Honor is quite well known for making stellar budget smartphones. The company has now again launched a new phone that’s not a pinch in your pocket. The Honor 9N is a gorgeous looking heavy duty smartphone with its prices starting at INR 11,999. However, a state of the art design is not the only thing that motivates you to buy a phone as a smart user. So, we decided to review the Honor 9N thoroughly to figure out whether it delivers what it promises.
Honor 9N: What Do You Get when you Unbox!
Honor 9N comes in a fairly standard cardboard box and on unboxing you find:
- The smartphone itself
- A hard-back plastic case
- Adapter for charging
- Micro-USB to USB-A cable
- A tool for SIM removal
- Documents (User-manual, warranty)
These are all pretty usual inclusions given with every smartphone falling in this price range. However, Honor 9N scores brownie points with the thoughtfully put plastic case.
Honor 9N: Summing up the Specifications
Here are all the details about the hardware that Honor 9N packs in:
- Dimensions: 149.2 x 71.8 x 7.7 mm
- Phone Weight: 152 g
- Display Specifications:5.5.84 inches. 1080 X 2280 pixels. 19.9 ratio
- Processor: HiSilicon Kirin 659
- RAM: Has two variants of 3 GB and 4 GB
- Storage: Comes in variants of 32 GB, 64 GB, and 128 GB
- Primary Camera: 13 MP + 2 MP
- Secondary Camera: 16 MP
- Battery: 3000 mAh
- Operating System: v8.0 (Android Oreo)
- Available sensors: Fingerprint scanner at the back, accelerometer, proximity sensor and compass
- Connectivity Options: Wi-Fi 80.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth 4.2
Honor 9N: The Build and Design Analysis
Honor 9N takes a leaf out of the book of costlier phones and truly resembles Honor 10. The horizontal dual camera placement and the glass back are a classic staple of the Honor series of phones. The glass back comes in a solid color of your choice.
Thankfully the smartphone doesn’t cut costs or compromise when it comes to assuring a great build. The phone feels exceptionally solid and the glass on glass making gives a premium layer to the phone’s look and feel. The size is also perfectly balanced for one-handed use because it’s not too large or too tiny. In this age of bulky and clunky heavyweight smartphones, Honor 9N comes as a sigh of relief.
Honor 9N: Dissecting the Display
This phone comes with a really commendable 5.84-inch display with a lovely 1080 x 2280 pixel resolution. The 19.9 aspect ratio gives users the flexibility to read eBooks or browse social media easily. The colors are great and the phone offers excellent viewing angles. It has a notch at the top but then again every Android manufacturer has been making notched smartphones for a while. Apart from that, you will have absolutely nothing to complain about display wise.
Honor 9N: Understanding the Interface
Honour 9N comes with EMUI 8.0 which is the standard interface for all Honour phones. The phone runs Android 8.0 Oreo which means that you don’t really have to worry about an updated operating system right now. EMUI has a lot of customizability features and more tweaking options over the stock Android interface which is great! But this also means that you will have to deal with a few bloatware apps. Also, the vibrant colors of EMUI might not be everyone’s cup of tea. You might find strong influences of iOS and that is something you might love or detest. But apart from the look, EMUI is quite effective in terms of accessibility, functionality, and usage. If you are a fan of changing themes on your phone, EMUI comes with its own theme store. It further offers several wonderful features such as gesture-based functions, fingerprint-based app lock and face recognition based unlocking.
Honor 9N: Does it Pass the Performance Test?
Honor 9N comes with Huawei’s in-house Kirin processors which previously made a mark because of their stability but fails to pack a punch when it comes to this latest Honor phone. The phone has a proper up to date processor and GPU and comes with decent RAM and storage but where it suffers slightly is a day to day performance. You might feel irritated with the long app launch time and restarting time. This makes for a jittery smartphone experience which you might find really unsatisfactory and clumsy. The biggest problem with the phone is that it fails to multitask and run 3-4 apps together even though it has a decent amount of RAM. However, the phone runs heavy duty games like Asphalt 8 quite well with an extended loading time and a few drop frames now and then as the only concerns. You might find the animations really weird since they are not at all fluid making for a not so smooth user experience. However one can always expect these problems to be fixed with updates to Honor 9N.
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Honor 9N: Looking Closely at the Camera
If you have used an Honor phone before, you will know that their cameras are usually excellent and Honor 9N is quite up to the mark in that regard. The primary dual lens camera is quite decent when it comes to brightly lit environments and the photos have great detail and are low on noise. However, in low lit situations, you might find it really difficult to focus on subjects unless you are experienced in smartphone photography. The front camera, however, falls a little short because of the soft, grainy pictures it takes and if you like your share of selfies, this phone might not be the right fit for you.
Honor 9N: Surveying the Battery
If your average use of a phone includes a couple of hours of calling, web browsing and social media usage along with an hour of listening to music and gaming, the Honor 9N’s 3000 mAh battery should do you good. It will not offer you the best battery life in this price range but the battery is stable enough to get you through the day without running out of charge. However, if you play a lot of games, watch a lot of videos and prefer really fast charging you might not want to go for this phone.
Honor 9N: Definitely Pretty but NOT a Great Performer
Honor 9N does have its share of strengths. It looks beautiful and the design makes it look really expensive and you will love the build quality. But the performance is inconsistent and can really annoy you and the front camera is not exactly out of the ordinary. If you are ready to embrace the jitters and patiently wait for Honor 9N updates, you can definitely give this a shot. Here’s hoping that the phone’s performance improves and lives up to the excellent design and build.
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