Honor X9b review: A mid-range smartphone with ‘super’ display

Honor X9b: Display is king

With the X9b, Honor has seemingly decided to pin its hopes on what it is calling the “ultra-bounce anti-drop display,” which the company claims can withstand “1.2 times the impact of a drop, whatever that means.

The truth of the matter is that I am not quite equipped to do the kind of specialised testing to see if those claims are true. Honor says that the X9b is the “first phone to get a five-star overall drop resistance certification from Switzerland’s SGS.”Certifications like this are meaningless unless they provide a benchmark to compare against. What I can say for the phone is that my clumsy self dropped it twice — once from my bed a foot or two above the ground and one from my table that is less than a metre above the ground. There was no damage.

Also, my friend’s pet cockatiel Kiwi took a liking to perching on the phone when I held it up around him. Kiwi’s sharp claws scratch my shoulder when he sits on it, but it did nothing to the phone. Of course, I am not sure how much of that can be attributed to the applied screen protector and the free transparent case that comes with the phone.

The Honor X9b seems to be cockatiel proof. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

But there is one thing that I can say about the screen. It is brilliant.

The massive 6.7-inch screen has a 2652×1200 (1.5k resolution), giving it a very high pixel density of 429 pixels per inch. The sides of the phone’s screen curve away from the user in a way that reminds me of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. Maybe that is not what you remember that phone for.

I am usually sceptical about phones that have a curved display because I am not sure how well they deal with palm rejection but that did not seem to be an issue here. That may be because the actual screen does not really curve as much as the glass’s design makes it appear.

The Honor X9b’s screen does not actually curve all that much. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

The hole punch cutout for the selfie camera is centred on the top, and the bottom bezel or the “chin” of the phone, is only slightly larger than the one at the top. But that did not distract me from the screen that I was glued to for hours on an end. Everything from Instagram reels to movies on Amazon Prime and anime looked crystal clear on the sharp display. It also seemed to be more than capable of reproducing colours very accurately.

Even in bright sunlight, you don’t need to jack the screen’s brightness all the way up to use the phone. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

Honor X9b: Performs honourably enough

The phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset. That is a bit of a disappointment considering that the Realme 12 Pro Plus, [which is similarly priced] comes with a Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset. The Honor X9b comes with 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of internal storage.

Honor X9b’s AnTuTu score.

But that was more than capable of handling most of the mundane tasks I was able to throw at it. It got a score of 4,97,480 when I ran version 10.2.1 of the AnTuTu benchmark, which is far from impressive. But benchmarks don’t always give the full picture and the phone was more than sufficient for the mundane tasks that I threw at it.

While it was good enough for things that most average users would need a smartphone for, I would not recommend it if gaming is a major concern for you. The phone sometimes struggled with SimCity, a relatively light game, when I played it for extended periods of time or even switched between it and other apps. The back of the phone also got warm to the touch.

But otherwise, the smooth UI animations and the 120 Hz refresh rate combine for a very fluid daily usage experience. I am not the greatest fan of Honor’s MagicOS after using Samsung’s OneUI and OnePlus’s OxygenOS for years. However, this disdain was something I got past within just days of receiving the phone.

Another thing that impressed me was the one-and-a-half day’s worth of usage I got out of a full charge of the 5,800 mAh battery. I removed all the app timers I usually use, and this meant multiple hours spent watching media on Instagram and scrolling through Twitter and Reddit. Thanks to this phone, I am no longer worried about leaving my phone charger back at home or at the office. I know the phone can get me through the day

Honor X9b: Big and unwieldy

So, the phone has a great screen and a great battery and gives a good software user experience. But after that, things slowly start unravelling for the Honor X9b. To begin with, there is the sheer size of it. I don’t have small hands by any means but I really struggle to use the smartphone one-handed. Also, the lock button and the volume button are placed absurdly close together for a phone of this size, and I found myself hitting the wrong button many times, even after using the phone for a week.

Also, the volume and power buttons of the Honor X9b are placed too close together. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

It is not that the phone is particularly heavy. It is not. It is also not too thick. But reaching small UI elements on different parts of the massive screen can get quite inconvenient without shuffling the phone around your palm. It also got quite uncomfortable in my front pocket whenever I rode my motorcycle, restricting my movement a fair bit.

Then there is the design. The review unit I got is called the “Midnight Black” variant. This gives you a black plastic back that is fairly reflective. I do not mind the colour or even the use of plastic, since there is no way I will use any phone without a case. The problem is the camera bump.

