Honor 90

The Honor 90 5G has a camera system that looks good on paper. You get a 200MP Samsung ISOCELL HP3 primary sensor with f/1.9 aperture, a 12MP ultra-wide and macro camera lens, and a 2MP depth sensor. At the front, the phone uses a 50MP camera for selfies. There is no OIS support, which is unfortunate for a phone in this price segment. You do get EIS support though.In daylight conditions, the Honor 90's primary camera captures decent photos with accurate colours. For comparison, I tested the Honor 90's cameras with the OnePlus Nord 3's, the latter being one of the best camera phones in its segment based on our review. In daylight shots, the Honor 90 5G would produce shots with more accurate colours and better dynamic range as opposed to the saturated photos taken by the Nord 3. That said, the Nord 3's 50MP Sony IMX890 camera (in default shooting mode) was able to capture sharper, more detailed images in comparison to Honor's 90's 200MP HP3 sensor. In the comparison shot below, the Honor 90 5G was able to accurately differentiate the orange colour of the fire extinguisher from the red buckets behind it, which the Nord 3 was unable to do.We found that the Nord 3's 8MP ultra-wide lens managed to capture more visually appealing (albeit with boosted colours) and detailed shots compared to the 12MP wide-angle images taken on the Honor 90 5G. The same 12MP lens is able to capture macro shots, leading to sharper close-up shots compared to the Nord 3's 2MP macro lens.

Last year's Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 Accelerated Edition chipset powers the Honor 90 5G. We haven't seen this processor powering a lot of devices in India despite it being over a year old. In fact, the only other phone to launch with this chip in recent times is the Rs 60,000 Moto Razr 40. As far as benchmarks go, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 Accelerated Edition, which is essentially overclocked up to 2.5GHz, delivers fairly mid-range scores. On AnTuTu, the device scored over 700,000 while single-core and multi-core scores on Geekbench were 1127 and 3284, respectively. These benchmark scores are expectedly lower than the more affordable POCO F5 that's powered by the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 chipset.While it's not the most powerful chipset in the segment, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 is good and efficient. It is more than capable of handling basic day-to-day tasks like messaging, checking mail, browsing through social media, and switching between apps lag-free thanks to up to 12GB of RAM. It can also run games like BGMI in HDR with Ultra frame rate settings. However, expect some stutters while playing in these graphics settings, although I was impressed with the chipset's thermal efficiency.Honor 90 5G ships with Android 13-based MagicOS 7.1. Globally, Honor phones have been called out for offering a lot of bloatware, but the Honor 90 5G that's released in India will be largely bloatware-free. You will be greeted with some pre-loaded apps, especially Honor's own apps like Honor App Market, Game Center, Honor's Email app, and a few more. Most of these apps can be uninstalled if you prefer fewer apps and a cleaner UI. In everyday usage, MagicOS 7.1 is largely easy to deal with and runs smoothly for the most part. However, Honor is promising only two major OS updates and three years of security patches. Other phones in this price range, especially from Samsung, OnePlus, and Google offer better software support.We tested the Honor 90 5G on Airtel 5G Plus network in Gurugram, Haryana, and managed to get good speeds and largely uninterrupted signal.

The Honor 90 5G packs a 5,000mAh battery that's good enough to last a full day and then some. Battery drain during typical day-to-day tasks like messaging, social media browsing, checking emails, etc., is managed efficiently thanks to the 4nm chipset. During a 30-minute BGMI gaming session, the battery dropped by around 5 per cent, with little to no noticeable heating throughout. In our PCMark battery test, the phone lasted roughly 12 hours, which isn't the best in its segment, but is quite decent.While the device supports 66W charging, you don't get a bundled charger in the box in India. Honor stated that you can get its 30W charger separately free of cost. I, however, used Honor's 65W charger and it took roughly 50 minutes to fully charge the phone from zero to 100 per cent.