Honor 9 Lite

Honor 9 Lite was launched on January 17, 2018. If you wish for more storage and power, Honor 9 will make a good option. However, Honor 9 Lite offers two cameras on both the front and the rear, which its more expensive brother doesn’t have.

Display

Honor Play Lite’s screen has a resolution of 1080 x 2160 and is Full HD+. The panel measures 5.65 inches and with 428 pixels per inch, the results are sharp. That performance puts Honor 9 Lite above some flagships like OnePlus 5T, even iPhone 8 and its sibling 8 Plus. Honor 9 Lite has an IPS screen so users will have excellent viewing angles and enough brightness to make the content legible under harsh sunlight. The colors lean toward the cool side with a little blue hue. Users have access to a wide range of white balance so users can customize the colors. To protect users’ eyes, the phone offers Night mode which reduces the processed resolution down to 720p. You might think lowering the sharpness of the screen might be a bad move for Honor, but the benefits it brings, including less strain on the chipset and the battery, are enough reasons to justify its place. While the screen of Honor 9 Lite cannot rival the sharpness and immersion of its OLED counterpart, like what you have with the Samsung Galaxy A5, OLED panel is not available at this price point so there is nothing to complain here. Instead of an OLED, what Honor offers is an 18:9 screen to suit the need to watch widescreen content. The aspect ratio means the bezels are thin, putting the content at the center.

Chipset

Under the hood, Honor 9 Lite runs on Kirin 659 chipset. This mid-range chip comes with only 3GB of RAM, creating a kind of performance you would expect with other budget-friendly handsets. On Geekbench, the phone scores 3,696, not a powerhouse of course. Honor 9 Lite doesn’t have too many handy features, but there is one thing it can do which can come in handy sometimes – the split-screen multitasking. Videos can be played at Full HD resolution, not something too impressive, which comes down to the limitation of the processor. However, the fingerprint scanner, Wi-Fi, and signal strength are decent in our tests. The speed of memory read and write is quite slow so don’t expect running heavy tasks or transferring lots of files will be zippy on this handset. Playing games on this smartphone should not be a challenging task although it has only a mid-range chip and not so much RAM. If you are fans of 3D games, expect to see a serious drop of frame rate to maintain a smooth experience. However, 2D games are no problem for Honor 9 Lite.

RAM

With the Honor 9 Lite, users have the choice to acquire the phone in either 3GB or 4GB of RAM, not so much compared to other phones on the market but that is what we have to settle with at this price point.

Battery

Honor Lite 9 draws power from a 3,000mAh battery. And thanks to the 5.65-inch display, the phone can easily last for a whole day under medium usage. If you don’t use it much, the battery might last until the second day but heavy use will drain it when night falls. In one of our tests, the phone scores 76%, an average for a phone with that much screen brightness. What you can count on to prolong the power cell life is the battery optimization options in the Settings. What you have are minor tweaks that can deliver powerful impact like the output resolution or some other more extreme measures, like disable the majority of the phone functions to preserve power. With this price tag, there is no fast charging for Honor 9 Lite so users might want to charge it overnight whenever they can.

Camera

On the rear and the front, Honor 9 Lite features a dual-camera setup consisting of a 13MP and a 2MP sensor. Users have access to more shooting modes with the back cameras but the front one offers wider aperture for better selfies in low light. The selfie snappers are the highlight of the phone. With two cameras, users can blur out the background and keep all the people appearing in the shot clear and sharp. Users can also control how much blurriness they want after the shots are taken.   The front cameras work just fine in well-lit environment, but when you don’t have enough light, you can count on Honor 9 Lite’s screen flash, but you will have to be within about an arm-length from the phone to take advantage of this feature. With low light and in situations with high contrast, the shots will be grainy and have a middle to low dynamic range. What you have with the front cameras are filters, which put Instagram-like effects in your pics, panorama, and time-lapse. They can also record Full HD video, just like the rear snappers. For more discerning users who want the best photography performance possible, Honor 9 Lite might not be a good choice as both the rear and front cameras have similar amount of grain, even if you have decent light. When you need to capture high-contrast images, the dynamic range will be poor due to the lack of HDR. Even if you have HDR and good light, grain is still visible. While the low-light shots are not the strong point of Honor 9 Lite, the phone does offer a wide range of modes that can keep the shutter speed ay eight seconds. The mediocre sensor, when supported by a tripod or a lower ISO, can still produce decent shots. Light painting is also possible. You will have Full HD video at 30 frames per second. However, slow-motion is non-existent. Other features include light painting, panorama, HDR, time-lapse, and a manual modes for both videos and photos. Overall, Honor 9 Lite is not a competent camera phone, users might want to opt for the Moto G5 Plus with a better automatic mode. However, the phone offers a wider range of shooting modes than competitors with similar price tag.