Honor 9X Pro review

The right kind of display

The Honor 9X Pro employs a large 6.59" LTPS IPS LCD screen with rounded corners, and it's free of any punch holes. The selfie camera is on a motorized pop-up module, which allows for a more immersive viewing experience.

The Honor 9X Pro screen has an extended 1080p resolution - 2,340 x 1080 pixels - making for a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 391ppi density. There is no information on the type of glass used to protect the screen, though.

In our testing, the Honor 9X posted very good numbers for brightness and contrast ratio - 517 nits and 1319:1. The minimal brightness we measured turned out excellent at mere 2 nits.

Now let's talk color accuracy. The Honor 9X Pro can be very accurate in representing the sRGB color space. In the Normal + Default display setting, it achieves an impressive average DeltaE of 1.6 with a maximum deviation of 3.1. If you want, you can tweak it even further with the manual options.

That's not the default mode, though, because people tend to prefer livelier colors. The Vivid + Default setting (the actual out-of-the-box state) delivers those but at the price of a massive blue tinge. So, the Vivid mode is far from accurate to the sRGB color space - we measured an average DeltaE of 7.1 with a maximum deviation of 11.8.

And now it's time for the bad news. Even though the Honor 9X Pro has such a great screen, it can't be used for streaming. The phone lacks Widevine CDM support meaning Netflix and the likes won't run at all. We tried - the Netflix app just says - Device Not Supported. It's a pity you can't use such a nice display for one of its key purposes - watching.

Battery life

The Honor 9X Pro is powered by a 4,000 mAh battery. It supports 10W charging, and the provided 5V/2A adapter refills about 30% of the phone's depleted battery in half an hour.

The Honor 9X Pro posted an excellent endurance rating of 104 hours in our battery life test. It did great on all tests - you can talk for more than a day, watch videos or browse the web for half a day, and the frugal standby consumption helps a lot, too.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Honor 9X Pro for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Speaker test

The Honor 9X Pro has a single loudspeaker firing down from the bottom and it posted a 'Below Average' result for loudness in our seven-track music test. It's noticeably lacking in low- and high-frequency thump but handles vocals okay.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.