The Honor 9 Lite may look stunning with its all-glass body, but is it a capable performer? We find out.
It’s just the beginning of 2018 and Honor has steamrolled the market with two phones launched within a span of a fortnight. While the Honor View 10 (review) is the company’s high-end premium phone, the Honor 9 Lite is a mid-range offering which sits right above the Honor 9i (review), which is also a quad-camera phone launched not that long ago.
In a lot of ways, the Honor 9 Lite is a culmination of everything that Honor brought to the table last year. The 18:9 Univisium display, dual cameras on both the front and the back and a refined, premium design. Hardware iterations have rarely been this perfected. While we don’t know the price of the phone as of now, looking at the specifications, it is safe to assume it sits in the mid-range category and incidentally, could cannibalise its own offering, the Honor 9i.
Yet, playing around with the phone over the weekend, I have a nagging feeling that Honor could be trying a bit too hard at cracking the premium mid-range market. There’s very little separating the Honor 9 Lite and the relatively cheaper Honor 9i, save for the refined design and an improved software experience. Yet, those same differences make the phone a more attractive buy over the Honor 9i, and a lot of other phones in that range, for that matter.
Design
If the past year was about perfecting the metal unibody design, the Honor 9 Lite is an indication that glass bodies are making a comeback in 2018. And why not? The iPhone 8 has a glass back now. A quick look at the Honor 9 Lite will remind you of the iPhone 8 Plus, with the mirror-like glass finish and the dual camera placement. And that’s not a bad thing at all. In all fairness, the Honor 9 Lite feels more premium than a phone with metal finish, which most will agree have now become a tad monotonous. The finishing looks quite elegant and the minimalist take on the design left us impressed. It’s quite compact as well with a 5.6-inch display packed in a 6-inch body. The taller display left no space for the physical home button, so the fingerprint sensor now sits at the back and it’s a mighty fast one at that.
Despite the good looks, its longevity could be questionable. The Honor 9 Lite sports a double-sided 2.5D glass enclosed in a metal frame. There’s no antenna lines as the glass body itself doubles up as the network receptor. Honor claims there’s 12 layers of protection on the glass surface with a special coating on top that prevents scratches. While impressed, we were left with a pressing concern. How durable will the phone be after a few drops? It’s even more concerning as the glass back makes the phone slippery as hell. So if you are a person with butter fingers, you may have to use the phone with caution, or slap a case on it.
The phone also comes in three of the most attractive colour variants. There is a Seagull grey variant which looks quite premium and classy while the midnight black variant is the usual shiny black variant and there is the navy blue variant that is simply stunning to look at.
Display
The 5.65-inch panel on the Honor 9 Lite is densely packed with pixels. At 2160x1080p resolution, the phone has a pixel density of 428ppi and that shows in the punchy, vibrant colours the display can reproduce. Honor has stuck with an IPS LCD panel for the phone, but unlike most Honor phones, this one doesn’t seem to have that slight cooler tint. Instead, we found the display to be quite colour accurate. Honor also gives you the option to play around with the colour temperature as well as the resolution which can be dialed down to 720p to save battery.
The 18:9 aspect ratio also means some apps will not be compatible with the display. You will find games like Injustice 2 cropped from the sides, although streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube adjust automatically to the new resolution.
The phone also seems to have tight viewing angles. LCD panels usually have a wider viewing angle, but during the limited time we tested the phone, we found text to be illegible beyond 60 degrees.
Performance
The Honor 9 Lite is powered by a mid-range HiSilicon Kirin 659 chipset coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of RAM. There’s also a variant with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Initial testing shows the performance of the phone is commendable. There are no lags in operating the phone although Honor’s EMUI platform is a known performance deterrent. The phone is heavy on transition animations, but during testing, we did not face any noticeable slowdowns. However, while playing Asphalt 8, we did see the phone become warmer.
The Kirin 659 chipset houses an octa-core processor with a max clock-speed of 2.36Ghz which is faster than a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset but not as fast a flagship chipset. Nevertheless, the Kirin 659 was also used to power the Honor 9i and the Honor 7X, so the raw performance shouldn’t differ much from the current lineup of Honor phones.
