There’s no such thing as a cheap iPad, making Android your only real choice if you’re looking a cheap tablet. Alas, most low-budget Android tablets deliver a stodgy, joyless experience. Not so with the Honor Pad X9, however, which redefines what you can expect from a $175 device.
The Honor Pad X9 is an 11.5in tablet with a lovely screen. With a reolution of 2,000 x 1,200 pixels, definition is perfectly crisp, and the 120Hz screen refresh rate keeps everything delightfully smooth as you scroll down web pages, for example.
Web surfing is very much a strength of this tall device, which feels like a smartphone that has been enlarged under a photocopier. It’s great for reading off screen, and while the 400 nits maximum brightness isn’t the most dazzling display it’s absolutely bright enough for indoor use.
In fact, placed alongside an iPad Pro, it’s not easy to tell which is the premium device and which is the bargain basement tablet, such is the quality of that screen.
Honor Pad X9: Design And Audio
There’s nothing cheap about the design of the Honor Pad X9, either. On low-end Android tablets such as the Amazon range of Fire tablets (which use a fork of Android), we’re used to relatively chunky, often plastic cases with thick black bezels around the screen.
This all-metal design lends the Honor Pad X9 a more luxurious feel than you can reasonably expect at this price. It’s only 6.9mm thick and weighs a feather under 500g, so there’s no problem holding it for long periods and you will barely notice it’s there if packed in a bag.
There are bezels, but they’re reasonably slender and give you somewhere to rest your fingertips without activating the touch screen. Honor claims the screen-to-body ratio is 86%.
Honor also claims the sound from the tablet’s six speakers is “heavenly”, but here we’ll have to agree to disagree. The sound quality is decent and there’s no rattle even when you push it all the way to maximum volume, but the audio is thinner, more muddy than what you get from a premium tablet such as the iPad Pro. That is a very high bar, though.
Honor Pad X9: Performance And Battery Life
The X9 is fitted with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 685 chip, with a relatively modest 4GB of RAM. The latter might explain why I’ve seen the odd pause and stutter during my testing with the X9. But whether you’re playing games, scrolling through web pages or plundering the YouTube archives, performance is generally snappy.
There’s nothing to complain about with battery life, either. There’s a sizeable 7,250mAh battery inside the X9 and it means you need not worry about packing the charger if you’re heading out for the day or even the weekend. I’ve been using the tablet on-and-off, for about an hour a day for five days and I’m still to break past the 50% battery mark.
There are a few irritiations with this tablet. Honor has stuffed it with its own-brand apps, most of which are needless chaff—not least the Honor App Market, which is a poor relative to the pre-installed Google Play Store.
There are no official keyboard options for the X9, either, meaning you’ll need to budget for a third-party case or a separate Bluetooth keyboard if you want to do serious work with this thing. Likewise, there’s no stylus support.
The biggest drawback for U.S.-based customers is that Honor’s parent company, Huawei, remains on the blacklist of banned Chinese companies, meaning you may struggle to import the device.
For those in Europe, it’s currently on sale in the U.K. for £140 in the Black Friday sales. You’ll do very well to find a better quality tablet at such a modest price.
Read the full article here
