Honor 9X review: Above average phone with excellent design, long battery

At Rs 16,999 (6GB RAM), the Honor 9X is a good buy if you are wowed by its full-screen display and characteristic design. Not so much if performance and user experience are your top priorities

It's so much easier to pick a flagship phone. Most of them have discernible characteristics and one is not easily mistaken for the other. In contrast, the sub-Rs 20,000 category of smartphones is a muddled marketplace. Major players such as Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei and BBK Electronics (Oppo, Vivo and Realme) have flooded the market beyond recognition. You get more to choose from, but it is also considerably harder to zero in on that one phone. And there isn't that one phone anymore unless you know what you want from it exactly.

The Honor 9X makes that choice a bit easier. It's one of the few phones in the price range that come with a large, uninterrupted, almost borderless screen with a pop-up selfie camera. Other notable mentions include the Vivo V15 (Rs 16,440, Amazon), the Realme X (Rs 16,900, Amazon) and also the very similar Huawei Y9 Prime (Rs 15,990, Amazon), all of them released last year. Here's how the new model from Honor released in January 2020 fares in comparison.

Design and display 4/5

A bezel-less phone is an appealing design and Honor 9X does more to make it distinguishable. It's a wide 6.59-inch screen with a resolution of 1080x2340 pixels and a standard aspect ratio of 19:5:9. The selfie camera pops up from the left top corner of the screen on request.

The plastic back in the Sapphire Blue review unit that we tested does a cool trick. The surface reflects the light to make an X. It looks quite nice. The fingerprint sensor is placed at a convenient spot and is ridiculously accurate. It barely ever failed to recognise my fingerprints. Visually, one doesn't mind the triple-camera setup aligned vertically on the top with a flash under it, but the Honor branding in the bottom half could have been subtler. The phone is dual-sim, has a type-C charging and thankfully retains the 3.5mm headphones jack, which is critical in this price range.

Performance 3/5

\A 2.2 GHz, octa core, Hisilicon Kirin 710F SoC (System on chip) coupled with 6 GB RAM, forms the backbone of 9X's performance and it does not disappoint. It's not a top-end processor, though, and you can't expect games such as PUBG to run smoothly in the best graphics settings. The game when initiated advises medium graphics settings based on the phone's specifications and runs smoothly thereafter. It's only when you trouble the phone with a few more apps simultaneously that the frame rate in the gameplay starts to fluctuate...

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