Honor 9N Review | Premium Looking Budget Device

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Honor 9N is a pretty impressive device with a solid build and premium design. It has a pretty big display for the price. It performs well in day to day usage and also has a decent camera. The 9N is surely a great device for the price. Let's take a look at the in-depth review of the device itself.

Design and Build

Starting off with the design, the Huawei Honor 9N looks surprisingly good. It has a Glass back construction which looks totally premium. Although, the glass is prone to the fingerprint smudges just like any other glass back device. Nonetheless, the glass looks premium and is soft to touch. The front of the Honor 9N houses a small notch but a significant chin with Honor branding.

Honor 9N is surely on the light side as it very comfortable to use every for an extended period of time. It is also quite sleek at 7.7 mm thickness and weighs only 152 grams. The comfortable usage experience is coupled with 4 different colored variants-Lavender Purple, Robin Egg Blue, Sapphire Blue, and Midnight Black. Personally speaking, the Sapphire Blue look the most premium among all the four color options.

Moving to the front, the Honor 9N houses a 19:9 display with a notch housing the essential sensor like the earpiece, selfie camera, proximity sensor, and the ambient light sensor. There are no physical or capacitive keys on the front. The dual SIM tray can be found on the left while the power key and the volume rocker can be found on the opposite side

On the top, there is just a noise cancellation mic and at the bottom, you can find a Micro USB.charging port, a single speaker and the audio jack. On the back of the device, there is a Dual camera unit along with a fingerprint scanner. Overall, the build quality of the Honor 9N is pretty great but the glass back is more prone to damage than a metal device and 9N also lacks an IP rating.

Display

One of the best aspects of the Huawei Honor 9N is the display. It packs a beautiful 5.8 inches IPS LCD 19:9 display with a resolution of 1080x2280 pixels. It also packs a solid pixel density of 432 pixels per inch. Such high pixel density makes the display sharp. Honor 9N embraces a small notch but the chin is considerably bigger. Also, the bezels around the display aren’t exactly small but none the less, it is a big and immersive display.

Moving on to the quality, the color reproduction of the display is great. It is plenty sharp and the colors are nice and saturated. There is also an option to customize the white balance of the display but there are no controls regarding the saturation level. Talking about the sunlight visibility of the display, it’s pretty average as the display is also quite reflecting making it hand to use in direct sunlight. Apart from that, watching movies or videos on this display is pretty enjoyable and immersive.

While the display on the Honor 9N doesn’t have the WOW factor, but it is a very good display for the price.

Performance and Software

The Honor 9N is not a device for the power users. Why did we say that? Well, it houses the old HiSilicon Kirin 659 Octa-core processor which is coupled with the Mali T830 MP2 GPU. The honor was already using this SoC with its previous-gen smartphone like the Honor 9i, hence, it is not the latest or most powerful SoC today. For basic tasks like media consumption, web browsing, social media etc, the Honor 9N was able to handle them pretty well. However, when it comes to gaming, the less intense games like the Subway surfer works smoothly but intense games like PUBG will immediately make the device sweat. While playing PUBG we noticed that the graphics are turned down to Low for smoother gameplay. Hence, Honor 9N is not meant for heavy gaming.  

The Honor 9N comes in three different variants depending upon the storage and RAM.

• 128GB Storage and 4GB RAM
• 64GB Storage and 4GB RAM
• 32GB Storage and 3GB RAM

Although, it also supports memory expansion up to 256GB using a Micro SD but you have to trade in the second SIM slot due to the Hybrid SIM tray. As a recommendation, we suggest any of the 4GB RAM models because of better multitasking capability.

Honor 9N is another skinned Android device. It is running on Android Oreo 8.0 out of the box with the EMUI 8.0 skin on top. The EMUI skin is quite similar to the MIUI and has some design hints from the iOS too. With that being said, the Honor 9N comes with preinstalled bloatware but there are some useful features too like the gestures or stock app message filter. 

Also, the EMUI 8.0 feels much faster and responsive compared to any previous iteration of the EMUI. With that being said, navigating through the UI and opening/closing app feels smooth. However, it is still running on Android Oreo with no official note on the Android Pie release.

Camera

The Honor 9N sport a dual camera setup with a primary 13 Megapixel sensor along with a 2-megapixel sensor. It comes with Honor’s own camera app which comes with plenty of features like HDR, panorama and a full-fledged Pro mode which lets you control various elements like Shutter speed, ISO, White balance etc. It also provides the option for AR stickers and there are many other filters which you can download in Honor’s AppGallery.

Coming to the quality, it is pretty average at best. It can capture some good shots in daylight with accurate colors and decent sharpness. The wide aperture is also a hit or miss with poor edge detection, however, it offers the option to adjust the blur even after taking the photo. Moving to the low light, and the performance starts to degrade even more with plenty of noise creeping in the image. The overall performance in the low light is just poor. The rear camera can record videos at 1080p in 30fps which is a disappointment as some other phones in the same segment can do 1080p in 60fps.   

The 16 Megapixel front camera on the Honor 9N also performs just average with decent photos in the day but poor shots in the night. The Front camera also has the portrait mode feature which allows taking portraits shots by using software algos to blur the background. However, it feels like a gimmick with poor edge detection. Overall, Honor 9N is not meant for people especially looking for a good camera in a budget smartphone.

Battery Life

The battery on the Honor 9N is not enough to make it through a heavy work day. It has a 3000 mAh non-removable battery under the hood which is very small compared to the other devices in this segment. We test the device with frequent phone calls, some less intense gaming sessions, youtube, and social media and the phone required recharging at the end of the day.

With that being said, there is no fast charging support either which means slow charging speed on an already weak battery. Also, Huawei has used the old-school Micro USB charging port while most of the device in the segment is are already moving to the new Type-C standard.

Other Features

Honor 9N is a dual SIM device which supports Dual Standby. The device is LTE compatible which means faster data speeds. However, it uses a Hybrid SIM tray which means the second slot can either hold one memory card or one SIM card at a time. Other connectivity features on the device include WiFi, Bluetooth v4.2 and AGPS.

There are a bunch of sensors on the device including Fingerprint (rear-mounted), accelerometer, proximity sensor, and a compass. Apart from these, it lacks NFC and the IR emitter. The rear-mounted fingerprint scanner is easy to reach as placed in a spot on position. It is fairly quick in unlocking the device. Also, it works most of the time hence, no issues with the reliability.

There is facial recognition unlock feature too on the Honor 9N which is pretty quick and takes you directly to the home screen as opposed to the two-step process on the iPhone. It is a convenient way to unlock the smartphone but it struggles in low light conditions or in direct sunlight.

Speaker on the Honor 9N is decent as it is a single down firing speaker. The sound is loud but it can be easily blocked while holding the device in landscape mode. Also, there is a 3.5 mm audio jack which means you can connect any pair of wired earphones or external speaker and enjoy.

Should You Buy?

Well, Honor 9N is a pretty decent device for the price. It has some of the best design elements in this segment an looks quite good in the blue color. The display is also pretty good and looks quite immersive. It also performs well with basic tasks but suffers when it comes to a heavy workload. The camera on the device is good for daylight but no in dark conditions. Also, the battery life isn't that great either with pretty average battery.

Honor 9N is a device for anyone who is looking for a flash design but doesn't bother too much about the battery life and performance.

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