The Chinese brand is clearly hoping to appeal to budding photographers and serial Instagram sharersThe rest of the phone’s rear isn’t quite so sensible or functional. Honor has opted for a highly reflective, tinted-glass covering, which is practically begging for smudges and cracks. In other, more premium phones, such a design decision has the practical benefit of enabling wireless charging. There’s no such mitigating factor here.
You could view this as a bonus feature relating to the Honor 9 Lite’s photographic focus. One of our subjects during testing noted that the phone’s reflective back enabled them to check out their appearance before we took a portrait shot.
Either way, the Honor 9 Lite undoubtedly stands out, and it looks a great deal more premium than it actually is. It feels classy too, thanks to that glass back – although it’s also incredibly slippery. Place it down on a slightly uneven surface – such as a wooden bench or a couch arm – and it will gradually slide its way to the floor.
The Honor 9 Lite’s glass front and back sandwich a slim 7.6mm-thick aluminium frame, although a glossy finish makes it look and feel curiously plasticky. A relatively light weight of 149g may add a little to that sensation – not that we’d ever complain about a phone manufacturer trimming the fat.
When it comes to apps, Huawei’s EMUI skin will offer a prompt to go full screen and stretch out the content the first time you use them. It isn’t particularly elegant, but it works. Which rather sums up EMUI as whole.
With 32GB of storage – plus whatever you choose to add through the microSD slot – the Honor 9 Lite is well equipped for plenty of media downloads should you wish to put its large widescreen display to good use
Just like the similarly specced Huawei P Smart, the Honor 9 Lite runs the latest version of Google’s mobile OS, Android 8.0 Oreo. This is a good thing.
Also like that phone, although decidedly less positive, is the fact that you get Huawei’s own EMUI layered on top. We’re at version 8.0 now, yet EMUI remains a curiously half-baked combination of stock Android and iOS elements.
Huawei follows Apple’s lead in ditching the app tray altogether, placing the onus on you to drag and drop apps into themed folders on the homescreen. The notification tray, meanwhile, sticks closer to stock Android, with expandable control shortcuts to the top and clear notification windows below.
It’s far from an outright bad way to use a phone, and you’ll quickly get used to its graceless ways. Crucially for a mobile OS, it’s reasonably fast and reliable, with crisp and unfussy ani
One part of EMUI that seems to remain eternally bloated is the pre-installed app provision. There’s the usual Themes app for customising the look of your homescreen and menus, a file management app, and a Phone Manager for dealing with virus scans, battery-killing apps, blocked contacts and the like.
Then there are the home-brewed apps for Music, Videos, and Gallery, which merely duplicate the preinstalled – and far superior – provisions from Google. Even the likes of Health and Gallery have better equivalents from Google and others on the Google Play Store, which you’ll doubtless install as a matter of prior
You also get half a dozen Gameloft games preinstalled, which range from decent to the downright mediocre. We could probably have done without those, thanks.
On the plus side, text entry is provided by SwiftKey, which is actually one of the better virtual keyboards out there.Rather impressively for a budget phone, Honor has managed to follow the Honor 9 and Honor 7X and equip the Honor 9 Lite with a dual camera setup. In fact, it’s gone one step further and provided a similar provision for selfies.
Both the front and rear of the device play host to one 13-megapixel and one 2-megapixel sensor. Just as with the Honor 7X, the smaller secondary sensor is there purely to provide depth information for the included wide aperture and portrait modes.
This is the effect that a lot of phone manufacturers – most notably Apple – are going for right now, where you get a super-sharp subject and an extremely blurred out background.
That’s the ideal outcome, at least. The truth is that most cameras don’t yet get it quite right, with too much of the edge of the subject lost to the artificial blurring effect.