Huawei Honor 9 Lite 4GB Review
Huawei Honor 9 Lite 4GB Price in India
As the year drew to a close, a
British anthology series premiered another season of exploring and
contemplating the many facets of technology and how they impact our lives. I
was reeling off a binge-watch of the season when the Honor 9 Lite dropped
(cautiously) in my hands. The name of the series, Black Mirror, essentially
means, "the reflection of an unlit computer screen", and when I
noticed the all-glass design of the phone, the whole essence of the phrase
became more apparent. Honor's
latest offering is all-glass-everywhere, perfected in a way that when the tall
screen turned off, I was left rethinking my life as I saw myself.
Essentially, the Honor 9 Lite is an
stunningly good looking phone, but that's about it. Everything else about the
phone is more or less mediocre and something that you would expect from
mid-range phones anyway. The new glass design and the quad cameras seems to be
just ticks on a checklist to set itself apart from the rest. And while it does
manage to grab attention from curious onlookers, you will be left disappointed
when actually using the phone as a daily driver.
PROS
- Premium Design
- Latest Android
- Full HD+ Display
CONS
- Scratch-prone build
- Unimpressive camera
- Heavy UI
PROS
CONS
Huawei Honor 9 Lite 4GB: Detailed
Review
There are phones that are practical,
and then there are phones that just grab eyeballs without living up to the
expectation they set. Take the Google Pixel 2 and the iPhone X in the premium
range for example. The Pixel 2 does not boast of a modern design. It's quite
retro in the way it's built, as compared to the revolutionary iPhone X which
comes in an all-glass body. Between the two, the latter will definitely grab
more attention than the former, but at the same time, the Pixel 2 will edge out
the iPhone in terms of value for money.
A similar conundrum is now raging in
the mid-range segment, now that the Honor 9 Lite is out in the market. It looks
like it was carved from a piece of glass which gives a premium feel to the
phone. It actually feels quite underpriced for the materials used. But then
there are phones like the Lenovo K8 Plus which may have copious amount of
plastic in the body, but does the job it's made to do.
We received the 4GB/64GB storage
variant and In our review of the Honor 9 Lite, we come to the conclusion that
looks are not everything. It's the overall package, and a consistent
performance that makes all the difference.
Design
The Honor 9 Lite is an exquisitely
crafted smartphone. There's glass everywhere. Front, back, around the edges. It
is so well made that it feels more like an artifact than a device you would use
daily. The glass-enclosed design will remind you of the older Honor 8, but this
one feels more compact thanks to the 5.6-inch Univisium display housed in a
6-inch body. There's more screen real estate because of the 18:9 aspect ratio.
Phones are no stranger to glass
designs. Before the metal unibody design took over phones, glass was used to
set premium phones apart from the rest. Phones with glass bodies have a snug
and smooth hand feel, but they are also prone to damage. It is primarily
because of that reason that manufacturers switched to aluminium bodies that gave
phones the longevity glass couldn't. Yet, more recently, glass made a comeback,
not because phones needed to look better, but for wireless charging. It was an
acceptable trade-off. But the Honor 9 Lite, despite having an all-glass body
does not have wireless charging. So it's safe to assume, Honor's choice to use
glass was for aesthetics only. And in that regard, the phone just oozes a
premium feel. But is the glass durable enough to withstand the daily wear and
tear phones tend to go through?
Well, Honor certainly thinks the
phone can withstand shocks and scratches. But I wasn't convinced. Honor claims
it has used a 12-layer coating on the glass and a special nano-optical film on
top to prevent scratches. Less than a week of using the phone, I had two deep
scratches at the back of the phone which was probably caused by the house-keys
I was carrying in my pocket along with the phone.
The Honor 9 Lite is a phone that
looks stunning, but if you intend to use it as your daily driver, you will have
to slap a case on the back of it. What's the point of having a stunning design
if you can't flaunt it to the world?
