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Introduction and specs
The Honor Pad X9 is an inexpensive tablet that seems to be geared towards media consumption more than anything else. It has a large 11.5-inch, 5:3, 1200 x 2000-pixel display with 120Hz refresh rate. Also on board is an impressive six-speaker system.
Its battery is a decently large 7250 mAh, considering the tablet's very slim 6.9 mm profile and relatively low weight at 495 grams - and it even has an aluminum back and frame.
Honor Pad X9 specs at a glance:
- Body: 267.3x167.4x6.9mm, 495g; Glass front, aluminum frame, aluminum back.
- Display: 11.50" TFT LCD, 120Hz, 1200x2000px resolution, 15:9 aspect ratio, 203ppi.
- Chipset: Qualcomm SM6225 Snapdragon 685 (6 nm): Octa-core (4x2.8 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4x1.9 GHz Cortex-A53); Adreno 610.
- Memory: 128GB 4GB RAM.
- OS/Software: Android 13, MagicOS 7.1.
- Rear camera: 5 MP, f/2.2, AF.
- Front camera: 5 MP, f/2.2.
- Video capture: Rear camera: 1080p@30fps; Front camera: 1080p@30fps.
- Battery: 7250mAh, 10W charger bundled.
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 5; BT 5.1.
- Misc: Accelerometer; stereo speakers (6 speakers).
The rest of the Pad X9 specs are nothing to phone home about. The Snapdragon 685 chipset is pretty modern in terms of features but offers modest performance. Connectivity-wise, the Pad X9 lacks any cellular connectivity and only has Wi-Fi ac. There is also Bluetooth 5.1 on board. One potential pain point for the longevity of the Pad X9 is the modest amount of RAM - only 4GB. Storage-wise, you only get a single version - 128GB with no expandable storage.
Lastly, the Pad X9 has a pair of cameras at its disposal, but neither is particularly impressive. The main cam on the rear is a simple 5MP unit with autofocus, and you get another 5MP snapper on the front, this one with fixed focus, though.
Honor Pad X9 unboxing
The Honor Pad X9 ships in a nice two-piece cardboard box. It is pretty sturdy and offers adequate protection while shipping. There seems to be no plastic in the packaging whatsoever, even though Honor is not bragging about it in any particular manner.
Most modern devices don't really come in rich retail packages, so we appreciate anything we can get in the box. In the case of the Pad X9, this just includes a simple 10W (5V@2A) wall charger and a USB Type-A to Type-C cable.
Design
There is nothing particularly standout about the design of the Pad X9, but it does both look and feel very premium. The anodized aluminum body is not something you see too commonly in this budget price segment.
The Honor Pad X9 seems to only come in one color - Space Gray. Matte as it may be, the back panel still picks up fingerprints.
The Honor Pad X9 is pretty thin at 6.9 mm. The weight is quite reasonable as well at 495 grams given the 11.5-inch display size and 7250 mAh battery. That being said, the Pad X9 is still a hefty device and holding it with one hand is only feasible for short periods of time.
The reasonably-sized bezels strike a good balance between offering enough area to grab onto, all without making the design look dated.
Build quality
As already mentioned, the Pad X9 has quite a premium bill of materials for its price tag. Both its middle frame and back panel are made of aluminum.
There is some protective glass covering the display, which offers some peace of mind. However, Honor does not specify exactly what kind of glass it is. Also, in case you were wondering, there is no formal ingress protection rating.
Controls
The Honor Pad X9 has a pretty standard set of controls. Well, unless you count the six-speaker setup with two speakers on each of the short sides and two more speakers on the "bottom" of the tablet when you are holding it horizontally.
These two speakers, in particular, are meant to bounce sound from a surface you've placed the slate on, creating a 360-degree effect.
The opposite side of the Pad X9 houses a volume rocker and power button. These are positioned a bit high up on the frame, but there is no truly comfortable location to place these on a tablet. The buttons are nice and clicky, with good tactile feedback.
One thing worth pointing out is that the Honor Pad X9 lacks a fingerprint reader but this seems par for the course for tablets in this price segment.
The top of the device has a pair of speakers and not much else.
The bottom side of the Pad X9 has two symmetrical speakers and a USB Type-C port. There is no 3.5mm jack on the tablet.
There are also no dedicated POGO pins or anything of the sort for accessories like a keyboard. In fact, Honor doesn't seem to have a case with a kickstand or a keyboard option on offer, but you may find those on the third-party market.
Connectivity
As already mentioned, the Honor Pad X9 lacks cellular connectivity. You only get dual-band Wi-Fi ac and Bluetooth 5.1 support with LE. There is no NFC of IR blaster or anything fancy on board. The Type-C port is backed up by a USB 2.0 data connection, which means a theoretical maximum data transfer speed of 480 Mbps. The USB port supports Host/OTG but doesn't have anything else beyond that, like video output.
