Honor X9b Review: A Mid-Ranger With More Downsides Than Upsides
Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has made a triumphant return to India, but its latest offering, the Honor X9b, struggles to make a strong impression in a competitive market. While the phone boasts a sleek design, a massive battery, and a seemingly capable camera, its performance falls short of expectations, especially considering the competition. This review delves deep into the Honor X9b’s strengths and weaknesses, ultimately revealing why it’s a tough phone to recommend.
Honor X9b Review: Price in India
The Honor X9b is available in India for Rs. 25,999 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It comes in two colorways: Midnight Black, featuring a basic polycarbonate rear panel, and Sunrise Orange, which adds a touch of vibrancy with a bright orange vegan leather rear panel. We reviewed the Midnight Black variant.
The phone arrives in the box with a clear TPU case, documentation, a Type-C to 3.5mm headphone adapter, and a pair of wired earphones. It also includes the usual Type-A to Type-C USB cable for charging but, unfortunately, no charger is bundled. For an additional Rs. 699, you can purchase the optional 30W charger.
Honor X9b Review: Design
The Honor X9b immediately impresses with its slim profile and curved sides. The polycarbonate rear panel and the display glass seamlessly curve around the edges, making it comfortable to hold. It’s surprisingly lightweight, weighing in at just 185g with a thickness of 7.98mm. The curved edges contribute to its premium feel despite the polycarbonate frame.
Honor claims that the X9b can withstand a drop from 1.5 meters thanks to its Ultra-Bounce Anti-Drop display technology. This proprietary shock-absorbing cushioning material, consisting of three layers, is applied to the frame, supporting the display’s curved edge glass panel. While the phone did survive a few drops in our tests, a direct impact on the display resulted in a shattered screen. While the display layer remained intact and functional, it’s clear that the "Ultra-Bounce" tech won’t protect against every impact.
Regrettably, the phone’s sleek design is marred by its dust and fingerprint magnet rear panel. The matte surface makes it almost impossible to wipe off fingerprints, leaving the phone looking smudged after just a few hours of use. This is a significant drawback at this price point, especially when considering competitors like the Realme 12 Pro, which boasts an IP65 certification at a similar price.
The X9b offers a basic IP53 rating for dust and water resistance, but this seems insufficient given that the rubber seal around the SIM card tray can easily come off when pulling or pushing the tray. This makes the water resistance claim questionable.
Despite this drawback, the sleek 6.78-inch curved-edge display is a highlight. It boasts thin bezels, creating a premium appearance. While it does attract smudges, they are easily wiped off.
Honor X9b Review: Specifications and Software
The Honor X9b deviates from Huawei’s usual silicon preference, opting instead for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 SoC. This 4nm processor clocked at 2.2GHz was launched in 2022 and is already being replaced by the faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 SoC, found in competing devices like the OnePlus Nord CE4.
The phone is equipped with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and offers 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, which is not expandable. For connectivity, it includes dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.1, NFC support, a USB-C port, dual-band 5G standby with two nano SIM cards, and the standard global positioning systems. However, the 30W wired charging support feels dated in a market where competitors offer 67-100W charging speeds.
The software experience remains familiar to those who have used older Honor and Huawei devices. The Honor X9b runs Magic OS 7.2, which is oddly based on Android 13. Honour promises only two years of Android updates and three years of security updates, which is limited, especially considering the phone is stuck on Android 13.
Magic OS is essentially a tweaked version of EMUI, Huawei’s software for its globally sold devices (EMUI is still available in the Chinese market). The icons have a refreshed appearance, but the overall interface hasn’t changed much.
The 120Hz refresh rate display significantly enhances the software experience, making interactions feel smooth and fluid. The icons offer extensive customization options and themes, resembling OnePlus’ OxygenOS’ Personalization section. The consistent use of the Honor Sans font across the interface, including the Chrome web browser, provides a cohesive look and feel.
Additional features include AI app suggestions, displayed as a widget on the home screen, and Magic Text, which lets you extract text from screenshots, proving useful.
Honor X9b Review: Performance
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 performs as expected in this price range, comparable to devices like the Realme 12 Pro and OnePlus Nord CE4, but lagging behind more performance-oriented phones like the Poco X6 Pro.
