Huawei’s subsidiary company Honor has finally launched its flagship for this year, as a refresh for the Honor 8 that was launched last year. The Honor 8 sported an attractive design with a glass build, and that design has been retained with this year’s Honor 9, with the latter phone looking more refined than its predecessor. This time, featuring a slightly curved glass back.
Based on the Honor 9’s spec sheet, the phone sounds pretty much like a Huawei P10. It has a 5.15-inch Full HD display on the front. One thing to note is that the fingerprint sensor now sits below the display instead Underneath the hood lies Huawei’s home grown Kirin 960 processor, the same one powering both the Huawei Mate 9 and Huawei P10. The Honor 9 comes in two storage and memory variants – 4GB RAM with 64GB of storage and 6GB RAM with either 64GB or 128GB of storage. Storage can also be further expanded for an extra 256GB via the micro SD card slot.
The Honor 9 sports a camera setup similar to that of the Huawei P10, without the Leica branding. This means that the setup consists of a 20MP monochrome sensor and a 12MP RGB sensor, which should be capable of 2X optical zoom plus blurred background and bokeh effects when capturing images. The front facing camera on the other hand is of 8 megapixels, with an f/2.0 aperture. The phone packs a 3,200mAh battery, which is also of the same capacity as the Huawei P10’s battery.
The Honor 9 carries a pretty affordable price tag, beginning at CNY 2,299 (RM 1,441.25) for the base model. If you’re willing to look past the absence of the Leica branded cameras, the Honor 9 is an affordable version of the Huawei P10. As usual, the phone will be exclusively available to the Chinese market for the time being. What do you think?