The 9i offers four cameras and a bezel-less display!
Huawei’s sub-brand Honor recently launched its new smartphone with a dual camera setup at both the ends. The Honor 9i is the latest smartphone by the company launched at 17,999 INR. Along with it, the smartphone also features a near bezel-less display. Let’s see how the smartphone performs in day-to-day usage in our review.
Design and Display
The Honor 9i catches attention with its almost bezel-less display and great aesthetics. The design is not very new, but the build quality is impressive. It has a metallic body with curved edges, which perfectly blend with the display panel. Thanks to the smaller bezels, the phone fits in the hands well even with its 5.9-inch display.
The rear panel has an antenna line at the top with LED placed at its centre. The dual-camera setup is just below it followed by the fingerprint sensor. The Honor logo is at the bottom, followed by another antenna line.
The micro-USB port, speaker grill and a 3.5mm audio jack are placed at the bottom edge. The volume rocker and power button is on the right, while the SIM card tray is placed on the left edge.
Overall, the design of the Honor 9i is minimal yet classy, and the premium finish makes it more appealing.
Display
The 9i features a 5.9-inch full HD+ IPS display with a resolution of 2,160 × 1080 pixels resolution. The display seems a bit low in terms of the colour saturation. Users need to increase the brightness near about max to see it properly, which also means that the sunlight readability is not up to the mark.
Specifications
Housing a 64-bit octa-core Kirin 659 processor with 4GB RAM, the Honor 9i has a decent hardware under the hood. Thera is 64GB of onboard storage and can be expandable up to 128GB via the hybrid slot. The phone runs Android 7.0 Nougat with EMUI 5.1 on the top of it. The UI is minimal and well-optimised and you’ll not need any kind of additional theme. There’s very less bloatware in it which is a good point.
Performance
Huawei’s Kirin 659 paired with 4GB of RAM works great and there was not a single issue of lag. The touch response was great and its multitasking capabilities are also satisfactory.
The gaming performance of the device is good but I noticed frame drops while playing high-end games like Modern Combat 4. The heating issue is minimal and only occurs during heavy gameplay.
The benchmark performance of the device is average. It scored 20032 on Quadrant Standard which if fair enough. The Geekbench score was 913 in Single Core and 3284 in Multi Core.
The fingerprint sensor works fine and unlocks the smartphone quickly. The audio quality is okay, but the video quality isn’t up to the mark. I guess the issue is with the display panel as the quality seems faded.
4G and other connectivity options works fine. One of the major drawback is the missing Type-C port in 2017. This means, that not only the transfer speed is slow, fast charging is missing too.
Battery
The 3,340mAh battery holds life for 9-10 hours with moderate usage. We got around 7 hours battery life on video loop test which is good for the users which loves to watch a lot of videos. The minimal users will easily get a full day backup. The charging time is around 3 and half hours which should not be in 2017.
Camera
The rear panel sports a 16MP + 2MP dual camera setup. The smartphone shoots great photos and it has good amount of details. The captured images has a good colour saturation and contrast. There are several modes available in the camera app like HDR, Panorama, Pro and Night mode which gives you additional benefits to shoot your perfect moments. You can also download more modes.
The front panel is equipped with 13MP + 2MP dual camera setup. The performance of the front camera is good to some extent but the images seems quite artificial. The brightness and colour saturation seems unnatural. Although the in-depth details are captured very well.
Gizmo-Verdict
The Honor 9i is a great smartphone to buy under Rs 20k range. It offers good camera quality and a bezel-less display. Its performance is decent too. For a price tag of Rs 17,999, it’s a good buy, although devices such as the Xiaomi Mi A1 and Moto G5s Plus are better all-rounders.
