Honor 9i Review

Huawei launched the device back in October 2019, hence it is going to complete its one year living in a few upcoming months. Huawei lately has been doing a fantabulous job with a couple of past handsets. The phone in India is priced for INR 14,999 and compete against the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro and the Moto G6. Let us have a look at the device in the review ahead and see if it really makes it up in a well-composed format.

Design & Build

The Honor 9i comes with the latest in trend design with the huge display and thin bezel style. The phone incorporates a 5.9-inch display which comes with the 18:9 ratio. This does make the phone comfortable to hold. The phone gets a tall boy design, while as per the trend on the Honor 9i we don’t get the notch but here we get upper and bottom bezels.

Talking about the placements, starting from the back, the phone gets a dual camera unit at the back with flash placed just above it, and the fingerprint scanner just below the camera unit. We also get the honor branding on the bottom side of the back. On the front, we get the earpiece with the camera unit and the sensor to the top. On the right side, we get the volume button and the power button.

As far as the build quality of the device goes the phone with the premium metal and glass build feels premium. Especially the front 2.5D glass gives a smoother feel to the device. From the rear, the phone looks totally different from any other device which gives it a distinctive look. Overall the phone is good to hold and with its assorted colors, it looks really good and amazing to one’s eye.

Display

The phone comes with a 5.9 – inch display which is an 18:9 ratio panel. Huawei calls it the Full View display and offers the device with FHD+ resolution. The panel offers the colors with a good amount of saturation and vividness. The color temperature of the display is a bit on the warmer side which does make us boost the contrast to make the display look better. Officially there is no support for the same. Also, there are no official words on the glass used on the screen which makes us wonder about the scratches and drop protection for the phone. Although the company applies a plastic film to prevent the display from scratching until you get a glass guard installed.

Performance

The phone comes with Huawei’s own Kirin 659 SoC which has similar performance as the Snapdragon 630 from Qualcomm.  Apart from the processor, the phone gets 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internals which supports the phone for delivering a great performance.

The phone is capable of scoring 60,550 in AnTuTu while on GeekBench it is capable of scoring 3460 & 914 in multi-core and single core scores. These are the synthetic scores which make the device stand head to head with the competitions.

In Day to Day performance the phone is capable of doing most of the tasks apart from heavy gaming. Although most of the games are capable of running on the phone smoothly on Medium graphics we can observe a couple of stutters and lags while the game comes on an intensive corner. Currently, not all games are modified for the 18:9 ratio hence a couple of games have an issue to be run on Honor 9i.

Camera

Honor 9i is one of the first phones in India to feature 4 different camera units. The phone has a dual setup on the back while on the front also we get two different cameras. For the rear, we get 16MP unit paired with a 2MP secondary depth sensing sensor. While on the front we get 13MP and 2MP pair just like as we found on the rear. Assisting all the four sensors we have two flashlights to assist either on the front or on the rear.

The phone has a great camera application from the company. The interface of the application is quite simple with separate modes for video and photos. Talking about the camera performance the photos in the auto mode is good enough to be used for social media. The 16MP rear sensor is able to make for the most shots ranging from landscape to macros. When you need the DSLR like pictures you can even enable the 2MP sensor. Same goes for the front camera, for low light both the front units and the rear units are not so capable and the phone struggles to get some great images.

There are a lot of different software modifications available on both the front and rear cameras. The photos at times look over sharp in order to keep the noise under control. The colors and saturation are like natural photos, although we can tweak those from the settings. The photos at the time will look with a high amount of contrast, especially in the daylight.

Battery

Honor 9i offers a 3340 mAH battery, which makes it easy for us to stretch the device for day long. The phone’s battery is largely affected by gaming which sucks it like a glass of juice. Standby time on the phone is really great which can make the phone last up to 2 days without any charge. Hence if you mostly use the device for calling, and social media then at the end of the day you will be left with 30 – 40% of battery life.

Verdict

In the price range of 14,999, we get a lot of different devices which you must look at like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro, Nokia 6.1, Moto G6, and others. Although the phone is capable of fulfilling all your needs, in 2018 we have much better offerings which you must look at. The phone, on the other hand, is a great device with a great offer for you. But if the device gets a discount of 2000 INR or above then it will be a better deal package. What do you think about the device? Do let us know in the comment section below.