Honor 9 Lite
With high-end features for a low-end price, the Honor 9 Lite is a tempting budget smartphone
SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from store.hihonor.com/uk
Honor, an offshoot of Huawei, is doing an excellent job of producing low-cost handsets that don’t make hideous compromises. Last year we saw the terrific-value Honor 9 for £300, and now it appends the word Lite and chops £100 off the price. It does so with no immediately obvious compromises: it uses the same octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 659 chip we saw in the Honor 7X, and includes 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
There are even a couple of upgrades. Unlike its pricier predecessor, it has dual 13- and 2-megapixel front-facing cameras, plus a bigger 18:9 display with a super-sharp 2,160 x 1,080 resolution. Not bad for £200.
The handset itself has a similar design to the Honor 9, incorporating a mirrored “2.5D” curved glass rear. It’s certainly glitzy – launching in Sapphire Blue, Midnight Black and Glacier Grey – and it gives the immediate impression of a phone selling for twice the price. You don’t get waterproofing or NFC, but that shouldn’t be a shock in a £200 phone.
One unexpected change is that the fingerprint reader, integrated into the home button on the Honor 9, has been moved back to its old position at the rear of the phone. This works in a snap, too, with Honor claiming unlock times of under a quarter of a second. The volume rocker and power button sit side-by-side on the right edge, with a microSD card and nano-SIM tray on the left. Cast your eyes downward and you’ll spot a micro-USB port and 3.5mm headphone jack.
As soon as you switch the Honor 9 Lite on, the 2,160 x 1,080, 5.65in IPS display makes a statement. This is the first time Honor has launched an all-display handset, and although it’s the cheapest 18:9 smartphone on the market, it looks great. Its pixel density of 428ppi is sharp enough to satisfy the most exacting eyes, and a high contrast ratio results in punchy images. Peak brightness hits a sunlight-friendly 504cd/m2.
Don’t expect stunning colour balance and accuracy: the Honor 9 Lite oversaturates certain colour tones. Our X-Rite colour calibrator reported an sRGB coverage of 83.8%, which isn’t abysmal but could be better, while an average Delta E of 3.71 is some way adrift of the sub-2 result we always look for.
The specification promises decent but unexceptional performance – and
“The Honor stands out for its dual-camera setup on the front. Selfie shots were well-exposed, and there’s even a bokeh mode”
so it proved. In the Geekbench 4 and GFXBench tests, the Honor 9 Lite matched the scores of the Honor 7X and Moto G5S. In short, performance is solid, but a step behind the more expensive Honor 9 ( see p69 for a graph of its results vs competitors).
Disappointingly, the Honor 9 Lite’s 3,000mAh battery doesn’t last as long as I expected. Typically, low-powered internals such as the Kirin 659 used here promise healthy battery life, but in our video rundown test (with Airplane mode engaged) the Honor 9 Lite plummeted to zero in only 9hrs 9mins. That’s poor: the Honor 9 lasted for over 11 hours in the same test, and the Motorola Moto G5S kept going beyond 12 hours.
The Honor 9 Lite also falls behind more expensive rivals when it comes to photography, but the 13- and 2-megapixel rear-facing cameras are fine for taking quick pics and Instagram snaps. Indeed, provided you have plenty of light, you can take some impressive shots. It picked up plenty of detail in our tests, correctly reproducing neighbouring brickwork and tricky window reflections, and capturing natural-looking colours.
However, once the light dims, the Honor 9 Lite’s sensors start to struggle: washed-out colours and lots of visual noise become apparent. Our test low-light scenes lacked definition and vibrancy.
Where the Honor 9 Lite does stand out is the inclusion of a very similar dual-camera arrangement on the front as on the back. I found selfie shots were wellexposed, with crisp details. There’s even a background-blurring bokeh mode, which does a commendable job of bringing finer foreground details into relief. It’s not quite up there with the Pixel 2, but at this price it’s much closer than you might expect.
And that’s the key to the Honor 9 Lite: its price. This may not be the fastest phone on the market, nor longest lasting, but for £200 it’s an outright bargain. With its excellent 18:9 display, stylish design and decent set of cameras, it’s already a contender for best budget smartphone of 2018. SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2.36GHz/1.7GHz HiSilicon Kirin 659 processor 3GB RAM Mali-T830 graphics 5.65in IPS screen, 1,080 x 2,160 resolution 32GB storage microSDXC slot (up to 256GB) dual 13MP/2MP rear camera
dual 13MP/2MP front camera 802.11n Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 micro-USB connector
3,000mAh battery Android 8 71.9 x 7.6 x 151mm (WDH) 149g 2yr warranty