Honor 9A is another member of a long line of budget-friendly Honor phones.

Hardware-wise, the 9A has everything it ever needs to be the best budget phone Honor has ever made. For a quite low price, you get a durable battery, a 720+p screen, and a triple-camera setup.

Honor 9A also has a fingerprint scanner and facial recognition to sign you in, the two features not many manufacturers give their budget options.

Display

The phone features a 6.3-inch LCD display with 720 x 1600 resolution, a 20:9 aspect ratio, and a screen-to-body ratio of 88.4%.

The aspect ratio here is ideal to make sure users have an as large as possible screen all while ensuring comfort and ease of use. Most users will have no problem reaching all the corners of the phone.

The 720+ display seems to be a low resolution but most of the time, it’s suitable for tasks like watching YouTube videos (since there is no YouTube app, you have to go to the website). When scrolling through apps and pages, everything looks fine too.

The low resolution doesn’t prevent Honor 9A screen to become one of the brightest among the budget smartphones, even comparable with the OnePlus 8. Vibrancy is evident too.

The phone also comes with a wide range of display options, including one that filters out blue light and switches to warmer tones. Another handy feature is the ebook mode, which shows a warmer spectrum to help you read without putting a strain on your eyes.

Processor

Honor 9A runs on an octa-core Cortex-A53 chipset, which is a mid-range processor, matching the price range of the phone itself. The chipset is paired with 3GB of RAM and 64GB of inbuilt storage.

The phone is powered by Android 10 with Magic UI 3.1 on top. Since Huawei and the U.S is currently in a bitter relationship, all Honor phones have no access to Google Mobile Services.

So this means you have no access to Google Maps and Google Play Store. Huawei did offer its own AppGallery but the alternative has no Facebook, WhatsApp, Spotify, and Twitter.

While it’s possible to manually install Google Mobile Services but neither Huawei nor Google recommends you do so.

In reality, Honor 9A can handle most common tasks like running apps and streaming videos. However, if you are looking for a gaming phone, you’d better look elsewhere. Simple and smaller games will do but Fortnite and PUBG are a big no.

Since Geekbench 5 isn’t available on App Gallery, we couldn’t run a test to tell you exactly the stats of Honor 9A power.

RAM

3GB of RAM isn’t a lot and Honor 9A performance will definitely suffer from this lack of RAM and powerful chipset.

So as we said above, gaming isn’t something the phone can handle.

Battery

If what you are after is long battery life, Honor 9A with its 5,000mAh battery should be on your list. Moto G8 Power’s battery has the same capacity but the phone itself is more expensive than Honor 9A.

The powerful battery means you can breeze through an entire day without topping up the phone, even with heavy use. Under moderate use, the phone can go for a few days before it needs to be charged again.

According to Honor’s own testing, users can get 65 hours of calls, video playback of 32 hours, and 4G calls of 36 hours with a 100% charged battery.

With this price range, it’s reasonable that Honor 9A supports neither fast charging nor wireless charging. So you are left with the traditional way to charging it, which involves waiting for quite a while.

Despite the lack of latest charging technology and its price tag, Honor 9A can reverse charge other gadgets via an OTG cable. Given the beefy power cell of the phone. If you own a smartwatch, for example, you can charge it on the go with the Honor phone knowing that you still have plenty of power left in the battery after that.

Camera

When it comes to lowering the price of phones, one of the most usual candidates for sacrifice is the camera setup. That is true with this phone to a certain extent.

You cannot expect flagship photo quality on the Honor 9A but it doesn’t mean what the phone can do isn’t impressive.

On the rear, the 9A has a triple-camera setup consisting of a 13MP/f/1.8 primary lens, a 5MP/f/2.0 ultra-wide, and a 2MP f/2.4 depth camera.

This setup is identical to what you can find on the Samsung Galaxy A11. This sounds wonderful, given that the iPhone SE has only one camera and costs twice as much.

Raw camera number aside, the real quality is what most users want to know about. The primary 13MP camera is suitable for everyday shots. You can get pretty decent pictures without manually tweaking anything in the Pro mode. The ultra-wide lens works well too.

The absence of a telephoto means the best you get with this phone is 4x zoom. However, you might want to stay away from it because what it produces is a bunch of grainy images.

For videos, the Honor 9A can record at 30FPS and 1080p. This isn’t exactly something stands out but the quality is good enough to satisfy basic needs.

There are no fancy features to rely on, like motion stabilization or slow-mo recording. This is why if you don’t have steady hands, the results can be very blurry when you move or the phone is moved.

On the other side, users can take selfies with an 8MP camera. Honor has forfeited the pop-up mechanism it used on Honor 9X to go for the traditional notch at the top center of the display. And overall, the photo quality is very good.

As we said above, the phone supports facial recognition so the selfie camera doubles as the hardware needed to unlock your phone. After tests, we can say that the mechanism is reliable and snappy enough for a phone of this price range.