Nevertheless, the phone itself is
quite compact compared to other offerings in its price range. In fact, the
dimensions are similar to Honor's other offerings - The Honor 9i and the Honor
7X. In fact, the Honor 9 Lite is much smaller compared to the two. It's not
completely bezel-less though as there are distinct borders around the edges and
thick upper and lower chins. At the back, the dual camera unit is housed on the
top left corner while the fingerprint sensor sits in the upper central coloumn.
The power and volume rockers are on the right edge and they are quite
responsive and clicky. The phone also relies on a micro-USB port to charge and
that's a bummer.
In a sense, the Honor 9 Lite is a
culmination of all the design cues from the company since the Honor 9i launched
in India. Honor has perfected the colour offerings as well and the 9 Lite comes
in three beautifully crafted colours - Saphire Blue, Glacier Gray, and Midnight
Black.
Display
Taller, 18:9 displays are now a
common sight in smartphones. It took surprisingly less time for the technology
to trickle down to lower price segments but 2017 saw phones across a broad
price range launch with the new display formats. The Honor 9 Lite is the fourth
offering from Honor in India featuring the 18:9 display. For one, because of
its proprietary chipset, the Honor 9i is one of the few mid-range phones to
offer an FHD+ (2160x1080p) resolution. That means, the phone packs a lot more
pixels in the 5.6-inch panel than most, making photos and videos look vibrant
and full of colours.
The display also didn't have the
cool blueish tint that other Honor phones have. In fact, I found the Honor 9
Lite's display has a more accurate white point. You can play around with the
colour temperature though and Honor also gives you the option to dial down the
resolution to 720p if required.
Yet, one of the major problems the
display will face is incompatibility with apps. Not all content is calibrated
for taller displays, yet. So some Android games like Injustice 2 will have
menus cropped when you go full-screen, although Netflix and YouTube should work
fine.
The display had a measured
luminescence rating of 570 nits which is quite good for the price. Although,
because this is an IPS LCD panel, you won't get the deep contrasts on the Honor
9 Lite. As a result, while the brightness is enough to be legible under direct
sunlight, content might seem a little bland.
Performance
As a subsidiary of Huawei, Honor
devices have the honour (get it?) to use the company's proprietary chipsets.
The Honor 9 Lite is no exception. But weirdly enough, all the newly launched
mid-range phones by Honor are powered by the same chipset - The HiSilicon Kirin
659. Like the Honor 7X and the Honor 9i, the Honor 8 Lite too is offered in 3GB
and 4GB RAM variants with 32GB and 64GB of storage respectively. Even weirder
is the margin of difference the three phones had on benchmark tests. While
there wasn't much separating the phones on AnTuTu or Geekbench 4, 3D Mark,
which calculates graphical prowess of the phone, gave drastically low scores.
After scratching our heads for
sometime, we figured it could be that the chipset's drivers are not optimised
for Vulcan API which is enabled by default on Android Oreo. Futuremark notes on
its website that "devices that shipped with early Vulkan drivers may have
performance and stability issues in this test. Vulkan performance can be much
lower than expected and the test can crash on devices with underdeveloped
Vulkan drivers."
Nevertheless, real world usage will
show no difference. The phone did not slow down even after opening a lot of
apps in one go. There are also no drops in framerates while playing games like
Asphalt 8: Nitro and loading times are impressive. The phone feels faster for
its price of Rs 14,999 and that speaks a lot for mid-range phones where the raw
performance is not always the priority.
The phone is also optimised to run
quite fast. It takes around 35 seconds to boot which is commendable and the
fingerprint sensor works blazing fast. Overall, we felt the phone is quite fast
for the price it retails for, and that should be an encouraging sign of the
phones to come this year.
Camera
The highlight of the Honor 9 Lite is
its Quad-camera setup. Honor has done this overkill before with the Honor 9i
and now, it has trickled down the novelty to a price where dual cameras are
just starting to come in. There are two cameras on the front, and two at the
back. On both sides, the primary camera is of 13-megapixel resolution and there
is an additional 2-megapixel sensor to capture depth information. The twin
cameras on both sides are mostly for portrait mode. Yes, portrait mode is
present on both the front and the rear camera. But based on what we saw, the
cameras are not that impressive. They do take quality images under perfect
light, but it's not that consistent.
