Honor X9b Review: Tough on the Outside!

Honor X9b is the latest offering by Honor in the budget segment of smartphones. It features a rugged, indestructible display with Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 at the core and a 108 MP main camera. The display is the highlight of the entire device, with the 5800mAh battery coming in a close second. In this article, we will share our review of the Honor X9b after using it for two weeks as our primary smartphone. Let’s get started.

Honor X9b Review: Design and Build

The Honor X9b comes in two color variants. We have been using the midnight black variant that features a matte black polycarbonate back panel with gold accents around the camera module. The phone is just 8mm in thickness due to it being curved from both the front and back. It feels dense and solid in the hand while just weighing around 185 g. The right side holds the power button and volume rockers, while the bottom has the single speaker, USB 2.0 Type-C port, and the sim tray with dual sim support.

While the Honor X9b is entirely made out of polycarbonate, it does not feel cheap or flimsy like some other similarly built smartphones. You can easily grip the phone with one hand without worrying about it slipping out and breaking because you literally cannot break the phone under normal circumstances, thanks to the Ultra Bounce display that it comes with. It also has an IP53 rating for protection against dust and light splashes.

You might not need additional protection for the Honor X9b, but Honor does provide a transparent TPU case in the box, and a screen protector comes pre-applied on the phone. What you don’t get in the box is a charger. Honor gives you a type-c to 3.5mm audio converter along with a standard pair of earphones. Overall, we like the design and build quality of the Honor X9b. It is a tough phone from the outside.

Honor X9b: Display and Audio

Honor X9b comes with a 6.78-inch AMOLED display that has a 1.5K resolution and refreshes at 120Hz. The display is curved on the sides, which gives an immersive experience while watching content, and it is bright enough to view outdoors with a peak brightness of up to 1200 nits. It also has an in-display fingerprint sensor, which is fast and reliable.

The display on the Honor X9b is bright and vibrant. The content-watching experience is very good, but it does not support any kind of HDR playback, neither on YouTube nor on any streaming platforms. It features a single speaker on the bottom, which gets loud but is easily blockable while watching content or playing games. There is no headphone jack, but Honor provides a type-c to 3.5mm converter in the box, along with some standard earphones.

Overall, the display on the Honor X9b is good for content consumption and daily usage but lacks HDR support, and the single speaker can be a deal breaker for some.

Honor X9b: Performance and Battery Life

The Honor X9b comes with the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. In terms of performance, it is just average. The phone struggles even during day-to-day usage with longer app opening and closing times. The camera app struggles to click pictures with a lot of delay, and the animations are jittery even though it has a 120Hz display. We guess that the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 is unable to handle MagicOS along with that 120Hz high-resolution display. The phone does not get warm, but the frame drops and stutters regularly.

In terms of battery life, the 5800mAh cell in the Honor X9b performs well and consistently gives over a day’s worth of usage with around 7 hours of screen on time. The phone can charge at a maximum of 35W, but unfortunately, you don’t get the charger in the box. It took around 90 minutes to charge the Honor X9b with our 33W Stuffcool charger.

Honor X9b: Software and Features

Honor X9b comes with MagicOS 7.2, based on Android 13. Although we like the software on the Honor X9b, shipping a phone with Android 13 in mid-2024 is just laughable at this point when all the other phones are on their way to get Android 15 updates. Keeping that aside, MagicOS is feature-packed, comes with a lot of quirks, and is aesthetically pleasing to look at.

It does come with some pre-installed bloatware, but all of them can be uninstalled. The Honor X9b also comes with NFC, which enables tap-to-pay payments and NFC accessory support. We don’t like the fact that there is no double tap gesture to lock and wake the phone. Also, you cannot swipe down on the home screen to pull down the notification panel.

In terms of calling, the Honor X9b sounds crisp through the earpiece. It has good network coverage with 4G carrier aggregation and good 5G speeds. Even the WiFi speeds are decent. Overall, Android 14 will be a nice touch to see on the phone, but otherwise, the Honor X9b has a good enough software experience.

Honor X9b: Camera Review

Honor X9b comes with a 108MP main camera, a 5MP ultrawide, and a 2MP macro camera on the back. On the front, there is a 16MP sensor for selfies. The pictures come out decently when there is a ton of light, but they start to fall apart as the sun goes down, and the camera also lacks OIS. Although the camera app is filled with features like dual-video and pro mode, there is a noticeable shutter lag in the camera app, which sometimes results in blurry photos.

The colors are a bit saturated as it boosts the reds and greens. The dynamic range is not handled very well in most scenarios, but the main camera surprises us from time to time. The selfie photos are soft and lack detail, but they manage to capture accurate colors while again boosting the reds in the faces of people. It can shoot up to 4K 30FPS videos from the back camera, which is usable, but the front camera is capped at 1080p 30FPS.

Overall, the cameras on the Honor X9b are fine for clicking random photos and videos, but do not expect anything amazing from this camera system. You can check out more samples from Honor X9b here.

Honor X9b Review Verdict

Honor X9b is a well-built, good-looking device that comes with a beautiful, unbreakable display and a huge battery, but it misses out in terms of the software, camera, and performance. If Honor could have packed this smartphone with a Snapdragon 7 Gen series processor like the Honor 90 along with better cameras, then it would have been a well-balanced device for the price. Right now, we would only recommend the Honor X9b to those who do not care much about the performance or the cameras. Otherwise, there are smartphones like the Poco X6 Pro with better performance, Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G with better cameras, Moto Edge 40 Neo with better software, and the Nothing Phone (2a) with a balanced feature set, which are all better devices compared to the Honor X9b at a similar price range.

Let us know in the comments if you would consider the Honor X9b as your next smartphone or which one you would rather buy instead of it.

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