HONOR X9d 5G Review

Every time I hear about a so-called “tough,” “durable” phone or whatever, I can’t help but think of Nokia and reminisce about how ‘indestructible’ their phones were before smartphones took over.

By today’s standards, it seems that HONOR is one of the few brands out there (if not the only one) that is seriously taking the initiative to make durable phones within its portfolio. The new HONOR X9d 5G is a prime example of that.

You see, this device likely has all the types of protection you can get out of a consumer device, which is honestly great to have on a smartphone that is usually fragile to begin with.

But is durability the only thing that makes this phone stand out in a highly competitive midrange market? Let’s dig deeper in this full review.

Design and Construction

Before we get to the bits, let’s talk about the looks.

Coming from last year’s HONOR X9c 5G, there’s not a lot of design change to see here on the X9d. The large, circular camera island is still here accompanied by a glossy frame and the “HONOR” branding on the lower part of the rear.

The actual differences are the flat frame and on the camera island, the chromatic bezel is now gone, replaced by a relatively thinner yet ridged outline. You will also notice that the camera enclosure is not a whole slab anymore unlike the X9c. Instead, it now comes with sort of a decorative center piece having a bunch of useless text.

Personally, not a fan of this look, but at the end of the day, design is subjective.

Our unit is in the Reddish Brown colorway with a faux leather back and a plastic frame. While the rear panel itself is resistant to smudges, the glossy frame is unfortunately not, so I had to wipe it clean often. Thankfully, there is a black jelly case included in the box to prevent smudges and to serve as an added protection as well.

Speaking of durability, the X9d had major enhancements, that’s for sure. You see, this phone has the strongest levels of protection yet, including IP66-, IP68-, IP69-, and wait for it, IP69K along with a stronger drop resistance, said to survive a fall from up to 2.5 meters.

What does the ‘K’ mean in IP69K? Well, it means that the phone can withstand high temperature water for up to 85-degrees Celsius, according to HONOR.

We did a bunch of durability tests such as dropping it from a two meter height, using it as a chopping board, getting it ran over by a motorbike, and of course, blasting it with water, and the phone survived all that, fortunately.

For reference, the HONOR X9c only had an IP65 rating and a drop resistance of 2 meters. So, there’s that.

However, like we always say, it’s a good practice to take utmost care for your electronics because such ingress protections degrade over time. Think of those as safety precautions, and remember, the warranty does not cover any water or physical damage. So, you have been warned.

Going back to the X9d, we have the usual layout for I/Os here. Facing the screen, you’ll find the power button and the volume rocker on the right; the dual SIM tray, a mic, USB-C, and a speaker grill are located at the bottom; another mic and the second loudspeaker are at the top; while the left side is clear.

Display, Multimedia, and Biometrics

Moving over to the screen, the X9d sports a 6.79-inch Full HD+ AMOLED panel with 120Hz refresh rate and 1800 nits of luminance in high brightness mode (HBM). And to complement that tough build, the screen is made of Aluminosilicate glass providing some level of scratch resistance.

The biggest change here from previous iterations is that HONOR finally opted for a flat edge screen. Although, I’m not saying that curved screens are bad, it’s just my preference. There’re just no unnecessary glares and no accidental touches with a flat display. On top of that, the bezel size on this thing is impressively thin which is roughly 1.3 mm and uniform all around.

Now, in my experience, the display quality is quite nice with vibrant colors, sharp details, and deep, true blacks, as expected of an AMOLED panel.

The phone also has this “Circadian Night Display” feature that I can appreciate. As the name suggests, it basically changes the screen color temperature automatically to align with your circadian rhythm for you to get better sleep at night.

Surprisingly, the audio quality is pretty good. It can go loud with up to 400% volume without making it sound distorted. The highs are definitely clear, while the mids and bass come out decently.

For biometrics security, the phone supports both face unlock and an under-display fingerprint sensor. Both methods register quickly and there’s even an option to use face unlock even when you’re wearing a surgical mask. Although, my one gripe is that the fingerprint sensor is placed too low for my liking, but it works fine regardless.

Cameras

As for the cameras, it’s a bit disappointing… though I’m not referring to the image quality because I’m rather disappointed about its camera hardware. Specs-wise, the cameras remained EXACTLY the same as last year’s model.

It still has a dual rear setup consisting of a 108-megapixel main shooter with OIS along with a 5-megapixel ultrawide lens. The 16-megapixel selfie camera here is also a carryover, apparently.

That said, we can’t really expect some definitive improvement in terms of camera performance. But setting that thought aside, the phone still managed to perform quite well.

HONOR X9d 5G sample shots

Friday, Jan 2

The image quality have nice clarity, near-accurate color reproduction, and decent amount of dynamic range. In regular Photo mode, there are three zoom levels: 0.6x using the ultrawide, and 1x up to 3x for the main camera. The images captured in 1x zoom are sure Instagram-worthy, while in 3x zoom, the details become softer but still decent for casual social media snaps.

As for ultrawide shots, they’re generally decent, except you don’t want to zoom in on things since the details here aren’t that sharp. Portrait shots are a bit excessive at beautifying the subjects, but the background separation here is decent.

Selfies are also decent capturing nice facial texture and skin tones.

It’s a different story for video quality though. The maximum resolution is up to 4K 60 fps from the rear and it’s 1080p 30 fps from the front. While the colors and details are fine, the stabilization is a bit rough.

