Now Huawei’s Honor brand has tried to give more powerful options to customers by presenting Honor 9 Lite. Let us know that this is an affordable handset that comes with four cameras. This is not the first smartphone of the company with four cameras, through Honor 9I, the company also made a similar effort. However, this time the company has put a new option for a larger market by keeping the price of Honor 9 Lite at Rs 10,999. The specialty of Honor 9 Lite is not limited to the camera, its specifications are also worth noting. At first glance, this phone left a positive impression. Now it has to be seen whether the Honor 9 Lite is able to give a new definition to the budget segment in terms of performance.
Honor 9 Lite Design and Texture
The Honor 9 Lite reminds of Honor 8 to a great extent. It was the company’s first flagship smartphone in 2016. Due to 2.5D curved glass, the rear part gives a mirror. However, it has been clear on Honor’s website that this effect is limited to only the saffron blue and glacier gray variants. There will be no such effect in midnight black. It is largely like Moto X4. The glass of the display is also curved in the front. For this reason, the phone grip becomes good. By the way, this feature is also a shortage. The phone easily slipped into the hands and there are also fingers on it. The frame is of plastic. This has been done to keep the price low. Because of this, the phone becomes lighter and many times you will feel that the phone is not in your pocket.
According to our desire, the sim tray should also have the color of the rest of the phone. But due to this, it looks different. Apart from this, we have no complaint with build quality and finish. The volume and power buttons are plastic, but their response is good. The sim tray is hybrid. That is, you can use a microSD card up to 256 GB with two nano SIM cards, or a SIM card at one time. The 3.5mm headphone socket and micro-USB port are at the bottom of the phone. The speaker grill has also got a place here. Once again, Honor is disappointed at not using USB Type-C port. It seems that the company wants to limit this hardware feature only to expensive phones.
We liked the display of Honor 9 Lite very much. You will get a full-HD+ IPS panel. The screen is 5.65 inches and its aspect ratio is 18: 9. This variety of displays are now in trend. The edges have become very thin due to the long display, which increases the beauty of the phone. Despite this, there is space for selfie camera above the screen on the front panel and for the company’s logo on the lower part. The panel’s brightness is sufficient and the color reproduction is also fine. It is not easy to reach every edge of the long display with one hand fingers, but there are many gestures to help you. For example, you can open a notification shed by swiping the fingerprint sensor. Navigation is also a dock, like an assistant touch of iOS. One-handed mode will also be available.
Honor 9 Lite has a circular fingerprint sensor on the back. It quickly recognizes fingers mark. Apart from unlocking the screen, you can protect the apps by using fingerprint sensor and make virtual safe for private files. This sensor can be used for different types of gestures, such as taking photos, raising phone calls or browsing photos. These gestures will work with any finger. In the retail box you will find charger, data cable, SIM Ejector Tool. The phone does not come with the headset.
Honor 9 Lite Specification and Feature
Despite keeping the price low, Honor has not compromised on the specification of 9 lights. Many of its specifications are Honor 7X and Honor 9i which are expensive than it. Phone Huawei has used its own octa-core Kirin 659 processor. RAM and storage -based phones have two variants. One of these is 3 GB RAM and 32 GB storage. The second is 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage, which we have reviewed. While using the phone, we found that only 2 GB of RAM works throughout the day. You will get 2 GB free all the time. Other specifications include FM Radio, Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi B/G/N, 4G VoLTE, USB OTG, Ambient Light Sensor, Processimity Sensor, Accelerometer and Jayroscopa.
The funny thing is that Honor 9 Lite gave better results in the benchmark test than Honor 7X and Honor 9i.
Like the recently launched Honor View 10 by Honor, Honor 9 Lite also runs out of box Android 8.0 Oreo. By the way, the company’s skin EMUI 8 is present above the latest version of Android. It has a feature called Huawei Share which acts like Apple’s Aircraft technology.
Wi-Fi+ feature automatically switchs between Wi-Fi and mobile data. This will depend on the state of the connection. When we restarted our router, the Wi-Fi+ feature of this phone started working. This feature was trying to check which internet connection in mobile data and Wi-Fi is strong. Finally, after investigation, it connected the phone to Wi-Fi.
The design of the Settings app is good. You can create a backup of contacts, calendars, Wi-Fi credentials, SMS messages and call logs. However, it is not clear yet how much storage you will get free. You will not be able to backup data from third party apps.