The camera bump is dominated by two concentric gold circles that dominate the top half of the back of the phone. In the middle of the inner circle are printed the words “Matrix AI Vision Camera.” (We will get to that in a bit. Honor claims that it incorporated “high-end watch design” on the phone. I do not see any way that can be true unless the high-end watches were found in Palika Bazaar. Overall, the gold circles and the printed text combine for a very tacky look in my opinion. But looks are subjective and I am sure many will like the aesthetic that Honor is going for. Also, even though I haven’t seen it in person, the faux leather back of the Sunrise Orange variant might work better with the bling on the back.

Also, because of the way in which the cameras are placed on the island in the back, if you switch from the normal telephoto lens to the wide-angle module, you get a completely different angle, especially if you are very close to the subject in question. That brings us to the camera.

Honor X9b: Average cameras

The 108 MP “AI Vision Camera” on the phone gives me full faith that artificial intelligence or even artificial general intelligence will never take over the world. The camera system on the phone is quite a hit or miss, with an emphasis on the latter.

That is quite heartbreaking for me because the main 108 MP camera seems formidable in some situations. The image below was taken at  5.43 PM in the evening, and the lighting conditions were ideal. I love how it reproduced many of the colours faithfully despite so many things happening in the image.

I like how the Honor X9b’s 108 MP camera handled this image, ignoring the washed out sky. (Sethu Pradeep Express photo)

But the camera is not good even when conditions are ideal. The image of the white flower below was taken with natural light at around 8 AM. Again, the lighting conditions were ideal. I even tapped on the flower in the viewfinder and dragged down the exposure. But despite that, the flower was overexposed and the image lost most of the details of the subject. The built-in AI mode on the camera identified that a flower was the subject but seemed to be unable to do anything about it. The results were pretty much equally as bad with AI on or off.

It is also almost too easy to miss focus on the phone. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

You can see the same thing happening again in this photo I took just ten minutes later. If you ignore the blur caused by the pigeons’ movements, you will see that the white pigeon once again seems to be overexposed, having nowhere near the amount of detail that you can see for the darker-coloured pigeon right next to it.

Here you can see how one pigeon’s details are lost. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

And when lighting conditions are less than ideal, all hell breaks loose. In the image below, what you see on the right is what I saw when I clicked the shutter button. The overexposed noisy mess on the left is the image that I got. The only way this would be an ideal scenario was if I was taking images of a crime scene at night. The AI clearly was not “smart” enough to understand that was not what I was going for with the soft lighting and the bunch of roses.

What I saw (right) vs what I got on the Honor X9b. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

The phone also has a 3X zoom mode, which takes a cutout from the reading of the main 108 MP sensor. Essentially, digital zoom. I found this 3X zoom mode to be mostly unusable because of the non-existent image stabilisation on the phone. The one saving grace is perhaps that the colour reproduction remains fairly consistent from wide-angle to telephoto.

It is not that the camera is incapable of taking decent images, it just fails to do so consistently. (Sethu Pradeep / Express photo)

Honor X9b verdict

Many of the Honor X9b’s shortcomings are put into context by its price tag. At an event in Noida on Thursday, the company launched the phone on Amazon, at a starting price of Rs 25,999. If you have an ICICI bank card, you can get a Rs, 3,000 discount to take the price to Rs 22,999.

This places it squarely against the Realme 12 Pro, which costs the same and has the same processor, and the Poco X6 Pro, which costs Rs 1,000 more but comes with what seems like a much better processor. Pitted against its competition, the Honor X9b clearly wins the aesthetics race. The camera island on the back and the muted Midnight Black shade looked tasteful and understated in comparison.

At the price point, the question between the Honor X9b, the Poco X6 Pro and the Realme 12 Pro is about what compromises you are willing to make and what you prioritise in a phone. If you want the best processor you can get for the money, for the Dimensity 8300 ultra chipset. If you want a better telephoto lens, you might want to go with the Realme 12 Pro.

Reading the reviews of those phones as well will help you compare and consider these extremely closely-priced devices. If I had to make a choice, I would go for the Honor X9b. Its looks may not be to my taste, but I believe it looks better than the competition. I love the screen and the battery life, and it is just about powerful for most of my daily needs. I don’t mind spending Rs 22,999 on this phone but I will have to carry my mirrorless camera in my backpack when I want to reliably capture great images.