Under direct sunlight, the colours
are somewhat faded and whitened out. You will notice the blue sky has become
white around the edges while in the center, the saturation is way too low. Yes,
it was a rare blue sky on a cold winter afternoon in Delhi that day.
If you take photos against harsh
sunlight, expect a loss in focus and soft-touches to objects. What's
commendable though is the lack of shadows in the photo under such tricky
lighting.
The whitening effect of the camera
becomes more prominent in the photo above. The walls should have a yellowish
glow considering its peak afternoon outside and the white balance is always
warmer in such situations. But the phone whitewashes the walls to an even
whiter shade than it should, for aesthetics?
Having said that, under indoor
lighting, the camera can reproduce vibrant and punchy colours, which is what
Honor's cameras are famous for. Even then, we faced some difficulty to bring
objects into focus. A quick shot will most likely be out of focus. It is only
when you spend some time composing the shot will you get decent results.
Low light shots are as you would
expect from a mid-range phone. Noisy, and lacking in detail. Also, it takes
significantly more time to focus and then some more time to process the photo
after shooting. But the end result isn't as impressive. There is some amount of
noise reduction and sharpening that happens, but you won't make out finer
details from a photo taken under low light.
As for the portrait mode, the Honor
9 Lite will aggressively blur the background, so much so, that the main object
in focus sometimes loses detail. The portrait mode also makes photos
overexposed which is never a good thing. The story of the front camera is also
the same. There is the same odd whitening effect prevalent in selfies, even
more so, because of the beautify effects. The portrait mode from the front
camera has the same issue of overexposing the shot.
To be honest, the camera is better
than what phones at that price offer, but if you are buying the phone simply
for the camera, it's better to think again.
Software
A phone that's coming out in the
beginning of 2018 shouldn't come with anything less than the latest version of
Android, and the Honor 9 Lite doesn't disappoint in that regard. The phone
comes with EMUI 8.0 based on Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box even when new
phones launching in January are still running older versions of Android.
Having said that, the interface is
nowhere near as light as stock Android. It's still faster than the previous
EMUI 5.0 as the new version takes advantage of the lightweight nature of
Android Oreo. It has also cut down on some system animations and now the UI
feels much smoother. That could also be because the Honor 9 Lite uses the F2FS
(Flash-based files storage) system that prevents the phone from slowing down
over time apart from increasing app loading times.
The UI offers a new way to navigate
the phone using a navigation dock. It's like an on-screen trackball that allow
users to go back, go to the homescreen or hit the recents menu. It's quite
nifty for one-handed use.
There are a bunch of pre-loaded apps
including a second Gallery App, a separate mail and music app, and the likes,
which may make sense in the Chinese market (where the phone originally
launched), but in India, it's just taking up precious space. Apart from these,
you get the usual Honor suite of apps.
There are a couple of India-centric
features on the phone as well - Paytm is integrated in the software and there
is a dedicated bike mode that prevents the phone from buzzing while you are
riding.
Android Oreo also brings new
features like picture-in-picture, deeper notification management and more.
Latest Android is always welcome on
a phone, but considering how heavily customised the interface is, it's remains
to be seen whether future updates will be rolled out in time.
Battery
The Honor 9 Lite sports a 3,000mAh
battery which is just about enough to last you through the day. The phone
lasted around 7 hours on PC Mark's battery test which is commendable. We also
used the phone like a daily driver with generous amounts of social media
browsing, playing YouTube videos, and browsing the web apart from half an hour
of gaming and copious use of the camera to take photos.
The phone uses a micro-USB port to
charge which is disappointing considering how the USB Type-C is fast becoming
the convention across devices. There is support for fast charging and
"smart battery saving"technology which essentially monitors active
apps running in the background, manage screen-timeout and location settings to
extend the battery life.
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