Honor 9X Pro

Honor 9X Pro

The Honor 9X Pro is an impressively affordable smartphone aimed at those looking for great hardware without the typically high price tag. Looking at the spec sheet, it almost seems too good to be true: you get a good-looking screen, plenty of storage, a 48MP camera, a big battery, and a reasonable fast processor.

But there is a catch: The Honor 9X Pro ships with no google apps or services, such as YouTube or Google Maps. This makes a very hard to recommend to the vast majority of buyers, especially when there are plenty of similarly price smartphone on the market with full access to play store and Google's extensive range of apps.

App Gallery is working instead of Google play store, you won't be disappointed by this otherwise well-performing phone.

 

Design & Display

The physical aspect of this smartphone is one thing that makes it stand out from the crowd. Honor has equipped the 9X pro with 6.6 inch LCD display complete with a full HD+ (2340 x 1080) resolution. The screen is quite pleasant to look at, although by default, it has a bit of a yellow tint to it. Fortunately, this can be quickly fixed inside the settings app bu adjusting the colour temperature slightly.

Honor has embraced the all-screen experience by adopting a pop-up camera system for selfie camera. It automatically activates when the selfie mode is opened inside the camera app but otherwise totally unnoticed.

These efforts have helped reduce the size of the smartphone but it feels chunky in the hand, especially with a case on. sandwiched between the front and rear panel is an aluminium frame. Among other things, it's home to a headphone jack and a side-mounted fingerprint scanner which is crazy fast. The back of the Honor 9X pro, on the other hand, is covered in glass. The unit i have features a cool gradient finish that shifts from purple to pink and an X-shaped logo on the back that's visible in certain lighting.

Display Type                                                  IPS LCD
Screen size (inches)                                       6.6
Touchscreen                                                   Yes capacitive touchscreen, multi-touch
Resolution                                                      1080*2340 pixels
Protection type                                               Corning Gorilla Glass
Screen to Body Ratio Calculated                   84.48%

Google Apps & App Gallery

That's one area where the Honor 9X Pro massively drop the ball, though because it ships without the Play Store and doesn't support Google wide range popular apps either. The Huawei App gallery does come pre-installed on the smartphone so buyers at least have an access to App store.

The lack of Google service is a fatal flaw from which the Honor 9X Pro can't recover. Even if there were no decent alternatives available, the Honor 9X Pro still wouldn't get a pass; the fact that there are plenty just compounds the issue.

Camera

There is a triple-camera setup on the back of the Honor 9X Pro, featuring a main 48-megapixel camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide-angle shooter, and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. The primary camera employs pixel binning technology - it combines four pixel into one - to produce superior 12-megapixel shots. Photos taken during the day are pretty decent, although the camera sometimes over-saturates shots. Taking photos indoors also produces satisfying results.

The secondary ultra-wide-angle is okay but far from amazing. The photos it produce in daylight are acceptable, albeit a little soft, but in low-light conditions and indoors, a big drop in quality compared to the primary camera is noticeable.

As for the front facing cameras, that's a 16-megapixel sensor. I was pleasantly surprised with this camera because it produce good selfies whenever lighting isn't a issue and display skin tones pretty accurately.

On the video side, the Honor 9X Pro supports up to 1080p at 60fps, though the electronic image stabilization only kicks in when capturing at 30fps. The capture quality lacks real detail, but it's acceptable considering the price of the phone.

Gaming Performance The result is a smoother experience and superior gaming performance. Processor-intensive 3D games like Asphalt 9 run without hiccups. Plus, if you are the kind of person who likes comparing benchmarks, you will see much larger numbers across all tests compared to the regular 9X.

Storage 

The 9X Pro comes with 256GB storage as standard. More storage is always welcome, and you have the option to expand it by a further 512GB with a microSD card. 

Battery & Performance

These two areas are the Honor 9X Pro's strongest points. Powering the smartphone is the in-house kirin 810 chipset coupled with 6GB RAM. 

The software of the smartphone feels very snappy thanks to the aforementioned chipset, and mobile gaming hasn't been an issue either. The later is boosted by Honor's GPU turbo 3.0 software, which boost system performance and reduce Soc power consumption by 10% when gaming.

Ensuring you get the most out of the Honor 9X Pro on a single charge is the 4000mAh battery. It easily lasts a full day with normal usage and probably stretch to 48 hours if you're a light user. 

verdict

Discounting the middling camera performance, it's hard to complain too much with the Honor 9X Pro as an overall hardware package. It's the phone the Honor 9X should've been in the first place.

Unfortunately, just like the recent batch of Huawei phones, It's incredibly hard to recommend the Honor 9X Pro in its current state.

With so many commonplace apps either missing or not officially supported in the AppGallery. It frequently felt like I was fighting the phone just to perform the basic tasks I'd except from any smartphone. Even some of the positives, such as the addition of NFC, are hamstrung by the software issues. what good is NFC when you can't get Google Pay ? (to be fair, some banks do provide their own payment apps in the AppGallery).