Honor 9i Review: Minimum Bezel, Maximum Camera Smartphone

Honor 9i Review | TelecomDrive.com

Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has been quite consistently coming out with great smartphones – Honor 8 Pro is truly amazing and working on the similar lines, Honor 9i comes with super impressive set of features in a unique affordable price point.

This device is available at Flipkart for INR 17,999. We extensively reviewed the device while on a trip to Taipei, Taiwan.

Honor 9i comes with 18:9 display and the screen isn’t the only positive that can be associated with smartphone. This is the one of its kind device that sports four cameras making it quite unique offering in India today.

Honor 9i - Design Elements

In keeping with today’s trend of super thin bezels and big displays – Honor 9i packs in more surprise for customers than any other smartphone in this range. It packs a huge 5.9-inch display with slim borders all around.

The big display means that the metal earpiece, sensors, and front cameras have been pushed right to the upper edge. The fingerprint scanner is at the back and you get a clean front face.

The curved sides and edges of this device provide a super comfortable feel when the device is in hand. Honor 9i feels quite solid as it comes in a metal unibody.

With this smartphone, Honor has kept the LED flash, cameras, and fingerprint scanner down the center of the smartphone. Honor 9i has a Micro-USB port for charging and data transfers, it comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack and the loudspeaker on either side.

Honor 9i Software and Specifications

Honor 9i has a 5.9-inch FullView screen that comes with 18:9 aspect ratio and FHD+ resolution (1080x2160 pixels). The display is bright enough for indoors as well as outdoor situations. We had a wonderful experience while reviewing this in and around Taipei City.

When it comes to camera - Honor has used dual camera setups on both the sides. The primary rear and front cameras of this smartphone have 16-megapixel camera and 13-megapixel sensors respectively. Both come paired with 2-megapixel secondary camera sensors which are used to capture depth information and to enable portrait mode. With Honor 9i, you get a single LED flash at the back and a soft selfie flash on the front side.

Honor 9i comes powered with a Huawei Kirin 659 SoC, which has eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores. This smartphone carries 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage which is expandable with the help of the hybrid dual-SIM slot. This smartphone comes packed with a 3340mAh battery which is quite sufficient to deliver a power-packed performance in a day.

Honor 9i uses the company’s custom interface called EMUI. You get EMUI 5.1 on top of Android Nougat. The software experience runs quite smooth and there are gestures that simplify taking screenshots and launching applications. Honor has done it in style – for instance, you can double-knock to take a screenshot or do a two-knuckle tap to start screen recording. While reviewing this device, we found that these are designed in a very special way to save critical time for users.

Honor 9i battery life, and cameras

Honor 9i delivers great performance on its 3340mAh battery. The phone does not heat up when running day-to-day tasks such as making voice calls, watching videos, taking pictures and playing games etc. And yes, watching videos and playing games deliver an added punch of excitement with this phone – because of the bezel less screen.

Honor 9i is a very special device and the biggest feature for this smartphone is its unique camera setup. Launch the camera app and you get controls for the flash, aperture mode, moving picture mode, and portrait mode. You can swipe right from the default screen to access the different shooting modes.

Light Rail Shots 

The camera setup offers carefully designed features – which are ideal to deliver great photography results. Apart from HDR, panorama, and video, you can get pro modes for both photos and videos, slow-mo, filters, effects etc. You also have the option to download more modes if you wish to. Pro mode lets you adjust different parameters like ISO, shutter speed, exposure, focus and white balance.

Below are some pictures that we took with this device - while in Taipei City

Honor 9i can record videos at 1080p and just to make things all the more interesting, you can also use beautification while recording video with the front camera of this device.

Final Verdict

Honor 9i is a future-ready device that is offering great features for this price point. This device offers great processor power which is good enough for most people's daily needs. This device holds great potential for Honor to increase its marketshare in India.