Honor Pad X9 review

Large display, but a bit low on the ppi

The Pad X9 has an 11.5-inch display in what's seemingly the hottest 5:3 aspect ratio (or 15:9 for easier comparisons). The 5:3 aspect (15:9) is great for browsing and video watching. The resolution is 1,200 x 2,000px, and the pixel density works out to 203ppi - decent but hardly the sharpest around.

The display is just an LCD with no HDR support. What it does, however, have is a 120Hz refresh rate. It is also TUV Rheinland certified for low blue light and "flicker free".

When it comes to brightness, we measured the modest 452 nits of max output, with no boost in bright ambient conditions. Then again, we can't really expect much more from a budget tablet of this size with an LCD. Contrast is decent at a little under 1603:1.

The Pad X9 doesn't have display color modes, just color temperature settings. The display targets the sRGB color space. The default color temperature mode is not particularly color-accurate. It results in cold, bluish colors. Using the warm color temperature setting results in what can be considered accurate color reproduction compared to the sRGB color space with deltaE values lower than four.

Display color settings

As mentioned, the display on the Honor Pad X9 has no HDR support. The video decoder inside the tablet also lacks HDR support, for what that's worth.

No HDR support • DRM • Netflix playback capabilities

On a more positive note, the tablet has the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing services like Netflix to offer up FullHD streams.

High refresh rate handling

The Honor Pad X9 has a 120Hz display. It reports support for 60Hz, 90Hz and 120Hz refresh rate modes. In terms of refresh rate settings, there are a total of three modes: Standard, which locks the tablet to 60Hz; High; and Dynamic, both of which promise to go up to 120Hz.

In reality, both the High and Dynamic refresh rate modes seem to work identically. The UI mostly works at 90Hz while you are interacting with the device. When you leave the tablet alone for a few seconds, it drops its refresh rate down to 60Hz.

High refresh rate handling

Certain apps like YouTube do trigger the 120Hz mode of the display. But again, we observed the exact same behavior in both Dynamic and High refresh rate modes.

Naturally, we tried high refresh rate gaming as well. Unfortunately, we were not particularly successful. Most of the games we tried that we know can push past the 60fps mark were capped at 60Hz, which is not ideal.

High refresh rate gaming is mostly a no-go

Overall, we would call the high refresh rate on the Honor Pad X9 basic but mostly functional. The tablet only operates on user interaction logic and tends to stick to 90Hz most of the time. Still, it is a step up from the basic 60Hz refresh rate, and we appreciate the effort.

Honor Pad X9 battery life

The Honor Pad X9 has a 7250 mAh battery on board. That is pretty decent, given its thin 6.9mm body and 495 grams of total weight.

As you might already know, we recently retired our original Endurance rating battery test and have now moved on to our new GSMArena Battery test 2.0 and the so-called Active Use Score. In the case of a Wi-Fi-only tablet, the call runtime is tested over Whatsapp.

The Pad X9 managed a decent 13:17 hours of active use score.

If you don't plan on making any VoIP calls on the device, you will get a lower Active Use Score. You can use the slider below to see how that use case pans out.

Charging speed

Charging is a bit of a pain point on the Honor Pad X9. The tablet comes bundled with a meager 10W charger.

And using the bundled 10W charger, the Pad X9 is terribly slow to charge. It managed to get from dead to 9% in 15 minutes on the charger, then 17% in thirty minutes. A full charge took us a whopping 3:18 hours.

We also tested the Pad X9 with a Huawei/Honor 22.5W SuperCharge charger, as suggested by some online information. The tablet seems to support the faster charger since we measured it, taking in a bit over 20W with said charger. Fifteen minutes on the charger resulted in 18% charge, while thirty minutes resulted in 34% charge. A full top-up took 2:04 hours. You need to buy a charger separately to use the faster charging.

Speaker test

The six-speaker setup on the Honor Pad X9 is definitely one of its highlights. You get a set of two speakers on either of the shorter sides and a pair of speakers on one of the longer sides of the device. That way, you get speakers on the left and right when holding the tablet horizontally and a pair of speakers facing down.

The idea of the bottom pair is to bounce sound off of a surface and achieve a 3D audio effect that way.

The speakers on the Pad X9 are nice, loud, and quite clear in their output. They leave little to be desired, especially on a budget device. The tablet is pretty loud, with a VERY GOOD score in our testing, and its output is clean with clear voices and highs and even some bass.

However, we should note that no additional audio settings or equalizers and enhancements are available here. You get what you get.

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.