Honor Pad 9 review

Display

The Honor Pad 9 has a large 12.1-inch LCD. It also has a 16:10 aspect ratio, making reading and general productivity much better. The resolution is a nice and crisp 1600 x 2560 pixels, which works out to around 249 ppi. The tablet does have dynamic resolution, which sometimes lowers the render resolution automatically and is enabled by default.

The Honor Pad 9 doesn't get particularly bright. The officially advertised brightness is 500 nits. In our standardized testing, we managed to get 530 nits of brightness out of our unit, which is more than promised.

There is no automatic brightness boost beyond these 530 nits. So, that's all you get. Frankly, it's not enough to be comfortably usable outdoors.

On a positive note, we measured a min black value of 0.47 nits, which makes for a pretty good contrast ratio overall.

The minimum brightness level is also very good at just 1.8 nits.

The Honor Pad 9 has a special reading mode, enabling a monochrome display mode. It works well enough, but don't expect to get anywhere near the same experience as from e-Ink and something like a Kindle.

The Honor Pad 9 supports 60Hz, 90Hz and 120Hz, as reported by the system. There are three refresh rate modes in settings - Standard, which basically locks the refresh rate at 60Hz, as well as High and Dynamic. Both of these can go up to 120Hz, but they tend to choose the 90Hz middle-ground mode more often than not.

The High refresh rate mode does have a tendency to switch to 120Hz a bit more often, but not nearly enough since, for instance, we couldn't get any of our test games to run at more than 60Hz.

On a more positive note, both the Dynamic and High modes have implemented some smart refresh rate switching logic. It mostly has to do with interacting with the display. If left alone for a few seconds, it drops down to 60Hz to save power.

The Honor Pad 9 lacks any HDR support on the display. The software reports HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG decoding capabilities without Dolby Vision. The tablet has the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing apps like Netflix to offer up FullHD resolution streams.

Battery life

The battery inside the Honor Pad 9 isn't particularly large at 8,300 mAh. Then again, the tablet is quite thin. The Honor Pad 9 managed a respectable 9:18 hours in our standardized Active Use Score test. It did particularly well with streaming video, and browsing wasn't half bad either.

However, some of its competitors, like the Xiaomi Pad 6, did a bit better in the battery life department.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

Speakers - loudness and quality

The Honor Pad 9 has a total of eight speakers. While the tablet is positioned horizontally, two of these speakers end up on the left side and two on the right. Another two speakers end up facing downward.

Honor doesn't specify how it arrives at the number eight for the total speaker count, but we can only imagine that the bottom speakers are a combination of a tweeter and a woofer each.

The Honor Pad 9 gets very loud. It scored an Excellent rating on our standardized testing. Not only that, but the sound quality is also great. You get clear mids, especially voices, likely thanks to Honor's "bidirectional vocal enhancement technology". Highs are pretty clean as well, and there is even some bass. The sound stage is nice and wide, with rich details.

While Honor mostly brags about the teleconferencing capabilities of the Honor Pad 9, we also found it to offer an excellent multimedia audio experience.

There is an equalizer control panel with nifty presets for things like music, movies and games.

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.

Connectivity

The Honor Pad 9 we got for review has no cellular connectivity or positioning support. We only phrase it like that since the official Honor site does mention a 5G version of the Honor Pad 9 that is supposedly "coming soon". As per the site, that version also has expandable storage, which is missing from our model.

Our unit only has local connectivity in the form of dual-band Wi-Fi ac and Bluetooth 5.1 with LE support. There is no NFC on board, nor is there an FM radio receiver or a 3.5mm jack.

The Type-C port only offers a basic USB 2.0 data connection, which means a maximum theoretical data transfer speed of around 480 Mbps. The port does support USB Host/OTG. There is nothing fancy like video output, though.

The Honor Pad 9 has a fairly limited set of sensors on board. There is a sip1221 light sensor, which works well to automatically adjust the display brightness and accompanying it is an STMicro lis2dw12 accelerometer. There is no proximity sensor, magnetometer, compass, gyroscope, or barometer.