The Honor 9 Lite runs on the latest EMUI 8.0, based on Android 8.0, which Honor claims has an improved system response rate by 60 percent and operationally 50 percent smoother than the previous EMUI 5.1. The phone also uses the F2FS (Flash-friendly File System) file storage format that improves sequential read-write speeds over the more popular EXT4 system, allowing apps, photos and documents open much faster.
Camera
Honor has been launching phones with dual cameras for quite some time now, and starting with the Honor 9i, the company started fitting twin cameras both at the front and the back. The Honor Lite is also a quad-camera phone with 13+2-megapixel cameras on both the front and the back. Honor’s application of dual cameras uses the extra 2-megapixel camera for depth information and apparently to improve low-light performance. The camera is super-fast with negligible shutter lag. The phone leveraged the portrait mode using a combination of hardware and software. There is an option to dial the aperture up or down, before and after taking the shot. The same portrait mode is also there for the front camera. But for the limited time we tested the phone, the camera(s) left a lot to be desired.
Left: Portrait Mode using Honor 9 Lite Right: Portrait Mode Cropped to 100 percent
Honor’s version of portrait mode is clearly software-based unlike phones like the OnePlus 5T, which makes the application quite volatile. For one, portrait shots tend to be overexposed while the blurring around the edges are often inconsistent.
Left: Landscape shot using Honor 9 Lite Right: Landscape shot cropped to 100 percent
Both photos shot with Honor 9 Lite have accurate white balance
Landscape shots come out quite controlled. While it could be argued the photos are true-to-source, they lack the dynamics and saturation we have become used to from other phones in the same price range. Although, the photos seemed to have a more accurate white balance than most of its rivals. However, the camera can produce sharp details as seen in the image above.
Both shots taken under incandescent lighting show signs of noise while the colour dynamics are weak
Dual cameras notwithstanding, the low-light performance of the phone also wasn’t up to the mark. We found the results to be quite noisy and not at all as promised by Honor in their marketing campaigns.
Software
It’s been three months since Android Oreo came out for the masses and we wouldn’t expect anything less than the current version to power the phone out of the box. And in that regard, the Honor 9 Lite left us impressed.
While there are no facial changes to the interface, there are some new additions here and there. Since there are hardly any bezels, EMUI 8.0 has fake-touch-detection that prevents touches around the edges to register accidentally. There are more options to manage notifications, but we couldn't turn on picture-in-picture on any app, which should be enabled by default.
There also instances of multiple apps for the same purpose. Google Photos and a separate Gallery app, a proprietary email app along with Gmail. There is also the usual bunch of Honor bloatware that cannot be uninstalled. Incidentally, we also realised the phone does not support 5GHz Wi-Fi connections, so the Wi-Fi speed will be limited to 50Mbps even when you have a faster connection.
There are also instances of the AI chops that we saw in the company’s flagship Honor View 10. Features like smart scene recognition can detect faces and objects and tune the photos accordingly. A certain gender beauty mode can detect the gender of the person in the photo and apply beauty effects accordingly ( sexist much?).
Battery
The Honor 9 Lite sports a 3,000mAh battery which the company claims can last the phone for a day without charging. The phone supports Huawei’s Super Charge technology, which is the company’s version of fast charging. But to its detriment, the phone has a micro USB port at the bottom and not a USB-Type C which is more mainstream in 2018. We will reserve our opinion on the battery life in our detailed review.
How it compares
The premium mid-range smartphone category is quite an ambitious category. Veterans like Motorola have pitched their tents with offerings like the modular Moto Z2 Play (review) and the compact Moto X4 (review). There are also populist players like Vivo and Oppo with their camera-centric phones. It is among these giants that the Honor 9 Lite walks. And owing to its stunning design, it might grab eyeballs without even doing anything, and once it does, it sort of fits in with the rest of the competition, making the choice even mroe difficult for the consumer.
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Subhrojit Mallick
Eats smartphones for breakfast. View Full Profile