Yes, HONOR does say that it has OIS support, however, I felt like the video isn’t stabilized enough. There’s a noticeable shake or wobble even though I’m just panning the phone with my bare hands.

Another minor issue that I had is when switching lenses, say switching from the main camera to ultrawide, it takes a while to load.

Performance and Benchmarks

Jumping onto performance, our X9d unit features a Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chip combined with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage.

Taking a look at our benchmark results, the phone achieved decent numbers with over 740,000 points in AnTutu version 10. Geekbench 6 scores are also good, and in 3DMark Wild Life graphical test, it scored over 3,700 with an average frame rate of 22 fps.

In actuality, those numbers translate to mid-optimal performance. Doing productivity tasks is smooth with quick app loading times, and navigating around is a fair experience.

Of course, we tried to play games on this thing. In low-demanding titles like Mobile Legends, the X9d did a good job. It was able to hover around 75 fps of frame rate even when the graphics settings are set to Ultra and High.

Meanwhile on Call of Duty Mobile, while the in-game settings say that the phone can play all game modes at 90 fps, when when I tried running an FPS meter, it went down to 60 fps.

Weirdly enough, for graphic-intensive games like Wuthering Waves, regardless of the graphic setting being set to High or Low, the game runs at less than 30 fps on average.

On the bright side though, the phone is relatively cool to the touch even when playing for hours long.

OS, UI, and Apps

Onto the software side of things, interestingly the X9d doesn’t ship with the newest software. Instead, it came with MagicOS 9 based on Android 15 out of the box.

Despite the fact, the UI design still has that familiar EMUI look, but with better blur effects throughout the system. It’s pretty clean with a few first-party apps pre-installed and only adds a folder for app suggestions which you can uninstall. Aside from those, there’s no other bloatware to be seen here.

As expected, it comes with several AI tools that are conveniently compiled in one place such as AI Translate, AI Writing, and more. There’s also AI Edit feature inside the Gallery app that includes the usual stuff like AI Erase when you edit a photo.

There are also multi-tasking features available here such as split- and floating windows. However, there are a couple of things that HONOR hasn’t fixed or improved yet with this iteration, like not having proper text wrapping on the control center or having less janky system animations.

As for update policy, sadly, HONOR has yet to tell how long the software support is gonna be for the HONOR X9d.

Connectivity and Battery Life

Battery-wise, the phone packs a massive 8300mAh silicon-carbon unit paired with 66W of wired charging.

Now, that amount of battery capacity is no joke. In our PCMark battery life test, the phone managed to get 17 hours and 23 minutes of runtime. And in my actual experience, its battery life, honestly, felt longer than that. Also, with that amount of capacity, I could even charge my accessories like a wireless earbuds.

Since I was mainly using the phone for doomscrolling and watching videos, the phone lasted me a little over two days before needing to recharge.

Speaking of, with the supplied 66W charging brick, the phone was able to get from zero to 100% in less than one and a half hour. It’s quite a bummer that it doesn’t support bypass charging, but when you have that amount of battery life? I feel like that’s unnecessary.

In terms of connectivity, the phone covers the essentials including 5G, NFC, and Wi-Fi 6. No eSIM support here though.

Pricing

Now, before we drop our verdict, let’s set our expectations for its price.

As of writing, HONOR hasn’t revealed how much the X9d’s gonna cost. But for reference, last year’s HONOR X9c retailed for PHP 16,999 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

So, more or less, we can expect the price to hover around that range.

Verdict

Taking everything into account, the HONOR X9d 5G gets a noticeable glow-up, particularly in durability, battery life, and the welcome shift to a flat display instead of a curved one.

These improvements double as its strongest selling points, areas where most of its competitors still fall short in some way. That massive battery alone easily stands out as the phone’s biggest highlight alongside its durable build.

If you’re coming from the X9c, this might be an easy skip. But for everyone else, the HONOR X9d 5G shapes up as an interesting option, especially for users who are frequently exposed to the elements.

Whether that’s daily commutes in the rain or work in more demanding environments like construction sites, or even frequent travelers who just want a phone that can take a beating, the HONOR X9d sure fits the criteria.

What we liked:

• Ultra durable build
• Shift to flat display
• Surprisingly good audio quality
• Long battery life

What we didn’t like:

• No hardware upgrades for the camera
• MagicOS needs more polish (e.g. more fluid animations, proper text wrapping on Control Center)

HONOR X9d 5G specs:
6.79-inch FHD+ AMOLED
2640 x 1200 pixels,
1800 nits (HBM) brightness
Aluminosilicate glass
Snapdragon 6 Gen 4
4nm, octa-core, up to 2.3GHz
12GB RAM
256GB storage
Dual rear cameras:
– 108MP f/1.75 main, OIS
– 5MP f/2.2 ultrawide
16MP f/2.45 selfie shooter
Dual nano-SIM
5G, 4G LTE
Wi-Fi 6
Bluetooth 5.2
GPS, AGPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo
USB Type-C
NFC
Under-display fingerprint sensor
IP66, IP68, IP68, IP69K dust and water resistance
Dual stereo speakers
MagicOS 9.0 (Android 15)
8300mAh Si/C battery
66W charging (wired)
Supports reverse wired charging
161.9 x 76.1 x 7.76 mm (dimensions)
193g (weight)
Reddish Brown, Midnight Black, Sunrise Gold, Forest Green (colorways)