Honor 9X Pro review

EMUI 9.1 on top of Android 9 Pie

The Honor 9X Pro boots EMUI 9.1, which is based on Android 9 Pie. It was stripped of all Google services and has no access to the Play Store. Instead, Huawei offers its new proprietary Mobile Services complete with Huawei's AppGallery.

The Honor 9X Pro has a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, and it's among the best in terms of speed and accuracy. Face Unlock is surprisingly not available.

Like all EMUI-driven devices, you can set up a magazine lockscreen style that changes the picture every time you wake up the screen. Sliding from the bottom will bring out quick shortcuts to some commonly used utilities. As usual, we found it to be useful and a bit annoying at the same time because there were times when we just wanted to unlock the phone, but we brought out the menu instead.

On the homescreen, you will find all of the installed and system apps, but there's a toggle in the settings menu that lets you choose between the standard layout or a homescreen with an app drawer. It's a personal preference, and it's good to be able to choose.

Lockscreen • Tools • Homescreen • Homescreen style • Some apps

There is no replacement for the Google Feed on this version of EMUI. The homescreens are business as usual, and you can populate them with apps, folders, and widgets.

The notification shade itself is nothing out of the ordinary. It can fit three rows with five quick launch icons for each row and right under the icons, you will find the screen brightness slider.

App/contacts search • Notification shade

Multitasking is a familiar affair and the task switcher allows for split-screen mode. You could even have a video playing on top of the two windows if for some reason you find that useful.

Recent apps • Split screen • Split screen

As we've seen on other recent Huawei/Honor devices, on the 9X Pro, you can opt for gesture-based navigation if the classic navbar is too 2017 for you. It goes like this - swipe up for Home, swipe up and stop midway for Task switcher, or swipe from the left or right edge of the screen for Back.

From the phone manager app, which is now called Optimiser, you can access shortcuts to storage cleanup, battery settings, blocked numbers, Virus scan powered by Avast, and mobile data usage.

Huawei's Music app offers a way to listen to stored MP3s, while Huawei's Health app offers step counting. The gallery is an entirely custom job, too, but it has the usual chronological and albums views plus an AI-powered highlights selection. There's a file manager app and a note-taking app.

FM radio support is available on the Honor 9X and you get an appropriate app preinstalled as well.

Optimiser • Music Player • Gallery • Files • FM radio

Huawei does not provide Google services pre-installed on the Honor 9X Pro, as we mentioned a couple of times already, nor have they encouraged or assisted in the side loading of the Google Play Store by the users. You can actually sideload some of the Gapps like Maps, Gboard, and Chrome, but Gmail and Play Store won't work without Play Services, which you can't get to work easily.

The App Gallery's catalog - the Play Store alternative from Huawei - is scarce and you'll have a hard time finding anything popular in there. Sure, some platforms like Facebook offer direct APK download links for their mobile app, but that's more of an exception.

App Gallery

You can use the Phone Clone app, which will copy everything from your old phone including all installed apps but Google's (and some banking apps) on to your new Honor 9X Pro. And that's surely a nice start, but it's not a real deal as you won't get future updates to these apps automatically.

So your safest bet is to resort to using third-party app stores though. The Amazon App Store should do a fine job - it has plenty of the popular apps - both free and paid, so you'll manage just fine using Amazon's solution.

Of, if you don't need any paid apps, APKPure is another app repository and it works great for free apps and games. APKPure has a Store page with paid apps, too, but those are just links to the Play Store which obviously won't work on the Honor 9X Pro.

Amazon AppStore • Amazon AppStore • Amazon AppStore • APKPure • APKPure • APKPure

Another app store you can try is F-Droid. It's an app store for Open Source Android apps so there is a limited selection of apps. We found a nice YouTube alternative called NewPipe, which will come in handy as there is no YouTube app on the phone.

There is potentially another alternative. It's a more time-consuming approach that requires some extra tinkering, and it's called the microG Project - the XDA-approved open-source framework for getting apps designed for Google Play Services to run on phones without actual Google Play Services. But this goes beyond the scope of this review.

Performance and benchmarks

The Honor 9X Pro is the first smartphone we meet utilizing the HiSilicon Kirin 810 SoC - Huawei's latest mid-range chip.

The new Kirin 810 chipset is manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process and is a notable upgrade over the Kirin 710. It has a different octa-core processor with newer cores - there are 2x Cortex-A76 clocked at 2.27GHz and 6x Cortex A55 ticking at 1.8GHz.

The GPU though is probably the most interesting part - it's a six-core Mali-G52 up from the 710's four-core Mali-G51.

The Honor 9X Pro always ships with 8GB of RAM, no matter whether it's a 128GB or 256GB model.

We ran some benchmarks and the scores are impressive for this class for sure. The new processor easily outperforms every competitor and consistently ranks at the top of the charts.

GeekBench 4.4 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Honor 9X Pro
  7836
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  7039
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  7008
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  6999
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  6863
• Honor Play
  6696
• Xiaomi Mi 9 SE
  6017
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  5401
• Honor 9X
  5345

GeekBench 4.4 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Honor 9X Pro
  2831
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  2558
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  2537
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  2536
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  2472
• Xiaomi Mi 9 SE
  1905
• Honor Play
  1899
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  1668
• Honor 9X
  1559

GeekBench 5.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Honor 9X Pro
  1911
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  1733
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  1703
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  1692
• Honor Play
  1647
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  1622
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  1294

GeekBench 5.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Honor 9X Pro
  594
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  548
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  542
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  542
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  493
• Honor Play
  386
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  347

The six-core Mali-G52 is a mighty performer and the only GPU that could beat it is a flagship-grade one, like the 12-core Mali-G72 from the now older, high-end Kirin 970 chip inside the Honor Play.

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Honor Play
  55
• Honor 9X Pro
  48
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  40
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  37
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  37
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  34
• Xiaomi Mi 9 SE
  34
• Honor 9X
  19
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  15

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Honor Play
  36
• Honor 9X Pro
  30
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  27
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  27
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  24
• Xiaomi Mi 9 SE
  24
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  24
• Honor 9X
  12
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  8.9

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Honor Play
  21
• Honor 9X Pro
  18
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  15
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  15
• Xiaomi Mi 9 SE
  14
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  14
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  13
• Honor 9X
  6.5
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  5.6

Finally, the Honor 9X Pro easily aced the compound AnTuTu 8 test and posted an impressive score and won by a rather large margin.

AnTuTu 8

Higher is better

• Honor 9X Pro
  312668
• Redmi Note 8 Pro
  279355
• Xiaomi Redmi K30
  272229
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  263396
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  257146
• Honor Play
  238754
• Honor 9X
  187528
• Samsung Galaxy A51
  175363

The Kirin 810 is the most powerful mid-range chip we've seen so far, with very good thermal performance and deserves praise for its powerful and sustained performance.