Honor 9X Pro in for review

Despite being left without Google's Mobile Services since last May, Huawei and its Honor subsidiary keep pumping new phones. The initial response was to limit the availability of new phones outside China, but the company has been working hard on improving its HMS alternatives and is now slowly starting to re-expand its overseas portfolio.

The Honor 9X Pro is the latest phone to go global and on the hardware side of things it seems to offer excellent value for its price tag. It brings a very big display, sold chipset, versatile cameras, big battery and a nice design.

The Honor 9X Pro is built around a 6.59-inch IPS LCD of 1080x2340px resolution. It's not an OLED, but its image quality seems solid in these early days.

The 16MP selfie camera uses a motorized pop-up mechanism, which enables an uninterrupted screen with no notches.

The rear of the Honor 9X Pro is where the rest of its appeal lies. Our review unit is the Phantom Purple and is lovely to look at, especially under direct light. When lit a shifting X appears at the center of the rear panel.

Honor 9X Pro

Another key selling point of the Honor 9X Pro is its triple camera - 48MP f/1.8 main shooter, 8MP ultrawide snapper and a 2MP dedicated macro unit.

We've had a detailed look at all four cameras in our Honor 9X review. The 48MP main camera was good overall, but as a whole that phone wasn't among the best in its class, in terms of imaging and video. We'll see if Honor has improved its performance in the 9X when our detailed review is complete.

The Honor 9X Pro lacks Google services and instead comes with Huawei's own and we'll make sure to look into their usability at the current point. There are already several seemingly viable routes that let you get the apps you need, which would make the €249 Honor 9X Pro a bargain. However we'll have to try them to see how good they perform in real life.