Honor X9e Pro Review – The tough get tougher with bigger battery, more durable design

Like clockwork, Honor has launched their latest midrange tough phone from the X9 series with each successive generation being tougher and more resistant to the slings and arrows of outrageous misadventure than ever before.

Now in its fifth incarnation, this year’s offering, dubbed the Honor X9e Pro aims  to surpass its predecessors in how much punishment it can take and how long it can last. Honor graciously loaned us a sample for field testing – after putting it through the gauntlet, here’s our Honor X9e Pro review where we share if it’s worth your money.

The Honor X9e Pro Review – Build and Design

The successor to last year’s Honor X9d, the Honor X9e Pro maintains broadly similar aesthetics with a flat front and backplate, rounded corners and a rounded camera housing though the camera placement has been altered slightly. The Honor X9e Pro also has a slightly heavier, longer, wider and thicker chassis to accommodate the larger 11,000mAh battery which is larger than most power banks. 

While it looks like a chip off the old block, the Honor X9e Pro is considerably more resistant to misadventure. On paper, the Honor X9e Pro utilises an array of technical knowhow culled from Formula 1 cars, specifically the Halo safety system which is intended to protect drivers from high speed impacts. In this case, Honor has applied it to keeping the internal hardware safe from hard bumps and scrapes.

Dubbed the Honor Ultra-Bounce Anti-Drop Technology 4.0, the design uses full-area adhesive bonding using shear-resistant PUR adhesive to keep the screen intact while redistributing impacts across a wider area, a shock resistant chassis with metal reinforcements and much more. 

To wit, the Honor X9e Pro is officially rated to survive drops up to 3 meters in height (its predecessor the X9d was rated for 2.5 meters) and has an SGS 5-Star Certification for Drop Resistance in Harsh Conditions. In field tests, Honor demonstrated with live units smashing nails into wood with the display itself, crushing pistachios like a sledgehammer, breaking tiles in two and surviving BB pellets at about 20 paces. 

Even better, the Honor X9e Pro is also rated for IP68, IP69 and IP69K for dust and water resistance by building the interior chassis like a submarine with multiple water-tight compartments, independent seals and multiple barriers to resist immersion. 

According to Honor, the phone is able to survive immersion in up to 10 metres of water; its predecessor the X9d only managed to top it at 1.5 meters immersion. This means that it’s easily able to survive a dip in the pool and all but the heaviest rain storms in Malaysia’s unpredictable weather. As a nice touch, Honor has also added an underwater photography mode too, allowing users to capture stills and videos underwater without the need of an external protective casing.

Beyond its significant durability and water resistance upgrades, the Honor X9e Pro also has a more glammed up classier looking casing. Our Honor X9e Pro review sample came in its signature shade of Royal Purple with three other possible colourways to choose from. The backplate features a faux leather texture with the Honor logo emblazoned in gold on the base with the camera housing emplaced in a raised, rounded camera island in the upper quadrant of the phone.

To add to its premium look, the sides are finished in a muted gold finish with the base sporting a USB-C port, a SIM card tray and a grille for one of the two speakers. The right hosts a single power button and volume rocker while the left side is otherwise unremarkable. Up top, the phone hosts several holes for the second speaker and microphone.

Up front, our Honor X9e Pro comes with a 6.8-inch Fullview AMOLED display with 2,788 x 1,280 pixels resolution, up to a 120Hz refresh rate, a full 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut and, of note, an impressive 10,000 nits peak brightness which surpasses almost every other smartphone in the market by a substantial margin. A tiny punch hole up top houses a single 16MP camera for selfies and video calls.

Overall, the build quality for our Honor X9e Pro review sample is exceptionally solid and the chassis itself and especially the display remained scratch and damage resistant even after several incidents of being jangled around in a pocket full of coins and keys along with several other accidents including being dropped when exiting a car.

Honor has also generously provided a charger and a protective case on top of the obligatory USB-C cable and SIM eject pin which adds quite a bit to its value. However, it has to be said that there’s been a substantial price hike. Where its predecessor hovered around the border between a budget and midrange phone in terms of pricing, the Honor X9e Pro takes a leap forward into midrange phone territory with the base 256GB model retailing for RM1,999 and the higher end 512GB model for RM2,399. Even so, Honor still has more tricks up its sleeve to make it worth its higher price tag.

@hitechcentury Unboxing the new HONOR X9e Pro 5G in Royal Purple ahead of its official Malaysia launch! @HONOR Malaysia #honorx9epro ♬ Pachelbel’s Canon in D starting from the famous melody(911769) – SoLaTiDo

The X9e Pro also has the Honor 600 Pro’s vaunted AI Image to Video 2.0 mode that lets you animate a static still via a series of prompts to turn it into a short video. In a nutshell, you get a limited number of free generations daily and have a selection of predefined prompts to choose from though you’ll get best results with your own prompts. 

Honor X9e Pro Review – Specifications and Performance

On top of a significantly more durable chassis, the HONOR X9e Pro also gets an upgrade to the midrange Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 chipset over its predecessor’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 4. The newer chipset has higher clock speeds, better multi-core performance and a newer Adreno 812 GPU over the older Gen 4’s Adreno 810.

