enough energy for a day of regular use. The device supports only 10W charging so you don’t get any fast charging support in the device which is very disappointing.
The sound is fine, sufficiently loud, but not of the outside category. Unfortunately, face unlock is missing.
Software
Due to the problems with the US government, Huawei is currently unable to release new devices with Android. In Honor parent company Huawei has solved this by 9X base on the Huawei Y9 Prime. The Honor 9X is a Huawei Y9 Prime, with an adapted main camera. Also, an update to Android 10 is promised. In addition to Android, the device runs on EMUI 9.1. However, we are not optimistic about the future updates cycle of the device as recently honor play users were denied an update to Android 10 and had to settle with Android Pie (9.0) with 1 major Android update.
Conclusion
All in all, the Honor 9X is not an exciting upgrade over 8X. The large and fine screen will appeal to many. The performance is average, the device does not heat up and the battery is on the large side. The 9X, in any case, a good successor to the Honor 8X. If you are looking for an almost identical device then Huawei Y9 Prime, but if you looking for a cheaper device, then you could consider the Huawei P30 Lite/Honor 20i. This device is powered by Kirin 710F and has a 6.15-inch LCD screen with selfie notch but otherwise looks very much like the 9X.
