Honor 90 review

Design

The Honor 90 is an exquisitely crafted device. Clearly, a luxurious exterior was pretty high up on the design priorities list. As per Honor, the phone's design was inspired by jewelry and gem pieces. We can definitely see the inspiration, particularly in what appears to be the halo Diamond Silver variant of the phone.

The back side is definitely the most striking part of the phone's design. We wouldn't necessarily say that our Peacock Blue review unit is inspired by jewelry. It has more of a seemingly natural inspiration behind it. The splash pattern looks like something liquid or perhaps even feathers of some sort. The colors of choice are soft and pastel yet very eye-catching. The surface is uniform and has a sort of subtle, soft finish to it.

As we already mentioned, the Diamond Silver has two different textures and color finishes on its back. The Emerald Green color option also features a frosted texture finish and is a single uniform color. The Honor 90 can also be had in a Midnight Black color option. This variant features a glossy ceramic texture on the back and is the most "traditional" and classic out of the bunch.

Despite its pretty large 6.7-inch display, the Honor 90 is a pretty slick and surprisingly slim device, measuring 161.9 x 74.1 x 7.8 mm. It is also surprisingly light, especially given that it has a 5,000mAh battery as it tips the scale at 183 grams.

The phone's body is curved on almost every side with no sharp edges, making for a comfortable in-hand feel. The excellent weight distribution and balance help in this regard as well. The Honor 90 is a really comfortable phone to hold and use.

We would also be remiss, not to mention the distinctive camera accent rings the Honor 90 has going on. These are part of the overall memorable design of the phone and are color-matched with the rest of the colors on the phone. Honor calls these "Moon Phase Rings", which is admittedly a bit pretentious, but we can't deny that the aesthetics work well as a whole.

Build quality

Honor is being a bit tight-lipped regarding the bill of materials on the Honor 90. As far as we can tell, both the back and front sides are made from glass, though of some undisclosed variety. These two panes of glass curve down almost symmetrically into the middle frame of the device. The latter is quite thin and appears to be made of plastic. Even so, it feels very sturdy.

In fact, there is practically no flex to the Honor 90 at all. Nor is there any hollowness to the back of the phone. Officially, there is no ingress protection on the Honor 90, which is kind of a bummer in this price range. That being said, we did notice there is a fairly thick rubber gasket on the SIM tray, which leads us to believe that the phone might still survive a little bit of exposure to the elements. Don't hold us accountable for any mishaps, however.

Controls

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the controls and I/O on the Honor 90. Everything is pretty standard. The power button and volume rocker are well-positioned height-wise on the phone's right side. Both are nice and clicky, with plenty of tactile feedback.

The phone's left side has an uninterrupted frame with no controls on it. You just get a thin strip of plastic here all the way down the length of the phone.

The top of the Honor 90 is practically empty as well. There is just a tiny hole here for the secondary noise-canceling microphone.

The bottom of the phone is a lot busier. It houses the single bottom-firing speaker on the Honor 90. That's right. Unfortunately, the Honor 90 does not have a stereo speaker setup.

Also on the bottom is the dual Nano-SIM card tray. The Honor 90 also lacks expandable storage, in case you were wondering. The main microphone is on the bottom side, and so is the USB Type-C port.

The Honor 90 uses an under-display optical fingerprint reader. It is snappy and reliable, which we have come to expect from current mature iterations of this technology.

Speaking of the front of the phone, we do have to note the quad-curved edge design. Honor calls it an "all-new suspended quad-curved fitting process". The odd naming aside, it looks modern and stylish.

In case you were wondering, there is no notification LED on the Honor 90, but this is expected.

Connectivity

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 Accelerated Edition chipset inside the Honor 90 is a 5G-capable part, and unlike Huawei, Honor can offer 5G connectivity. The Honor 90 offers SA and NSA Sub-6 connectivity on both of its SIM cards. It is worth noting that the Honor 90 exists in two variants - one with two physical nano-SIM slots with dual standby and another with just a single physical Nano-SIM slot and the capability to add an eSIM again with dual standby. As we mentioned already, neither has expandable storage, though.

The Honor 90 has GPS, GALILEO, GLONASS, BDS and QZSS support for positioning. Local connectivity includes dual-band Wi-Fi 6 (ax) and Bluetooth 5.2 with LE support and aptX HD. In case you were wondering, there is also NFC on board, but no FM radio.

The USB port is backed up by a USB 2.0 data connection, which means a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 480 Mbps. The Honor 90 has USB Host/OTG capabilities, but the USB port lacks any other fancy features like video output.

In terms of sensors, you get an icm4x6xa accelerometer and gyroscope combo, a tsl2510 ambient light sensor and an mmc56x3x magnetometer and compass combo. There is no barometer. Unfortunately, the UPD proximity sensor seems to be virtual, and it does not function as expected in all circumstances. The phone seemingly needs to be upright for the proximity to trigger at all. It usually does a decent job of disabling the display while on a call, but even that doesn't have a hundred percent accuracy. A hardware proximity sensor would have been much appreciated.