Honor is a sub-brand under the Huawei group, which was established to compete in the budget smartphone space in the market. With the increasing smartphone penetration rate in the world, especially in developing countries, Honor has been seeing growing success in the introduction of their smartphones to the market. We were excited when the Honor brand first arrived in Singapore officially last month, as these smartphones truly provided great value for the price at which they retailed at. We tested one of their flagship, the Honor View 10 previously – you can read more about it here.
The Honor 9 Lite differs from View 10, as it is truly positioned to be a smartphone for the masses. The Honor 9 Lite is the cheapest Honor smartphone you can get from Honor in Singapore, and it goes head-on against Xiaomi’s Redmi series, which has already established their name in the affordable smartphone space. What’s so special about the Honor 9 Lite? Does it perform well? Is it worth the price? We’ll find out in the coming sections.
Getting the basics right
Before anything, let’s properly manage our expectations of the Honor 9 Lite. This smartphone costs S$259 in retail stores, without the need for any contracts with the Telcos. In fact, the Honor 9 Lite is one of the most affordable and decent smartphone you can find in Singapore right now. So, let’s just focus on the basics and experience on daily usage. Hopefully, there won’t be any quirks with the Honor 9 Lite that deters us from getting the phone.
Design
The design of the Honor 9 Lite is rather down to earth. There are no funky or designs that goes out of the norm. However, the shiny glassy finish at the back gives the phone a premium look and feel. On the first look, if no one told me that this is supposed to a low budget smartphone, I would have thought that it is a premium smartphone.
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| Glacier Gray Version |
The Honor 9 Lite also looks very up-to-date due to its minimal design. Honor has decided to go with safer colours for the 9 Lite series. They are currently available in Glacier Gray and Sapphire Blue in Singapore, which are depicted in the images throughout the article. There are also black and white versions in other parts of the world.
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| Sapphire Blue Version – The actual unit actually looks a lot better |
Honor mentioned to us that the rear is made up of a unique 2.5D glass that’s highly reflective, thus producing a mirror-like effect. The fingerprint sensor is also placed at the back, rather than the front, so as to provider a large screen-to-body ratio.
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| Power and Volume buttons are found on the right side |
Display
High-Five to 18:9 aspect ratio displays! The Honor 9 Lite features a 5.65-inch edge-to-edge FullView FHD+ Display. The wider aspect ratio is a lot more popular these days, as users will be able to view more on the screen at a glance. We did not expect a FullHD display at this price, but the Honor definitely surprised us by including it on the 9 Lite! The images on the display looks very sharp because of the high pixel density.
Since the 9 Lite uses IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen displays, we do see the differences when compared to other higher end smartphones which has either LTPS LCD or AMOLED displays. The latter display technologies provide more vibrant colors, but also at the cost of quicker degradation over time. The Honor 9 Lite focused on longetivity for their choice of display.
Connectivity and Expansion
The Honor 9 Lite has retained a MicroUSB port, rather than a more common USB TypeC port of today. Nonetheless, it still works perfectly well, just that we could have preferred a more updated charging/data transfer interface. Luckily, the 3.5mm can still be found on the 9 Lite.
The is really nothing much along the sides of the smartphone. On the right, we can see the SIM card slot. The Honor 9 Lite supports Dual-SIM cards, with the 2nd slot being replaceable with a MicroSD card for storage expansion of up to 256GB. So there really isn’t a huge worry with its built-in 32GB of internal storage, as you can just simply pop an extra MicroSD card in.
We took note that the Honor 9 Lite’s Kirin 659 chipset only comes with 802.11 b/g/n wireless. It lacks the wireless AC standard, which has been considered a mainstream standard today. Regardless, it still managed to achieve considerably good wireless speeds on our office’s wireless network. However, of course, it would be much better if Wireless AC can be supported, so that high resolution video streaming on the phone can be better supported. (This is tested on a 250Mbps M1 Fibre Network, on TP-LINK Archer C5400 Wireless router)
Audio
The speakers on the Honor 9 Lite performed above average. We found that the speakers on most Honor devices and Huawei devices tend to perform well, as the sounds were well amplified and thrown out of the phone directly onto the hearing space. This creates a sound profile that has more depth, where focus was put on vocal clarity as well the highs. Due to the physical limitation of the speakers, the lows were almost insignificant. This test was done in comparison with a Xiaomi Mi5s. The Honor 9 Lite did excel in this area, as compared to the flagship of Xiaomi from two years ago.
Camera
For our camera tests, we compared the Honor 9 Lite to the Xiaomi Mi5s. This should give a good comparison on the camera performance, as the Mi5s is considered to have one of the better smartphone cameras available.
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| Shot on the Honor 9 Lite |
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| Shot on the Xiaomi Mi5s |
The Mi5s seems to capture more details on a day shot, but the colours on the Honor 9 Lite looks more accurate. Both photos are considered to be of rather high quality, especially for the Honor 9 Lite. It’s definitely not something you would expect from a sub S$300 smartphone.
