Honor 9i

After introducing it with a different name in China, Huawei has launched its much-anticipated phone Honor 9i in India. The Honor 9i packs some remarkable features, it is the first phone in India to come with four cameras, it also comes with very narrow bezel 18:9 display. It shows us a glimpse of where the competition will be heading to in the future of budget smartphones. The Honor 9i comes in a premium metallic unibody design, it is very well built and comfortable to hold with its rounded edges. It comes with very less bezels and due to which it accommodates a huge 5.9 inches screen in the size of a typical 5.5 inches phone, which is a great thing! Despite the big screen and metal body, it manages to keep the weight at 164 grams.

It comes with the FullView FHD+ display with 18:9 aspect ratio and 2160 x 1080 pixels resolution with 407 ppi pixel density, the 18:9 aspect ratio is the new trend and is the feature which is usually seen in premium flagship phones, with only a few phones being able to implement it in the budget segment. The display quality is good, you will enjoy your apps, games and media on a long screen. Coming to the quad cameras on the Honor 9i, it features dual camera setup both on the front and back. On the rear, there is a 16 MP primary sensor along with a 2 MP sensor and on the front, there is a 13 MP primary sensor again with a 2 MP sensor. The secondary 2 MP sensors on the front and back are used to capture depth information and for portrait mode.

The picture quality of the rear camera is very good, it captures images with natural colors and good details, even the low light images also come out good. The front camera is again very good, it captures excellent selfies. It also comes with soft LED flash on the front. The portrait shots using the secondary cameras comes out good, it very well blurs the background but has some issues in identifying the edges. It can record 1080p videos from both the front and rear cameras. The camera app comes with beautification mode and lots of other modes, filters and settings.

The Honor 9i is powered by the 2.36 GHz octa-core Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 659 processor paired with 4 GB RAM. The performance is well enough for day to day operations and multitasking but, it lags with heavy games. So, heavy gamers should give it a miss. The phone runs on Android 7.0 Nougat based company’s EMUI 5.1, it is feature rich and provides lots of gestures and options like a private second partition which is totally separate from the primary partition, and can be accessed directly from the dedicated fingerprint. The fingerprint scanner on the back should have been more towards the center to make it easily accessible however, it is very fast and accurate.

It is a dual sim phone with 4G and VoLTE support. It comes with 64 GB of internal storage which is expandable up to 128 GB via microSD card but, uses a hybrid slot. It is backed by a non-removable 3340 mAh battery which delivers decent battery backup but, it could become even better with some optimisations. Sadly, it doesn’t support fast charging.

Honor 9i (Graphite Black):

Honor 9i (Prestige Gold):