Honor 9 Lite Performance, Camera and Battery Life
EMUI of Honor running on Android Oreo works well. But this stock is not as fast as Android. EMUI is quite different from Google’s material design language. But it is good in appearance and effective. Despite having 4 GB RAM, the phone slowed down a bit during the search in the Settings app. However, we did not receive this complaint again and again.
The touch response of the display is good. We have no complaint with call quality. The processor is fully capable of maintaining multitasking experience. There was no problem in playing easy games. However, framrats fell in a game with powerful graphics such as Asphalt 8. This phone becomes easily heated. For example, the upper part of the Honor 9 Lite became slightly warm when downloaded from the app from the Play Store and listening to the songs with it.
In the video playback with 1080 pixels resolution, the phone ran very smooth. Videos with more resolution also ran easily. In the default video player you will get the option to stretch the video screen.
Now the matter of this phone of Honor’s phone is the most important feature. The primary camera is 13 megapixels on both parts of Honor 9 Lite. There is also a 2 -megapixel depth sensor on both parts. With its help, the Bokeh Effect can be achieved. For this, you have to choose one of the portrait or wide aperture mode in the camera app.
Photos taken in daylight were good on the handset display. The autofocus is fast and the details are clearly visible in landscape mode. However, colors are slightly dull. Zoom in the pictures shows noise in dark parts. In low light, the performance of Honor 9 Lite is seen in the same decrease in the rest of the smartphone of this price range. The focus slows down. Details are not clearly visible. Especially the edges become more sharp.
With the help of wide aperture mode, you get an aperture value of (F/0.95 – F/13), so that you can adjust the depth of field before and after taking photos. Although the blur effect in our investigation did not look very effective, the picture blurred with F/2.0 aperture value looked like a photoshop. Similarly, it also has a portrait mode, which works exactly like this. In this, you will not be able to implement the Blur Effect while taking a photo. Also, Bokeh’s togle has been given in it but it is not particularly effective, because the photos already come with Bokeh effect. Bokeh effect is much better than wide aperture mode but does not seem defined many times on the side of the subject. Along with this, it takes a long time to focus.
It has been given shooting modes like professional and Panorama for photography fans. Features like filters and HDR are also added to the phone. Along with this, your smile will be recorded with the phone ‘Touch Capture’ and your picture will click on its own.
Talking about video recording, you will be able to record videos up to 1080 pixels. The video is a very average record. Since it does not have an image stabilization feature, the video is a record record. Photos taken in low light are not very clear. The quality of selfie taken from the front camera is better. Along with screen flash, beauty mode is attractive and you will be able to take good pictures even in low light. You will also get video records of up to 1080 pixels from the front camera. If you have turned on beauty mode, then the quality of the video will be the highest 720 pixels.
It also has some gesture mode for selfie. You will be able to use your palm or take a selfie with your voice. Apart from this, if you take the phone in hand and speak loudly, then the gesture sensor will click your picture. Talking about portrait mode, the front camera is also very quality.
Now talk about the battery. In fact, in the case of battery, Honor’s previous smartphones 7X and 9i could not show anything special despite the big size battery. In our video loop test, 9 lights played HD video 10 hours 3 minutes without stopping, which cannot be called much better.
We found that the battery is declining by 5 to 10 percent on using Asphalt 8 even for 10 minutes, which could be a matter of concern. The smartphone does not have any feature like fast charging. The charge of 10 watts coming with the phone takes an hour to charge 60 percent of the battery. To reduce power consumption, the user has been given the option to turn on/off HD Plus Screen Resolution.
Our decision
18: 9 If you add the price of price to the trend of aspect ratio, then the cheaper variant of Honor 9 Lite is currently the best option in the market. The price of this variant is Rs 11,000. One thing to note is that the Honor 7X is also currently in the market, in which additional cameras may not be there but the metal body, big screen and relatively large battery have been given.
The variant with which we investigated 4 GB RAM are a bit expensive according to their specification. The phone looks good but the quality of battery power and camera is not very good. In the range of Rs 15,000, there are already phones like Xiaomi Mi A1 (Review) and Moto G5S Plus (Review) in the market. Even though these phones do not have a long screen, which is in trend nowadays but Honor is more powerful than 9 lights in terms of performance.
If you are not in a hurry, then you can wait for the recently launched Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus to come to India, the price of which will probably be around Honor 9 Lite.