Honor 9i

Bezel-less designs on smartphones don't really raise eybrows anymore and we’ve already seen plenty of devices ship with minimal bezels. However, smartphone manufacturers often cut corners with the display’s resolution to reduce costs. To Honor’s credit, the 9i looks and feels amazing and the 5.9-inch FHD+ display is nothing short of stunning. But before we jump into my experience with the display, allow me to talk a little more about the handset’s design. As I mentioned earlier, the Honor 9i packs a massive 5.9-inch display, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that the smartphone is a phablet. On the contrary, the smartphone’s size is comparable to most 5.5-inchers in the market, a feat made possible by trimming down the top and the bottom bezels and adopting the 18:9 aspect ratio. The build quality of the Honor 9i is impeccable too, which is evident the second you pick up the smartphone. The 9i employs metal in its construction and has been crafted with industrial precision. The device flaunts a curvy back which makes it comfortable to hold and the sides merge into the display seamlessly as well.

Smartphone photography has advanced exponentially in terms of quality over the years. With sharper lenses, smartphones have been able to click brilliant stills in diverse scenarios. One of the biggest trends which was seen last year was that of portrait (or bokeh) shots which blurred the background of a subject to add more depth to the image. Now, to simulate depth, a smartphone was required to ship with two cameras at the back. While it’s certainly not a pre-requisite and a single camera could click in portrait mode via some software tweaks, the mode was primarily limited to devices which shipped with a dual-camera setup at the back. Well, the Honor 9i comes with not two, but four cameras. That’s right, the smartphone gets a dual-camera setup on both the front as well as the back, paving way for bokeh selfies as well as stills. In terms of specifications, the smartphone gets a pair of 16MP and 2MP sensors at the back. For selfies, you’ll be smiling into a pair of 13MP and 2MP sensors - so far, so good. But do the specs translate well into the day-to-day performance as well? Before we dissect the smartphone’s camera prowess, let’s take a closer look at the camera UI.

Much like Samsung and Apple, Honor also has its own processor line which the company calls HiSilicon Kirin chips. If you’re even remotely familiar with mobile benchmarking applications, then you might have noticed that Kirin processors often trail Qualcomm counterparts in terms of benchmark scores. The reason behind this is that the GPU onboard the Kirin SoCs often runs on lower GFlops when compared to an equivalent Qualcomm processor. With that said, I would like to state upfront that the Kirin processors are no slouch and there’s little-to-no difference in the day-to-day performance of comparable Qualcomm and HiSilicon chips. Moreover, since the hardware has been designed by Honor itself, it should gel well with the software and crunch out solid performance and battery life as well. But does it?