Honor 9 Lite is the newest addition to under 15K budget segment by Honor. The smartphone comes at starting price of Rs 11,999. The USP of the smartphone is the 18:9 Ratio Full View Display, Dual Camera at back and front, Very Slim and Lightweight body. There are two versions of the smartphone one with 3GB RAM + 32GB ROM and the other one of 4GB RAM and 64GB ROM. We got the 4GB RAM variant with us. Let’s see how it performs in our review.
Design and Build:
The Honor 9 Lite seems like the previous Honor 8 but with a few enhancements with the shape and display. The body is lightweight and very slim which is a very positive point. Both the side has 2.5D glass covering which makes it a bit slippery. The blue colour seems really attractive with the smooth finishes. The curved edges match with the back and front and give it a very impressive look.
The rear panel has Dual Camera at the top with LED flash and Fingerprint sensor in the middle. There is an Honor Logo at the bottom part but placed under the 2.5D glass. Similar at the front, Dual camera at the top with other sensors, thin bezels around the full view display and an Honor logo at the bottom. There are three on-screen buttons because it saves a lot of space for display.
The SIM Slot is on the left while the Volume Rocker keys and the power button is on the right side of the edge. All the ports and Speaker grill is at the bottom and the top is clean. Overall the design is pretty good and all the buttons/port placements are appropriate.
Display:
Honor 9 Lite features a 5.65-inch FHD+ display with 18:9 aspect ratio. The display is covered by a 2.5D curved display with 1080×2160 pixels resolution, which gives a pixel density of 428 PPI. The display seems quite bright and attractive. The colour reproduction is good and offers good visibility.
Specification:
Honor 9 Lite also houses the HiSilicon octa-core Kirin 659 chipset coupled with Mali T830 MP2 GPU. It has a 4xCortex A53 cores clocked at 2.36 GHz and another 4xCortex A53 core clocked at 1.7 GHz. It has 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage. Users can also increase the storage with the help of microSD card up to 256GB. Connectivity options are 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2 and GPS.
It runs on Android Oreo 8.0 with Huawei’s Emotion UI version 8.0 (EMUI 8.0) out of the box. The UI seems pretty clean but has a lot of bloatware in it like several trial games Asphalt Nitro, Spiderman, Dragon Mania and many more. Apart from it, there are several additional apps by Honor. There are several customizations and themes option to go on.
Performance:
Honor 9 Lite offers very smooth experience with the usage end exploration. The touch response is quick and has very good multitasking ability. We can say the provided SoC with the paired RAM works efficiently. The benchmark score is good and comparable to the similar budget devices like Mi A1. It scored 88138 in AnTuTu while the Quadrant Standard score was 29413.
The gaming experience on this smartphone is good. I played Shadow Fight 3 and Modern Combat 5 with ease. There was very pretty lag at the start but after that it was smooth. There is the heating issue in it if you play the game for too long which can a bit problem for the core gamers.
The fingerprint sensor works fine and unlocks the phone quickly. It also offers several additional usages of the sensor like call pick up/ rejecting and many more. The audio video experience is acceptable, the video quality is good but the sound could be bit louder and clear. The 4G VoLTE works fine and there wasn’t any connectivity issue in our usage.
Camera:
Honor 9i Lite13 MP + 2 MP setup for the front camera as well as the rear camera. The 13 MP camera is for heavy lifting while the 2 MP sensor is for capturing depth. The camera captures good images in daylight as well in low light. The captured image has a good amount of in-depth details and has acceptable colour compositions.
There are several modes provided in the camera app like Bokeh, Portrait, Moving Picture, HDR, Night Shot, Light Painting, Panorama, Pro Photo and many more. Some of them are very handy and useful to capture the perfect shots but few of them doesn’t work as up to the mark. The front captures good selfies and other images which is quite similar to the one captured with the back. So the quality is almost same on both front and back.
Battery:
The smartphone is backed by 3,000 mAh Li-Polymer non-removable battery which supports fast Charging. It offers a full day backup with moderate usage which is good but bit lower than comparing to the other specs that it offers. If you use camera, internet, gaming, calling all in a rotation, you’ll find the battery only offers 4-5 hours of life. So the provided 3000mAh is good but it could be a bit more.
Gizmo Verdict:
Honor 9 Lite justifies with the provided specification at Rs 10,999 price. It offers good design, camera, and performance. So you can surely go for this but if you want other options Mi A1 seems a good option too.
