It's an incredibly crowded market, and Honor will have difficulties making a splash in this segment with the X9. The OnePlus Nord 2 is now also often going for just a little more than the Honor X9. However, a phone like the 2021 Poco F3 is still a strong alternative at a similar price point, with a better processor and a more modern Wi-Fi radio. It easily beats the much cheaper Samsung Galaxy A13 5G that’s more broadly available internationally. And with 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM, it is one of the more generous offerings when it comes to storage. The LCD screen also provides a generally great experience, with a 120Hz refresh rate you'll rarely see on phones in this price segment. Its battery life is impressive, and paired with quick charging, you should never be afraid of running low.
That said, the Honor X9 has quite some going for it.
Might and magic icon android#
It’s also a bummer that it ships with Android 11, even though Android 13 is already around the corner. Honor’s battery-saving measures are also utterly punishing for anyone who relies on apps running smoothly in the background, and to find out what’s wrong, you first need to know what the culprit is and then check in system settings. The home screen doesn’t feel well-thought-out with its lack of shortcuts and its tendency to throw up a different panel than expected when you hit the home button.
Might and magic icon software#
The software is another department that Honor just doesn’t nail. A lot of budget phone in this price range struggle in this department, though, like the US-only OnePlus Nord N20, so Honor isn’t exactly faring any worse than the competition. You really need to be prepared to be unhappy with the images produced by the X9, especially if you’re not patient enough to work around the software problems. The Honor X9 ticks a lot of boxes, but photography isn’t one of them. Yes, but don’t expect great photos out of it. To be clear, this is an issue that no retail unit should ever run into, but since it happened to my unit during the review process, I did not want to leave it unmentioned.
Might and magic icon update#
In the process of manually updating it to the production release over-the-air, a wrong update build was pushed to the device. Honor has assured me that this has only happened because the phone shipped with pre-release software. I was also unfortunate enough to run into an issue with a software update that ended up crashing and then factory resetting my review unit shortly before publishing this review.
At least there is a system-wide switch for this, allowing you to disable automatic battery optimizations for all apps at once. At least it’s pretty simple to overcome this problem - just head to the battery section in system settings, select App launch, and toggle off all necessary apps. You might not run into problems all that often, but if you’re using a service like Fairtiq that tracks your route to buy you the cheapest possible public transit ticket, you’ll run into issues pretty fast. Honor, like its former parent company, is also rather aggressive with killing apps in the background to extend battery life at the cost of background features.
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