HONOR X9b 5G Review

HONOR started the new year with a bang, introducing the second-generation HONOR X9b 5G as the “toughest phone” in their 2024 lineup.

Now available for purchase today, the HONOR X9b 5G is well-known for its build and durability, but there’s so much more to it!

In this written review, we hope to shed even more light on the HONOR X9b and figure out if this smartphone is worth your next paycheck.

Design and Construction

Marketed as Tough from All Angles, the HONOR X9 series is no stranger to durability tests flooded all over tech social media, and we can confirm that, for the most part, it’s true!

Compared to its predecessor the HONOR X9a, the X9b refines its design by adding more durability protection and certifications.

It now features an IP53 rating with limited dust ingress and splash resistance, and the display now gets an SGS Five Star Overall Drop Resistance Certification for its Ultra-Bounce Anti-Drop Display!

The HONOR X9b also gets a new refined design, featuring a knurled-edge circular camera module here at the rear, that showcases the triple-camera array.

Our unit is in this Sunrise Orange colorway, which is the only one that features a vegan leather rear panel.

It’s also available in Midnight Black, Emerald Green, and Titanium Silver to fit a bevy of styles!

The HONOR X9b’s power button and volume rocker are to its right, and at the bottom is the dual nanoSIM card slot, USB Type-C port for wired charging and data transfers and it’s single downward-firing speaker.

It is on the tall side for smartphone dimensions, but the slender form factor and its curved edges make it pretty easy to grip with confidence.

Overall, it has a nice build and design. It refines its slim and sleek form-factor from its predecessor, perfectly adding enough nuance to separate it from the X9a and the rest of the midrange flock.

Display, Multimedia and Biometrics

The HONOR X9b 5G sports a slightly curved 6.78-inch FHD+ (2652 x 1220) AMOLED display, that features a 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 1200 nits. Its best feature has to be its All-Angle Ultra Tough display.

Translating to great viewing angles whether indoors or out, deep blacks with good contrast and vibrancy.

Color reproduction looks great with 100% DCI-P3 coverage. Making playing games, streaming movies and watching videos on social media a visual treat for the eyes.

It’s 120Hz refresh rate paired with it’s mostly-stutter free software experience make UI animations look smooth.

For audio playback, its single downward-firing speaker leaves more to be wanted, and with 3.5mm audio jack present, we can only assume this what to keep overall costs down.

The single speaker sounds pretty fair in essence, but it’s not blowing anyone’s socks off — that’s for sure.

We also get an optical in-display fingerprint scanner under that Ultra Tough display and it’s very accurate as long as you make sure to cover the whole scanning area.

It also features face-unlock of the sticky tracking variety, and it works surprisingly well even in less than optimal lighting conditions, it even features facial recognition with users wearing a face mask.

I still prefer just using the fingerprint scanner nonetheless.

Cameras

For optics, the HONOR X9b 5G’s triple camera system is also fairly substantial when assessing the overall package.

 

Headlining the show is a 108MP main camera sensor with an aperture of f/1.8 and features PDAF (Phase Detection Auto Focus), followed by a 5MP (f/2.2) ultrawide and a 2MP macro sensor.

In the punch-hole display resides its 16MP selfie shooter that features an aperture of f/2.5.

Overall image quality taken with this system won’t be topping the DXOMark Camera sensor rankings any time soon but they’re far from unusable.

Pictures come out with good clarity in naturally well-lit conditions. And its processing creates very vibrant and contrasty shots with what seems to be a fair bit of post-processing sharpening.

The quality tends to fall-off in less than optimal lighting conditions but that’s also why you get a flash.

For video, the main camera system supports shooting at up to 4K, 30 frames per second. And the front-facing sensor can do 1080p at 30 fps as well.

OS, Apps and UI

For software, the HONOR X9b 5G runs on MagicOS 7.2 based off Android 13 out of the box. MagicOS feels like a more global-friendly HarmonyOS with easy access to Google Play services and RCS support.

It a fairly good interface that could use a bit more original DNA in our opinion. But in hindsight, animations look well-polished matched with the high refresh rate display.

Overall it’s a good operating system with nice ease-of-use and productivity features, great for everyday use.

