Honor 9N is a luxurious little package at a budget price segment, and finally, Honor has an answer to Xiaomi’s dominant Redmi Note series. Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has been there in the Indian smartphone market for quite some time and the company has captured a good market share in a short span of time. Honor has been known for manufacturing beautiful looking smartphones with premium build quality, a powerful hardware and easy on price. And Honor 9N is no exception.
The Honor 9N continues the tradition by giving you great performance, good battery life and a decent camera. What really stands out for us though is the design and ergonomics. We have listed our top 5 features of the 9N, do give it a read.
Honor 9N: Top 5 Features
Excellence in Design
The Honor 9N takes a lot of cues from its expensive brethren in its design which basically means that you are getting a modern premium looking smartphone for quite an affordable price. No doubt the Honor 9N looks a lot like Honor 10 and which is good no? Having the same build quality and similar design at just half the price of its expensive sibling. The Honor 9N is essentially a glass sandwich with a plastic frame in the middle. The frame has been given a metallic coating which works well with the design language. The hand feel is absolutely fantastic and the 19:9 aspect ratio has helped Honor make a large screen phone that feels very comfortable.
Much like the Honor 10, the Honor 9N can also reflect light differently depending on how you look at it, and as a result, it can have this crazy psychedelic effect on your eyes. If that wasn’t enough, Honor’s choice of colors for the Honor 9N, Lavender Purple, Sapphire Blue, Midnight Black and Robin Egg Blue is crazier still. On the front, the Honor 9N comes with a notch up screen which you can also hide via software. The setup entails in a phone that can boast of a screen-to-body ratio of 79%.
AI-Powered Software
The Honor 9N ships with Huawei’s EMUI 8.0 which is running on top of Android 8.0 Oreo. The EMUi features a lot many tweaks and additions everywhere and for the most part, it works really well. The EMUI features include Wi-Fi Bridge, a feature that enables users to share any Wi-Fi network as a hotspot and connect up to four devices. Another feature of EMUI is, Smart face unlock which comes with closed-eye face unlock prevention and notification privacy. Also, there is a smart multi-tasking feature that enables split-screen mode automatically. Continuing with the theme of “smart” features, there’s also a smart dual Bluetooth connection feature that lets users connect two devices simultaneously.
Apart from all the above-mentioned features, the EMUI features a Ride Mode which is critical for a market like India where a whole lot of users travel on two-wheelers. Ride Mode basically hides away almost all functionality and even automatically responds to calls with a pre-programmed SMS to avoid distractions while you are driving. Another key feature of EMUI 8.0 is, Party Mode that lets you to sync multiple Honor phones to act as speakers while you play music.
Power Beast
The Honor 9N is not only about the looks. It has a capable hardware as well, for its price that is. The Honor 9N is being powered by HiSilicon Kirin 659 processor while the GPU related tasks are being handled by the Mali-T830 MP2. Honor has also included 4GB of RAM along with 64 GB of internal storage at the base model. That specifications of Honor 9N on paper looks quite good for a smartphone in this price range.
The Honor 9N chipset deliveres excellent performance for its category. That continues to be the case. In fact, day to day use seems to be even better, perhaps a result of extra optimization. Regardless, graphics intensive games work well without any performanc eissues or frame rate drops. Games such as PUBG run at decent graphics with good frame rates and there the game runs like a charm at medium graphics settings.
Also, just FYI. Honor will be bringing its GPU Turbo technology to the Honor 9N in Q4 2018, as announced. GPU Turbo tech is said to be a graphics processing acceleration technology achieved through hardware and software integration resulting in “smoother and faster mobile gaming experience.” Games will apparently play with up to 60% more graphics processing efficiency while consuming up to 30% less energy thanks to GPU Turbo and allowing even standard games to render in HDR.
“Top-Notch” Camera
Around the back, you’ll still find dual rear-facing cameras. The handset combines a 13MP main sensor with a 2MP sensor for capturing depth information. The 13MP primary camera mostly produces detailed and rich photographs. The Honor 9N is capable of adding “bokeh” effects for blurred backgrounds in portrait mode. The device is able to capture good pictures, especially in bright light conditions. The photos turned out to be pretty good with ample details, low noise, and good dynamic range. Even the portrait shots are good with bokeh effect not feeling artificial at all. The dual rear camera setup in the Honor 9N also pack modes like Pro Photo, Pro Video, HDR, Night Shot, Light Painting, Time-Lapse, Good Food, Wide Aperture, Moving Picture, and more.
Like most current smartphones, the Honor 9N does well indoor outdoors. Even in overcast conditions, the images captured had a good amount of detail. The metering was also accurate with no signs of over saturation.
On the front, the phone has a 16MP camera that comes with 4-in-1 “Light Fusion” technology that uses pixel binning to convert four small pixels into one large 2.0um pixel to deliver brighter photos in low light. Portrait mode is also supported.
Perfect Fit?
After testing dozens of Android devices which are getting bulkier day by day, Honor 9N’s size is quite a relief. Anyone who hates big phones will certainly love this phone. A minimalistic device with a display that is not to massive as the Samsung Galaxy S9 and not teeny tiny like the iPhone 7. Honor has finally managed to crack the perfect sweet spot for ideal smartphone dimensions.
Is Honor 9N Most affordable phone with a notch?
The Honor 9N offers quite good specs like premium build quality, a dual camera, a powerful processor, latest operating system and top it all a really good beautiful design with a bezel-less notched display. I am not really sure if that’s something to brag about since the notch is a polarising thing among buyers, some like it, many don’t. And trust us the notch is not that bad. In order to make the deal further enticing the smartphone has a starting price tag of INR 11,999 and at this price no other company in the Indian market is offering this package. In true sense, Honor 9N challenges the Redmi Note 5 Pro more than any smartphone.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post.