This translates to a smooth and lag-free software experience, adequate for casual users, but with some hiccups when gaming. The phone scored 4,87,774 points in AnTuTu, 939 points in Geekbench’s single-core test, and 2,763 points in its multi-core test. For graphics performance, it managed 60 FPS in GFXBench’s T-Rex test, 31 FPS in Manhattan 3.1, and 16 FPS in Car Chase.
While the phone did not exhibit overheating during gaming, the 240Hz maximum touch sampling rate felt inadequate for fast-paced games like Call of Duty: Mobile. Although Asphalt 9: Legends ran smoothly at high quality graphics with no hiccups, the phone offers a limited gaming experience.
The 120Hz refresh rate delivers buttery smooth animations and transitions within Magic OS but does not significantly impact the mid-range gaming performance. The display provides good outdoor brightness, ensuring text and images are legible even under direct sunlight. You get accurate color reproduction when choosing the natural screen color mode.
Battery life is a standout feature of the Honor X9b. The 5,800mAh battery delivers an impressive 1.5 days of heavy usage. Casual use, without gaming or camera usage, can stretch that to two days. Our standard video loop battery test produced a remarkable 25 hours and 43 minutes, slightly lower than the OnePlus Nord CE4’s performance, but still impressive.
However, charging is a significant drawback. The 30W (or 35W) wired charging speed is relatively slow compared to competitors offering 67-100W charging. What’s worse, Honor doesn’t include a charger in the box, forcing you to purchase the optional 30W charger separately. It took 1 hour and 54 minutes to fully charge the phone, a frustrating experience when compared to the competition.
Honor X9b Review: Cameras
The Honor X9b offers a basic camera setup for a mid-range device. It features a 108-megapixel primary camera (lacking OIS), a 5-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera, a 2-megapixel macro camera, and a 16-megapixel front-facing camera for selfies.
The camera interface feels clunky and unintuitive, with important settings buried in the camera settings menu. However, the intuitive clicking sounds when switching camera modes add a classic camera vibe.
The primary camera captures 12-megapixel binned images by default. While the high resolution is promising, daylight photos are only "okay". The resolved details are passable, but the camera often overexposes images, leading to blown-out highlights. A noticeable pinkish tinge is also present in all images.
The 2X digital zoom offers the ability to get closer to your subject, but the image quality suffers significantly, with noticeable degradation in textures and sharpness. The primary camera struggles with shot-to-shot consistency, a crucial aspect for phones in this price range.
In low-light conditions, image quality drops further in Auto mode, resulting in slightly pixelated photos with flattened textures. Switching to Night mode improves the situation, yielding decent images with defined edges around objects, but still falling short of the competition.
Selfies captured in Auto mode showcase decent detail and good dynamic range, but switching to Portrait mode reveals average edge detection and blown-out backgrounds, rendering the photos unusable. Selfies captured in low light are acceptable with the on-screen flash enabled, but suffer from over-sharpening, noise suppression, and blown-out highlights in Portrait mode.
The ultra-wide camera, with its paltry 5-megapixel resolution, produces underwhelming results. Images show overexposure, purple fringing, and textures that resemble oil paintings, lacking definition. Low-light images are soft and blurry.
The 2-megapixel macro camera, as expected, delivers passable results in macro photography. While it allows you to get closer to subjects, you’re better off cropping images from the primary camera for better quality.
4K videos at 30fps appear shaky when walking or panning, even when stationary. While exposure and detail are decent, the shaky footage becomes a major drawback. 1080p 30fps videos offer better stabilization and results, but frequent overexposure in daylight remains a problem. Low-light recordings benefit from 4K resolution, though they do suffer from noise.
Honor X9b Review: Verdict
While the Honor X9b is practical in terms of battery life, the Honor 90, currently retailing at a discounted price of Rs. 27,999, offers significantly better value overall.
Compared to its rivals, the Honor X9b struggles to stand out. The OnePlus Nord CE 4 offers similar performance and battery life, but surpasses it with a better software experience, cameras, and super-fast 100W wired charging. The Poco X6 Pro delivers superior performance for gamers, while the Nothing Phone 2A boasts a unique design, a bloatware-free software experience, and good performance. If you’re willing to spend a few thousand more, the Realme 12 Pro+ provides superior camera performance, a telephoto lens, a unique design, and an IP65 rating.
Given the strong competition in the mid-range segment, it’s incredibly difficult to recommend the Honor X9b. Its lackluster camera, outdated charging speed, and relatively limited software updates make it a tough sell when compared to the more compelling offerings available.
