Honor’s continued push to expand its Android-powered product offerings has continued to flourish, especially in recent years. With that in mind, the company recently announced that it was finally launching its Honor Pad 9 tablet for buyers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which brings some appealing features at a reasonably-affordable price.
We say “reasonably” as the tablet comes with a £299 price tag (with an option for £349 including a keyboard). This puts well below most competing tablet devices on the market, including ones from Apple and Samsung. As such, what can you expect from Honor’s latest tablet? Let’s take a look.
Display and Design
As with most of the tech we cover here on Gadgetsboy, let’s start with the design on the Honor Pad 9 – the tablet comes with a sleek-looking profile thanks to an aluminium alloy case, which wraps around the entirety of the Honor Pad 9. On the sides you’ll find the power and volume buttons, speaker grilles, as well as the USB-C port for charging and data transfers.
Of course, the main hardware highlight of the tablet is the large screen, which measures 12.1 inches. It’s also sharp thanks to a a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels, and is smooth with a 120Hz refresh rate. Honor adds that the Pad 9’s display supports up to 1.07 billion colours, making it ideal for daily usage including content consumption such as media streaming, web browsing, and even a bit of gaming.
On the rear panel you’ll find a circular camera module, which houses a 13MP main camera that complements the front-facing camera, which features an 8MP resolution. It probably won’t be the best device for day-to-day photography, but it should be more than enough for video calls and occasional snapshots.
Internals and Software
Due to its wallet-friendly price, it was understandable that Honor had to go with a midrange chipset for the pad 9. Inside the tablet is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset, which Honor says comes with 35% increase in GPU performance and a 40% increase in CPU efficiency compared to its predecessors. The tablet also comes with a base memory and storage configuration of 8GB + 256GB, although Honor says that there’s a memory boost option that can increase the RAM up to 16GB.
For software, the Honor Pad 9 comes with the company’s custom Magic OS 7.2 interface, which adds some Honor-exclusive apps and software services on top of Android. The tablet does ship with a slightly older Android 13 version though, so hopefully Honor sends out an Android 14 update soon. Powering this entire setup is a large 8,300 mAh battery, which should be enough to last most moderate users an entire day, and then some. The tablet also comes with support for 35W fast charging, and while it isn’t the fastest speed out there it’s not painfully slow as on cheaper tablets.
Interested buyers can check out the Honor Pad 9 via HiHonor, Argos, Amazon, Very, and Currys online, with a £50 discount on the keyboard option, meaning the tablet and keyboard combination is the price of the stand-alone tablet.