Performance and Benchmarks

Compared to its predecessor, the HONOR X9a, the new model elevates its gaming and entertainment capabilities.

Officially launching in the Philippines only in the 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage configuration, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset that features an Adreno 710 GPU, offers the HONOR X9b 5G good overall performance and efficient multitasking.

Being about one and half year since its introduction, this chipset is great for stable 60 frames per second mobile gaming optimized for responsiveness!

At this price-point we aren’t topping benchmark charts but it performs pretty good and snappy in everyday use.

For those interested in our synthetic benchmark results, our results are below:

Antutu Benchmark v10 – 509,306
Antutu Storage Benchmark:
Read Speed: 1,746.3 MB/s
Write Speed: 1,267.3 MB/s
Random Read Speed: 539.0 MB/s
Random Write Speed: 480.0 MB/s

3D Mark – 2,385 (Wild Life)

Geekbench 6: 944 (Single core), 2,780 (Multi-core)
Geekbench 6 GPU: 1,636 (Vulkan), 1,325 (OpenCL)
PCMark Work 3.0 Performance- 12,007

Connectivity and Battery

Powering the HONOR X9b 5G is a large 5,800mAh battery. The X9b also features a 35W SuperCharge brick in the box, ensuring speedy charging times when you do have to charge up your phone when out and about.

Either way, we don’t think you would because the battery performance out of the X9b is amazing!

When ran it through our usual battery benchmarks, and the HONOR X9b soared high, scoring 14 hours and 8 minutes in our PCMark Work 3.0 battery test, and 23 hours and 47 minutes in our standard video loop test.

Testing was done with Airplane mode turned ON, volume muted, and brightness locked to 50% to account for mixed use cases.

These results translate to great battery life in real-world use for watching videos all day on those relax weekends, sprinkled with light gaming sessions all around.

Using the phone moderately could easily keep the phone running without a charge for almost a day and a half, which really surprised me when reviewing the HONOR X9b 5G.

And to top off this battery portion, it also features reverse-wired charging to help any of your friends or family who need a quick juice up, just make sure you have a USB Type-C to C cable around!

When it came to making and receiving calls everything seemed fine with the X9b, no complaints here. We get network coverage from GSM to 5G, it features dual band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.1 and GPS.

Like that one American smartphone manufacturer, we surprisingly don’t get FM Radio on the HONOR X9b 5G, so if you do use that on your phone a lot, this probably isn’t the right phone to upgrade to.

Conclusion

To conclude this review, we have to discuss how big of a hole the HONOR X9b 5G will make in your wallet.

Officially available for PHP 16,999 for the 8GB+256GB variant, this makes the HONOR X9b a pretty solid mid-ranger that delivers great durability, battery life and a really nice display for watching videos and playing games.

As a successor to the Honor X9a 23 from last year, we expect some significant improvements from the Honor X9b. And rightfully so. Now, you’re getting a better chipset, more RAM, bigger battery and better set of cameras — all at the same retail price as its predecessor and that ultra-tough display we’ve all witnessed.

If these features are your priority at a budget less than 17k, then the HONOR X9b 5G is definitely worth considering!

What we Liked:

• Display.
• Battery Life.
• Durability.

What we liked a little LESS:

• Efficient but slightly old chipset.
• Camera system.

 

HONOR X9b 5G specs:
6.78-inch Curved AMOLED Display (resolution 2652 x 1220 pixels), 120Hz refresh rate
Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 2.2GHz, 4nm chipset
4x Cortex A78 @ 2.2GHz + 4x Cortex A55 @ 1.8GHz
Adreno 710 GPU
12GB RAM
256GB internal storage (No card slot)
108MP f/1.75, PDAF main camera
5MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera
2MP f/2.4 macro camera
16MP f/2.45 front camera
Dual nano SIM card
5G/4G/3G/2G
Dual-band Wi-Fi: 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth 5.1
Optical in-display fingerprint sensor
Single speaker
Optical Face Unlock
NFC
5,800mAh Li-Po battery, 35W Super Charge
MagicOS 7.2 (based on Android 13)
185 grams (weight)
163.6mm x 75.5mm x 7.98mm (dimensions)
Colors: Sunrise Orange, Midnight Black, Emerald Green