The Honor Pad X9 is kind of light on on-board sensors. It does have a lis2dw12 accelerometer and a sip1221 ambient light sensor. Beyond that, however, there is no gyroscope typically bundled with the accelerometer. There is also no ambient light sensor. Also absent from the Pad X9 - are a magnetometer, a compass and a barometer. The lack of a GPS receiver goes without saying in a tablet without a cellular modem.
Large display, but a bit low on the ppi
The Pad X9 has an 11.5-inch display in what's seemingly the hottest 5:3 aspect ratio (or 15:9 for easier comparisons). The 5:3 aspect (15:9) is great for browsing and video watching. The resolution is 1,200 x 2,000px, and the pixel density works out to 203ppi - decent but hardly the sharpest around.
The display is just an LCD with no HDR support. What it does, however, have is a 120Hz refresh rate. It is also TUV Rheinland certified for low blue light and "flicker free".
When it comes to brightness, we measured the modest 452 nits of max output, with no boost in bright ambient conditions. Then again, we can't really expect much more from a budget tablet of this size with an LCD. Contrast is decent at a little under 1603:1.
The Pad X9 doesn't have display color modes, just color temperature settings. The display targets the sRGB color space. The default color temperature mode is not particularly color-accurate. It results in cold, bluish colors. Using the warm color temperature setting results in what can be considered accurate color reproduction compared to the sRGB color space with deltaE values lower than four.
Display color settings
As mentioned, the display on the Honor Pad X9 has no HDR support. The video decoder inside the tablet also lacks HDR support, for what that's worth.
No HDR support • DRM • Netflix playback capabilities
On a more positive note, the tablet has the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing services like Netflix to offer up FullHD streams.
High refresh rate handling
The Honor Pad X9 has a 120Hz display. It reports support for 60Hz, 90Hz and 120Hz refresh rate modes. In terms of refresh rate settings, there are a total of three modes: Standard, which locks the tablet to 60Hz; High; and Dynamic, both of which promise to go up to 120Hz.
In reality, both the High and Dynamic refresh rate modes seem to work identically. The UI mostly works at 90Hz while you are interacting with the device. When you leave the tablet alone for a few seconds, it drops its refresh rate down to 60Hz.
High refresh rate handling
Certain apps like YouTube do trigger the 120Hz mode of the display. But again, we observed the exact same behavior in both Dynamic and High refresh rate modes.
Naturally, we tried high refresh rate gaming as well. Unfortunately, we were not particularly successful. Most of the games we tried that we know can push past the 60fps mark were capped at 60Hz, which is not ideal.
High refresh rate gaming is mostly a no-go
Overall, we would call the high refresh rate on the Honor Pad X9 basic but mostly functional. The tablet only operates on user interaction logic and tends to stick to 90Hz most of the time. Still, it is a step up from the basic 60Hz refresh rate, and we appreciate the effort.
Honor Pad 8 battery life
The Honor Pad X9 has a 7250 mAh battery on board. That is pretty decent, given its thin 6.9mm body and 495 grams of total weight.
As you might already know, we recently retired our original Endurance rating battery test and have now moved on to our new GSMArena Battery test 2.0 and the so-called Active Use Score. In the case of a Wi-Fi only tablet, the call runtime is tested over Whatsapp.
The Pad X9 managed a decent 13:17 hours of active use score.
If you don't plan on making any VoIP calls on the device, you will get a lower Active Use Score. You can use the slider below to see how that use case pans out.
Charging speed
Charging is a bit of a pain point on the Honor Pad X9. The tablet comes bundled with a meager 10W charger.
And using the bundled 10W charger, the Pad X9 is terribly slow to charge. It managed to get from dead to 9% in 15 minutes on the charger, then 17% in thirty minutes. A full charge took us a whopping 3:18 hours.
Speaker test
The six-speaker setup on the Honor Pad X9 is definitely one of its highlights. You get a set of two speakers on either of the shorter sides and a pair of speakers on one of the longer sides of the device. That way, you get speakers on the left and right when holding the tablet horizontally and a pair of speakers facing down.
The idea of the bottom pair is to bounce sound off of a surface and achieve a 3D audio effect that way.
The speakers on the Pad X9 are nice, loud, and quite clear in their output. They leave little to be desired, especially on a budget device. The tablet is pretty loud, with a VERY GOOD score in our testing, and its output is clean with clear voices and highs and even some bass.
However, we should note that no additional audio settings or equalizers and enhancements are available here. You get what you get.
Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.
Magic OS with nice multi-tasking and Android 13
The Honor Pad X9 runs Android 13 out of the box and has full support for the Play Store and Google apps (worth mentioning in light of past relations between Honor and Huawei).
On top of the OS, there's an in-house layer of MagicOS (v7.1 in this case), where a lot of cool stuff is.
The multi-window functionality works well. You can launch apps into a split-screen view via a side menu, accessible by swiping from the right edge of the display. Tapping an app from here spawns a floating window of it, and you can now have two such windows open simultaneously, with every subsequently launched one minimizing one of the earlier ones to a separate icon on the side, opening a separate task switcher.
