What is the Honor 9 Lite?

The Honor 9 Lite is yet another feature-packed budget smartphone from Huawei’s affordable sub-brand.

Honor 9 Lite – Design

Similar to the Honor 7X that came immediately before it, the Honor 9 Lite seeks to provide the bezel-light appeal of modern flagship phones but at a more affordable price. Honor calls its approach FullView, which basically refers to devices with a higher screen-to-device ratio.

The Honor 9 Lite is far from bezel-free. Its screen doesn’t go edge-to-edge at the sides as seen on the Galaxy S9, nor do its top and bottom edges fill out the frame as they do on an iPhone X. But despite the additional presence of a black border around the active part of the screen, the front of the phone is undoubtedly dominated by its 5.65-inch display.

So much so, in fact, that there’s no space for a fingerprint sensor on the front of the device, which is where the full-fat Honor 9 places it. Rather, the sensor is sensibly positioned around back, three-quarters of the way up the phone.

Making the front of your phone even more about the display than usual places extra pressure on the quality of the screen itself. Thankfully, the Honor 9 Lite isn’t found wanting in this respect.

This is a nicely sized 5.65-inch IPS LCD screen, with decent viewing angles, contrast and strong brightness when you need to crank things up. You’d need to spend considerably more money to find something much better. Meanwhile, a 2160 x 1080 (FHD+) resolution ensures that individual pixels can’t be picked out, to the tune of 428ppi.

If that pixel count looks a little off to you, it’s because the Honor 9 Lite adopts a stretched-out 18:9 aspect ratio rather than the typical (albeit decreasingly so) 16:9.

Honor 9 Lite – Performance

One of the reasons Honor phones can often appear to offer more features than many of their budget rivals is because they have access to the cheaper processors of HiSilicon, which is owned by parent company Huawei.

In the Honor 9 Lite’s case this means the 2.36GHz Kirin 659 CPU, which is the same chip that powers both the Honor 7X and the Huawei P Smart. It’s accompanied by 3GB of RAM, which is 1GB less than the 7X.

The Kirin 659 is a lower-mid-range chip that appears to sit in the middle of Qualcomm’s entry-level offerings. An average Geekbench 4 multicore score of 3644 pitches the Honor 9 Lite well below the slightly more expensive Moto G5S Plus (with its Snapdragon 625) on 4460, but well above the similarly priced Moto G5S (packing a Snapdragon 430) on 2294.

Honor 9 Lite – Camera

Rather impressively for a budget phone, Honor has managed to follow the Honor 9 and Honor 7X and equip the Honor 9 Lite with a dual camera setup. In fact, it’s gone one step further and provided a similar provision for selfies.

Both the front and rear of the device play host to one 13-megapixel and one 2-megapixel sensor. Just as with the Honor 7X, the smaller secondary sensor is there purely to provide depth information for the included wide aperture and portrait modes.

This is the effect that a lot of phone manufacturers – most notably Apple – are going for right now, where you get a super-sharp subject and an extremely blurred out background.