Honor Pad 9 Review: Fantastic 12-Incher With 2 Big Weaknesses

The Honor Pad 9 is a large 12-inch tablet that is a little different from most of its competitors. And it’s different in terms of price. Usually, such giant tablets are quite expensive. But the Honor Pad 9 is sold for just $300 – although it’s not available in the US directly. Nevertheless, it has a stylish and bright display, good speakers and plenty of storage space. However, Honor’s update policy and battery life are not good.

For this test, I compared the Honor Pad 9 with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE+ and Lenovo Tab P12. Both are usually more expensive, with the S9 FE+ costing a couple of hundred Dollars more, but the P12 sometimes gets close to the Honor.

Design & Build Quality

Honor has not skimped on the design and build quality. The Pad 9 feels very high-end and I think it also looks stylish. We get a metal body here and the build quality is just as good as the Lenovo Tab P12. With Samsung, however, the transitions from the display to the body are of a higher quality.

Despite the 12-inch display, it only weighs 555g and is only 6.9mm thin.

On the sides we get a power button, volume controls and a USB C 2.0 port. Yes, unfortunately only USB 2.0. It lacks a fingerprint reader and MicroSD card slot, which its competitors have.

As is standard now, it can be unlocked using facial recognition using the front camera. It has a resolution of 8 megapixels and takes decent pictures. The same applies to the 13 megapixel main camera on the back.

Display & Speakers

The display of the Honor Pad 9 is exactly 12.1 inches in size. It’s therefore a little smaller than other 12-inch tablets, which usually start at 12.4 inches or even 12.9 inches in the case of Apple.

I think it’s great that Honor has improved the resolution. The predecessor looked pixelated, but with the Pad 9 we get 2560 x 1600 pixels and I think that’s definitely high-resolution enough.

It’s also new that it supports up to 120Hz. The P12 only has 60Hz and the S9 FE+ manages up to 90Hz.

The display is surprisingly good, especially for this price range. I think it looks very nice, really chic, and it’s fun to watch movies and series on. It also performs well in a direct comparison with great color reproduction. At the same time, it’s a good bit brighter than the Lenovo P12, but the Samsung S9 FE+ is a little more powerful.

You can watch Netflix and the like in HD resolution, as it has a Widevine level of L1. This was not possible with some Huawei tablets in the past.

The speakers are surprisingly good. The sound is pleasant and loud, so you can easily fill a room with music. The good display and good sound make it a great entertainment tablet.

By the way: Unlike its two competitors, the Honor Pad 9 does not support an active stylus. So if you want to write with a pen, it’s a bad choice.

Hardware & Performance

The Honor Pad 9 is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset, which consists of 4 Cortex-A78 and 4 Cortex-A55 cores. We also get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That’s a lot of storage space, whereas the competition offers 128GB as standard only.

It’s a shame that there is no version with 5G or LTE.

In my Geekbench 5 benchmark comparison, you can see that the Honor Pad 9 is significantly more powerful than its predecessor. The processor performance is also better than the Lenovo Tab P12, but its graphics performance is weaker. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE+ is stronger in all respects.

We can observe something similar in the 3D Mark Wild Life test. Here, the Honor Pad 9 is significantly better than its predecessor, so it’s worth upgrading. The Lenovo Tab P12 is slightly better in the Wild Life Extreme test, but the Honor is better in the normal Wild Life test. The S9 FE+ is more powerful in both tests and you can also see the Galaxy Tab S9+ here, which has a huge lead in the Wild Life Extreme test.

My gaming test is very interesting. I played Call of Duty Warzone and here I was able to set the graphics to “high” and the game is quite smooth. Interestingly, it can only be played with low graphics on the Lenovo P12 and Samsung S9 FE+. I think this is because these two don’t use a Qualcomm chipset and the game might be optimized for this.

However, it is also noteworthy that the real graphics quality is quite similar on the three tablets. It’s playable in each case, but looks pretty bad on all three compared to the iPad Pro. Sure, the iPad Pro is significantly more expensive, but I wanted to see what the game looks like on a premium tablet.

PUBG Mobile looks really nice on the 12-inch display and runs smoothly, but you can only set the graphics to “HD” and not higher.

Fortnite can be installed and played well. You can even set the graphics to “Epic” and the 3D resolution to 75%. Most of the time it runs at around 25FPS, but it can quickly drop to below 20FPS, which is no fun. It’s much more enjoyable if you set the graphics to “high” and the 3D resolution to 75% or even 50%. Then it’s running at over 30FPS and is very smooth.

Software: Android 13

The Honor Pad 9 runs Android 13 out of the box and features Honor’s MagicOS 7.2 interface.

Although the tablet is supposed to receive security updates once a quarter, I assume that it will not receive any major updates. The Honor Pad 8 was released with Android 12 and still doesn’t have Android 13, so it’s likely that the successor won’t get Android 14 or higher either.

I think that’s a shame, because while Samsung has been pretty good with updates for a while now, Lenovo and Xiaomi are catching up. Honor apparently isn’t.

Well, apart from that, the software is good. MagicOS adjusts standard Android quite a lot, but I think it looks nice. By default, all apps are on the home screen, but you can change that in the settings.

I think it’s a shame that there is no taskbar, which Google introduced with Android 12L. However, there is an Honor dock that you can pull out from the side at any time.

Keyboard Cover

Honor offers an optional keyboard cover for the Pad 9. Although this is cheaper than from Lenovo or Samsung, it is connected using Bluetooth only. This means you have to charge the keyboard separately from the tablet, which is doable of course, but not as convenient.

Apart from that, you hardly notice that it’s a Bluetooth keyboard, as I was able to connect it quickly and easily and the connection was always stable. And I wrote a lot with the keyboard.

I like the fact that the key have a proper travel and the keyboard is big enough thanks to the 12-inch display. It’s possible to use it regularly to write longer texts.

However, I think it’s a shame that you can set up the tablet with the keyboard at one angle only. It also lacks a touchpad.

I won’t be putting the Pad 9 on my list of the best tablets with a keyboard, simply because there are better keyboards out there. The ones for Lenovo and Samsung have a touchpad and you can set up the tablets at multiple angles. But if you want to have an entertainment tablet and use a keyboard from time to time, the Honor combination is good enough for that.

Battery Life

The Honor Pad 9 disappoints in my battery test, as it only lasts for 5 hours. Sure, the display is very bright, but that’s still not much and the result was the same at 120Hz and 60Hz. For this test, I always run an HD YouTube video at maximum brightness in an endless loop.

Honor Pad 9 Review: Final Verdict

My final verdict is clear. I think the Honor Pad 9 is an excellent entertainment tablet. Thanks to the pretty display and good speakers, it is perfect for Netflix and YouTube. At the same time, it’s cheaper than the competition despite the 12-inch display.

It also offers a lot of storage space, a solid keyboard option and if you want, you can play a game or two just fine. But often not with the highest graphics settings.

I think it’s a shame that it will probably never get a major software update and that the battery life is very short. It’s also not a good choice if you want a really good keyboard or an active stylus.

If you want the cheapest 12-inch tablet with a great keyboard, the Lenovo Tab P12 is an excellent choice. However, if you are looking for a better tablet overall, you should definitely take a look at my review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE+. It’s got a better performance, is protected against water and dust, comes with the fantastic S Pen and has a great keyboard. However, it’s also significantly more expensive.