Honor 9i first impressions: Ready to experience four cameras on one phone

Honor 9i smartphone has been unveiled in India and it comes with four cameras, which is also the USP of the device. Honor 9i follows the launch of Honor 8 Pro, which features dual rear cameras and costs Rs 29,999. The smartphone will be Flipkart exclusive and it will go on sale starting October 14.
Following the current trend, Huawei’s Honor has also included a bezel-less display in its latest smartphone. Honor 9i has two cameras on the front and two on the rear, which also support the ‘bokeh’ feature. Priced aggressively at Rs 17,999, what differentiates Honor 9i (apart from four cameras) is the presence of Full HD+ resolution screen in this price-range. We spent some time with Honor 9i and here’s our first impressions:
Honor 9i Design and Display
Honor 9i has a full metal unibody design with visible antenna lines on top and bottom of the back cover. Despite the large 5.9-inch screen, the phone is easy to hold and isn’t too slippery. It looks stylish thanks to the tall display, which has 83 per cent screen-to-body ratio. The phone has extremely thin bezels on the sides which adds up to the style quotient.

Honor 9i features a 5.9-inch Full HD+ display with a resolution of 2160×1080 pixels. I had absolutely no problems viewing the screen under bright sunlight. The viewing angles are great and I quite liked the colour balance as well. Icons appear sharp and a bezel-less screen makes watching videos, playing games, an excellent viewing experience.
The dual rear cameras are vertically aligned and right below is a circular fingerprint scanner. A single stereo speaker along with a USB Type 2.0 slot for charging and 3.5mm headset jack are placed at the bottom. The fingerprint sensor was quick to unlock the device each time I tried.
Honor 9i Camera
Camera is probably the biggest highlight of Honor 9i. It sports 16MP dual lens sensor plus a 2MP camera at the back, which comes with features such as bokeh mode, moving photo, night shot, pro photo, and panorama. I was pretty impressed with the details and colour reproduction in pictures clicked in bright outdoors. In the limited time that I spent with the phone, I managed to click some excellent shots with the primary shooter.

I really liked the bokeh mode on both the front and back camera as it retains details on the object. The front camera is 13MP+2MP with soft LED flash. It will easily please selfie lovers as pictures clicked in bright light have good colour reproduction and impressive amount of details. However, selfies that I took in dimly lit room didn’t turn out to be as impressive. They lacked details and noticeable noise in them.
Honor 9i Battery, Processor, and Memory
Honor 9i is powered by Huawei’s Octa-core Hisilicon Kirin 659 processor with 4GB RAM and 64GB ROM (expandable up to 256GB via a microSD card slot). We’re yet to gauge the phone’s performance by putting it through some aggressive tests, though the processor coupled with 4GB RAM shouldn’t disappoint. This phone has a hybrid SIM slot, which means people can either put in two SIM cards or use it with one SIM card and a microSD card.
Honor 9i is backed by a 3,340mAh battery, which may seem small going by other offerings in the market. But more on this once we have completed the review.
Honor 9i Software
Honor 9i runs Android 7.0 Nougat with company’s EMUI 5.1 skin on top. People can run two apps at once on Honor 9i which is great. The customisation shouldn’t bother as much given there’s minimum bloatware and settings have been kept quite simple and easy to use.

Honor 9i: Final thoughts
Honor 9i sure looks disruptive if we look at the specifications list. Dual cameras on the front and back are something definitely to look out for. Plus it sports a premium metal design with Full HD+ edge-to-edge display, which really work in the favour of Honor 9i. However, overall performance is something we’ll need to test before we can recommend the device. For now, it looks like a good mid-budget smartphone to buy this Diwali.