To initiate the split-screen view, you must long-press the app icon from the side dock and then drag it to another already open app. You can add any app you choose to this Multi-Window menu, and most seem to work and scale pretty effortlessly.
You can also have an app pair remain bundled together as one entry in the recent apps view, so you can easily close both of them or return to that particular side-by-side workflow.
Multi-window
Other than that, it's the familiar look and feel of Magic UI/EMUI. One of the other neat proprietary features is the 'large folder', all the more useful here than on the smartphones from the two brands - a large folder occupies as much space as four regular icons and holds up to 12 apps, which are immediately available. You don't need to expand the folder to launch an app.
Homescreen • Large folder • Settings
Performance and benchmarks
The Honor Pad X9 is powered by the Snapdragon 685, a lower midrange Qualcomm chip made on a 6nm process. In terms of CPU, you get four Cortex-A73 cores, clocked at up to 2.8 GHz and another four Cortex-A53 ones working at up to 1.9 GHz. It is paired with an Adreno 610 GPU. You also get 4GB of RAM, which is a bit low but okay for a budget tablet. The Pad X9 also offers 3GB of virtual memory for what that's worth.
The only storage tier is 128GB, and that's not expandable as there is no microSD slot.
Unfortunately, our Pad X9 review unit is locked down in some way that does not allow us to run or even install the majority of benchmarks. The only one we did manage to get working is 3DMark.
Regardless, we have seen the likes of the Snapdragon 685 before in smartphones, and it's not particularly impressive in terms of performance. The Snapdragon 685 is technically a bit better in the CPU department than the Snapdragon 680, as found inside the Honor Pad 8 and the Oppo Pad Air, but the Adreno 610 really fails to impress across all of these devices.
More powerful alternatives exist on the market in the budget segment, like the SD695-powered Realme Pad X or the Redmi Pad (Mediatek G99). That said, the tablet felt just fine in general use like web browsing, social media, and YouTube streaming.
Two 5MP cameras
The Pad X9 has two 5MP cameras at its disposal - one on the back and one on the front. Lenses have the same 27mm equivalent focal length and f/2.2 aperture, but only the rear camera features autofocus. Both cameras support 1080p video recording at 30fps and there's no video stabilization. In terms of sensors, the two cameras seem to use very similar units, which the system reports as C813cnn and C814cnn. We aren't sure which manufacturer these come from, but they seem to be very small 1/5" sensors with a pixel size of 1.12 µm.
We can't be exactly sure, but we suspect the Honor Pad X9 uses the same cameras as the Honor Pad 8.
The camera app is the standard Huawei/Honor app with a more basic feature set to account for the device's limited hardware. You're all but guaranteed to be using both hands for taking photos, and the UI works well in either orientation.
The main camera on the Pad X9 captures decent enough stills considering its hardware limitations. We're getting okay contrast but limited dynamic range. Colors are good most of the time. Sharpness and detail are, well, about alright for a 5MP tablet camera.
Honor Pad X9: 5MP main camera samples
The main camera UI has a 2x zoom toggle. 2x photos are pretty disappointing, primarily since they are very noisy, more so than the regular 1x ones.
Video capture on the Pad X9 is limited to 1080p on both the back and the front cameras. Video from the main camera is pretty decent, again, considering its limitations. Detail is alright for 1080p. Colors are also quite natural and true to life. Dynamic range is, unfortunately, quite narrow with crushed shadows. There is no stabilization.
Photos from the selfie camera are best described as satisfactory - detail is good, colors are muted, but mostly accurate, and dynamic range is limited.
Honor Pad X9: 5MP selfie camera samples
Selfie video capture is good enough for those video calls, and that's about all you need.
Honor Pad X9: 5MP selfie camera 1080p snapshots
Verdict
The Honor Pad X9 has a pretty big and also decently bright LCD, complete with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate. It also packs a great six-speaker audio system inside a premium aluminum body with an upmarket build. This makes for a very pleasant multimedia as well as web browsing experience. Honor's competent multi-window implementation also deserves praise and adds some points to the productivity department.
The Pad X9 is missing a microSD slot, which you'd find on several of its competitors. The average battery life and lack of cellular connectivity are easier to swallow on a device that's probably too big to leave the house often, while the chipset's lack of serious oomph doesn't hinder the tablet's use for less demanding applications.
At the time of writing this review, we are seeing some very competitive pricing for the Honor Pad X9. It seems to be going for just under €200 in Europe. The UK pricing is GBP 180 and even as low as GBP 150 on some listings. We also saw a Saudi Arabia listing for SAR 626. These are some very competitive numbers. Still, it might be worth looking at some alternatives as well, like the Xiaomi Redmi Pad, the OnePlus Pad Go or the Realme Pad 2 all of which have larger batteries with faster charging and expandable storage.
Pros
- Large display with 120Hz refresh rate.
- Premium-level look and feel.
- Loud and high-quality speaker system.
- Android 13, full Google app suite, useful multi-window functionality.
Cons
- No memory card slot.
- Battery life is not amazing, and charging is slow.
- Chipset on the low end of the performance spectrum for the class.
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