"For those who are young at heart" - this slogan in different variations was most often sounded at the presentation of Honor 9 in Berlin. I don’t know how about youth and soul, but last year's Honor 8 was a gift for those "who want a good smartphone, but do not want to pay much." It was a hit - the smartphone flew in China like hot cakes, and on the day of the official launch, when the new product was given in Russia at a pleasant discount, a huge queue lined up at the store in a few hours.
This was understandable: here you have both a beautiful design and decent technical characteristics, and even for money that you can't buy even half of a new iPhone. Therefore, Honor 9 was waiting: both the owners of Honor 8, who were wondering if they were in a hurry with the purchase that year, taking part in the "paid beta test", and those who were scared of the funny name of the company that time ("Honor" is so in Chinese), but is now considering buying. Both those and others have not waited in vain: Honor 9 is last year's Honor, only better.
The Honor 9 is a brilliant smartphone. In a literal sense: the company itself proudly dubs the novelty Lightcatcher, "Light Catcher", and, oddly enough, this is not just a marketing gimmick. As in the Honor 8, the back glass surface of the smartphone consists of 15 layers of the so-called "optical coating". The lid, curved in the latest fashion, plays very nicely with light and shimmers in the sun - this is the main design feature of Honor 9. Everything looks really creepy, however, only until you put the smartphone in your palm - the glass is covered with prints at the speed of a player in her depths of light. Scratches, unfortunately, too - so you should immediately place the smartphone in a transparent plastic case, since it comes in the kit.
Otherwise, we have in front of us actually a glass version of the flagship Huawei P10, which, in turn, is very similar to the iPhone 7. However, due to the glass body and unusual colors, this is not very striking. The build quality is not worse than that of the American competitor - except that the volume and power buttons play a little. All in all, Honor 9 is one of the nicest smartphones in its price segment. Also quite compact, because the display diagonal here is 5.2 inches.
© Huawei press service
The visual brilliance is doubled, just turn on the display. I didn't really like the Honor 8 screen - the picture was too unnatural. In the "nine" things are much better: the local LTPS-matrix with Full HD-resolution is distinguished by excellent contrast, excellent viewing angles and rich blacks. The Honor 9's screen may not boast of the most accurate color reproduction of the Galaxy S8 or iPhone 7 Plus, but even against the background of the best smartphones of our time, it looks more than worthy.
As with almost all the latest Huawei smartphones, the Honor 9 has a dual camera setup. The system is exactly the same as in the P10: two modules, one 12-megapixel, is responsible for color, the second, 20 megapixels for color. The Leica logo that adorns the body of the main flagship of Huawei has disappeared from the back cover. The results, however, are practically on par with those of the P10 - the Chinese company can rightfully be proud of the camera installed in the Honor 9. For a smartphone over 27,000, the shots are almost outstanding: excellent detail, perfect white balance, excellent sharpness throughout the photo. At night, everything is expected not so rosy, noises appear - but show me any other smartphone up to 30 thousand rubles, which shoots in the dark without them?
Plus, Honor 9 can take amazingly beautiful monochrome photos that no Instagram filters can get, and I caught myself regularly taking two pictures - one color, the other black and white.
1 of 2 © Dmitry Petrenko © Dmitry Petrenko
Like the iPhone 7 Plus, the Honor 9 has 2x optical zoom and portrait mode. The first one works well, the second one falls short of the level of an Apple smartphone: the edges of objects in focus are often blurred.
You can also complain about the not very convenient camera application: to switch modes, you need to call up a separate menu with a swipe, and then look for the one you need among a dozen icons of the same size. Taking a quick shot is annoying.
© Dmitry Petrenko
And in Honor 9 there is no optical stabilization, and when recording a video, instead of "mechanics", the gyroscope is blown out, as in the Google Pixel. Unfortunately, the Honor programmers did not reach the laurels of Google specialists this year.
Interface designers, however, too: Emotion UI 5.1, based on Andoid 7.1, has become more beautiful, but sometimes everything gives the impression of "Chinese iOS". All this is very subjective, but personally I like my native Material Design much more.
But EMUI has one interesting feature: according to representatives of Honor, the system is able to remember which applications you use in a particular period of the day, and over time begins to load them into memory in advance, making the launch almost instantaneous. Whether this feature helps or not is hard for me to say - simply because the Honor 9 runs pretty darn fast by default. The Honor 9 inherits Huawei's own Kirin 960 processor from the P10, and this is the flagship chip. It may be inferior in 3D games to the top-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, but its power is more than enough to provide a pleasant speed of the smartphone. It's no joke - Honor 9 behaves significantly smoother than the same Huawei P10, which costs more. But for show, I will still complain about rare problems with scrolling,especially when scrolling through "heavy" Internet pages.
© Huawei press service
At the presentation of the smartphone in Berlin, a few minutes were devoted to the sound of Honor 9, which seemed strange, because there is no separate audio chip in the device, and the company boasted that it had “screwed” several preset equalizers into the system for different types of headphones. Usually, such "improvements" and "surround sound systems" turn the sound into a mess, but this time Huawei has done it: by putting the necessary checkbox in the settings, you can really expand the soundstage and raise the low frequencies. So for music lovers a note.
But with the battery life miracles did not happen: Honor 9 is a typical "one-day smartphone". By the evening of intensive use, about ten percent usually remains.
© Huawei press service
As a result, it turns out that Honor 9 has no serious flaws. Of course, this is not the most perfect smartphone today - Huawei's brainchild is far from the design triumph of the frameless Galaxy S8, as far as the iPhone 7 Plus in terms of performance.
Only here Honor 9 costs half as much - 27 thousand rubles. And this is the official price in Russia, already taking into account all taxes and surcharges, and even with a guarantee. The novelty has essentially only two competitors: Xiaomi Mi6, recently presented in our country, and OnePlus 5. The first has a more powerful processor - but it is more expensive by three thousand and lacks a headphone jack. The second one may not reach our latitudes at all, but even when ordering from China, you will have to pay more for it.
It seems that a new leader has appeared in the category "price / quality, and even with a guarantee".>