Honor Pad 9 review

MagicOS 7.2 on top of Android 13

The Honor Pad 9 runs Android 13 out of the box and has full support for the Play Store and Google apps (worth mentioning in light of past relations between Honor and Huawei).

On top of the OS, there's an in-house layer of MagicOS (v7.2 in this case), where a lot of cool stuff is.

The Honor Pad 9 is set to receive a major update (to Android 14) and three years of security patches.

The multi-window functionality works well. You can launch apps in a split-screen view via a side menu, which is accessible by swiping from the right edge of the display. Tapping an app from here spawns a floating window, and you can now have two such windows open simultaneously, with every subsequently launched one minimizing one of the earlier ones to a separate icon on the side, opening a separate task switcher.

To initiate the split-screen view, you must long-press the app icon from the side dock and then drag it to another already open app. You can add any app you choose to this Multi-Window menu, and most seem to work and scale pretty effortlessly.

You can also have an app pair remain bundled together as one entry in the recent apps view, so you can easily close both of them or return to that particular side-by-side workflow.

Multi-window

Other than that, it's the familiar look and feel of Magic UI/EMUI. One of the other neat proprietary features is the 'large folder', all the more useful here than on the smartphones from the two brands - a large folder occupies as much space as four regular icons and holds up to 12 apps, which are immediately available. You don't need to expand the folder to launch an app.

Homescreen • Large folder • Settings

Benchmarks and performance

The Honor Pad 9 is based on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset. It is a 4nm Qualcomm part from 2023 and, thus, reasonably modern. Technically, there should be an X62 5G modem integrated inside the chipset, but as mentioned, our review unit has neither cellular connectivity nor location services, for that matter. A 5G variant of the tablet does seem to be in the works, though.

The Pad 9 has an octa-core CPU setup with two clusters. There are four Arm Cortex-A78 cores in one cluster, clocked at up to 2.2 GHz and four Cortex-A55, one in the other working at up to 1.8 GHz. The onboard GPU is an Adreno 710.

The Honor Pad 9 is available in four total memory configurations, though these seem market-dependent. These include: 128GB 8GB RAM, 256GB 8GB RAM, 256GB 12GB RAM and 512GB 12GB RAM. The RAM is LPDDR5, while according to our testing, the storage chips are UFS 3.1, at least on our 8GB + 256GB review unit.

Let's dig into some actual benchmark numbers. The Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 isn't a particularly popular chip. In fact, we only had one other device in our database at the time of writing rocking this silicon - the Realme 12 Pro, which we threw into the charts amid tablets just to see if the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 performs as expected inside the Honor Pad 9.

Indeed, GeekBench and its CPU tasks show that the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 inside the Honor Pad 9 performs as expected and offers decent performance. We also included the older GeekBench 5 chart since some of our comparison devices are getting on in age a bit.

AnTuTu has a much more broad and compound set of tests, including GPU runs and memory tests. It places the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 around the middle of the pack performance-wise. You can get better performance, but you might have to pay a bit more as well and go for something like the OnePlus Pad.

Finally, we have 3DMark and its graphical tests, which show that the Honor Pad 9 definitely holds its own. Again, you can probably get better performance, but you might have to pay more.

We've discontinued GFXBench graphics benchmarking as the app is often banned/blacklisted on the phones we receive for review. The graphics performance ranking in 3D Mark is just as meaningful, so we suggest you refer to that one instead.

In more practical terms, the Honor Pad 9 is very snappy and responsive in day-to-day use. It handled pretty much any app we threw at it easily, and even some lighter gaming was no issue. You are getting a very decent performance for your money.

The Honor Pad 9 does an excellent job of cooling the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset. It does not thermal-throttle aggressively even with prolonged torture testing and maintains a good chunk of its burs performance in the long term.

Thermal-throttling test

The tablet's surface never got more than barely warm during our stress testing and it remained perfectly comfortable to hold.