Honor re-enters crowded market – Gadget
Honor has released what it calls “the pinnacle of innovation and advanced features in its class at an affordable price” on a day of maximum noise from the two South African market leaders.
Huawei’s new flagship, the Mate50 Pro, hit stores on February 1, as Samsung unveiled its new flagship lineup, the Galaxy S23. Honor hasn’t released a smartphone in South Africa for over 6 months, with its latest release being its flagship Magic4 Pro.
The 256GB version of the new Honor X9a went on sale in South Africa on the same day via Telkom, with Vodacom starting to sell it a week later.
The handset is positioned at the top of the mid-range of phones, with a price tag of R11,999. As is customary with new phone launches these days, first-time buyers also get free headphones, in this case the Honor Choice X3 Lite headphones, usually priced at R1,499.
What do you get for the price? Pretty much the standard offering of decent mid-range phones. Honor says, “From the toughest glass display on the market, long battery life, smooth user experience, to an extremely compact and premium design.” In short, it claims pretty much the same as any other mid-range handset on the market.
Its most direct competitors are handsets like the Huawei nova 9 at around R12,000 and the Xiaomi 12T at around R14,000. Both devices, released in 2021 and last year respectively, eclipse the X9a.
Let’s look at the specs:
The Honor X9a features a 6.67-inch curved OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, making it ideal for browsing, video or gaming, web or gaming with less lag. hall. A resolution of 2400×1080 pixels also means it’s good for video viewing. It comes with eye comfort solutions, like 1920Hz PWM dimming technology and eye comfort mode.
Honor claims its large 5,100mAh battery makes the X9a the thinnest and lightest smartphone to feature a larger 5,000mAh battery so far – and promises two days of use on a single charge.
It uses 40W SuperCharge, which is a bit dated considering that the flagship Honor Magic range used the same fast charging power 5 years ago. The magic4 Pro arrived with a massive 100W fast charger. Still, this means that with 30 minutes of charging, the X9a can deliver up to 12.5 hours of use.
Storage is good at 256GB onboard, expandable to 1TB via microSD.
The rear camera array included 64 MP, f/1.8, (wide), 5 MP, f/2.2, (ultrawide) and 2 MP, f/2.4, (macro), enabling 1080p video at 30 fps. The front or selfie camera comes in at 16MP, with the same video resolution.
All in all, a good average phone.
* For more information, visit www.hihonor.com