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| Shot on the Honor 9 Lite |
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| Shot on the Honor 9 Lite |
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| Shot on the Mi5s |
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| Shot on the Honor 9 Lite |
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| Shot on the Xiaomi Mi5s |
Personally speaking, I felt that the photos taken on the Mi5s were always slightly brighter. The Honor 9 Lite was able to produce photos that were more vibrant. Both camera systems have their own merits, but there’s nothing totally amazing when compared to the real flagships smartphones’ camera such as the Huawei P20 Pro or Google Pixel 2 XL.
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| Shot on the Honor 9 Lite – Portrait Mode |
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| Shot on the Honor 9 Lite (Normal Mode) |
It can be clearly seen that the portrait mode on the Honor 9 Lite does make a difference to the overall composition of portrait photo. With portrait mode, the background is blurred, creating a “bokeh” effect on the photo. However, we believe that this effect is done purely on software, and was not very effective in differentiating between the foreground subject and the background. This resulted in the arms of the model being unintentionally blurred. It seems that the portrait mode also automatically creates a beauty effect on the photo.
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| Shot on the Xiaomi Mi5s |
As compared to a Xiaomi Mi5s, even though the bokeh was not as extreme as compared to photo captured by the Honor 9 Lite, it looked far more natural.
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| Shot on the Honor 9 Lite (Front Camera) |
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| Shot on the Xiaomi Mi5s (Front Camera) |
Comparing between these 2 phones, the Honor 9 Lite’s dual front camera system is much better than the Mi5s. It was able to produce photos of better depth in colours.
Performance
The Honor 9 Lite is equipped with the Hisilicon Kirin 659 chipset. This consists of a Octa-core processor, with 4x cores run at 2.36GHz while the rest runs at 1.7GHz. We do expect that only four of the cores will be active at any one time. When there is a need for higher compute performance by applications, the cores that operate at a higher frequency will kick in. Similarly, when idling, only lower clocked cores will be active. This allows better power management and energy consumption on the smartphone.
The Honor 9 Lite does not perform well on the Antutu benchmark, as the Kirin 659 is made for day-to-day applications, rather than actual compute heavy usage scenarios. This is also why the phone works perfectly well when it comes to sending instant messages, browsing social media or the web and viewing videos on YouTube. But when it comes to games or more compute intensive applications, the phone simple fails to handle them adequately.
I.E. don’t expect its computing performance to be amazing on a smartphone at this price range.
Conclusion
I always had the stereotype that you can’t get a good quality phone without paying at least $300-400 dollars. The Honor 9 Lite has changed my perception of a sub S$300 smartphone, and it raises the bar for other smartphones in this price range.
The Honor 9 Lite has surpassed our expectations, as it excels in getting the basics right. It sets itself apart from any other budget-oriented phones which scrimps on hardware configurations that results in poor user experience. We thought that the Honor 9 Lite is just a basic phone, but in fact, after having it for a period of three weeks, we can safely say that it’s more than basic. No basic phone will provide a up-to-date 18:9 high resolution display. No basic phone has 3GB of RAM. No basic phone will allow you to take photos with nice bokeh effects with dual rear cameras and even dual front cameras.
There’s simply no reason for us not to recommend the Honor 9 Lite, especially when it costs only S$259. If you are looking for a highly affordable smartphone that does not compromise on quality, the choice could be none other than the Honor 9 Lite.
The Honor 9 Lite will be available in the following sales channels:
Central
- Bugis Junction,
#B1-26, Challenger Flagship Store - Far East Plaza,
#02-52, MOBYSHOP - Lucky Plaza,
#03-91, Garphil Enterprise - North Bridge Centre,
#01-20, Red White Mobile - People’s Park
Complex #01-K98A, G3 Mobile & Digital - Sim Lim Square,
#01-62, Action Studio - VivoCity,
#02-34/35, Challenger
North/North East
- 178 Toa Payoh Central, #01-234, MG Comm
- 216 Serangoon Road,
Auroma Electronics and Computers - Mustafa Center,
Basement 2, Mustafa Mobile Zone - NEX, Serangoon
Central, #04-33/34, Challenger
East
- Marine Parade,
#B-56, Gadget Solution - Tampines 1,
#04-24/25, Challenger
West
- 131 Jurong Gateway
Road, #01-255, Solular Mobile (Next to J Cube) - 154 Bukit Batok Street 11, #01-310, Smart Play
- 371 Bukit Batok
Street 31, #01-371, Solular Mobile (Opposite Bukit Gombak MRT) - JEM, #04-01,
Challenger - Jurong Point,
#B1-94/95/96, Challenger
In Singapore, the full range of Honor Android smartphones
launched via our local distributor, Raduga Pte Ltd, will come with an official
warranty period of one (1) year.
launched via our local distributor, Raduga Pte Ltd, will come with an official
warranty period of one (1) year.
Users can visit the Huawei Customer Service Centre at:
313@Somerset,
#B2-13/14
#B2-13/14
Operating Hours: 11:00am to 8:00pm Daily
Service Hotline: 800-852-6666 (Toll Free) 9:00am to 9:00pm
Daily
Daily
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