Up close, the architecture of the Gen 5 is somewhat different, reverting to a more traditional big.LITTLE-style configuration with four 2.6GHz Cortex-A78 performance cores and four 2.0GHz Cortex-A55 efficiency cores. By comparison, the older Gen 4 has a single 2.3GHz Cortex-A720 prime core, three 2.2GHz Cortex-A720 performance cores and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A520 efficiency cores. The Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 also supports WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 6.0

Interestingly, the Honor X9e Pro does take a bit of a step back in other aspects as it only has 8GB RAM whereas last year’s X9d had 12GB RAM as standard across the board. This is likely due to the ongoing memory crunch but that’s understandable. Paired with the 8GB RAM is your choice of either 256GB or 512GB of storage. Our Honor X9e Pro review unit is the former. 

Running under the hood is Android 16 with MagicOS 10.0. If this follows Honor’s usual playbook, you’ll get two years of OS and security updates. Interestingly, the Honor X9e Pro has the ability to select up to 16GB of virtual RAM to augment the onboard 8GB RAM from its storage space. However, like previous versions of MagicOS, you can’t adjust how much RAM to assign though you can disable it entirely. Here’s how our Honor X9e Pro review sample stacks up on paper:

Price	RM1,899 [8GB RAM/256GB storage] / RM2,399 [8GB RAM/512GB storage]
Display	6.8-inch HONOR FullView Display, 2,788 x 1,280 pixels, 3,840Hz PWM Risk-free dimming, 120Hz refresh rate, 100% DCI-P3, 10,000 nits peak brightness
Processor	Snapdragon 6 Gen 5
OS	Android 16 w/ MagicOS 10.0
Memory	8GB LPDDR5X RAM w/ 256GB or 512GB UFS 3.1 storage
Cameras	108MP f/1.75 Ultra Sensing Main Camera + 5MP f/2.2 Ultra wide camera [rear] / 16MP f/2.45 [front]
Battery	11,000mAh w/ 80W HONOR SuperCharge wired charging, 27W wired reverse charging
Size/Weight	162.2 x 77 x 8.08mm / 203g

When subjected to synthetic benchmarks, our Honor X9e Pro review unit got the following results:

3D Mark Steel Nomad Light	429
3D Mark Steel Nomad Light Unlimited	426
3D Mark Wildlife Extreme	1,192
3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Unlimited	1,180
Geekbench 7 Single Core	914
Geekbench 7 Multi Core	3,228
Geekbench 7 OpenCL	3,265
Geekbench 7 Vulkan	3,999
PCMark Work 3.0	12,475
PC Mark Battery Life	22 hours 3 mins

Compared to the prior Honor X9d with its Snapdragon 6 Gen 4, our Honor X9e Pro review sample with its Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 processor has improvements in single, multicore as well as graphics performance benchmarks though the differences aren’t as radical in day to day performance.

The provision of 16GB of Honor RAM Turbo virtual memory off onboard storage in our Honor X9e Pro ensured smooth and snappy performance for games and tasks on default settings. Interestingly, the Honor X9d only maxes out at 12GB of Honor RAM Turbo even with the latest updates.Games like Genshin Impact, Call of Duty Mobile and Clash Royale ran in a smooth fashion on our Honor X9e Pro review sample and there wasn’t any discernible slowdown when swapping between apps and multiple tabs on Chrome or handling 1080p video edits in CapCut.

 

Honor has also integrated what they refer to as Honor Hummingbird Architecture in MagicOS 10.0 that constantly tunes memory in the back end and optimises user interactions to ensure fast app startup speed and smoother scrolling in the long term for a quoted 72 months which is 6 years. While this feature can’t be tested in the short duration of our review, it’s certainly something that helps reduce one of the usual long term pain points encountered by users.

The Honor X9e Pro’s display also aims to tackle another pet peeve of smartphone owners – poor clarity under direct sunlight by dialling its peak brightness to a selectable whopping 10,000 nits.

When viewed outdoors, it does what it says on the tin and our Honor X9e Pro’s Fullview display offered excellent clarity under direct sunlight. While it has a 120Hz refresh rate, the screen doesn’t offer dynamic refresh rates and staggers down to 60Hz when interacting with apps and web browsing while ramping up to 120Hz when navigating the menus. Nevertheless, it feels fast, snappy and responsive.

The provided stereo speakers retain the 400% volume increase from the prior Honor X9d and are able to be cranked to levels loud enough to draw ire from the neighbours.

In terms of battery life, the Honor X9e Pro already has a massive advantage over other phones, flagships included with its 11,000mAh Li-ion polymer battery. In PCMark’s battery life test, it enjoyed a substantial improvement over the X9d and many other competing phones with a whopping 22 hours and 3 minutes of battery life. 

On paper, Honor quotes that the phone is able to offer 35.6 hours of nonstop TikTok doomscrolling and about 66.8 hours of video playback. In practical terms and light usage, we managed to get a good three plus days and close to four days of normal use with a few rounds of Clash Royale daily, doomscrolling on social media for a couple of hours daily and emails. 

While charging a battery of this size would typically take hours, Honor has managed to offer 80W wired charging and the provided charger to support it straight out of the box. From dead zero, the provided charger managed to juice our Honor X9e Pro review sample to full in about an hour and a half. Even better, the X9e Pro can also offer 27W wired reverse charging too.

Honor X9e Pro Review – Cameras

Honor plays it safe this time around and sticks to a similar camera arrangement as its predecessor with our Honor X9e Pro review sample’s main rear camera array built around a primary 108MP f/1.75 main camera that has optical image stabilisation along with a 5MP f/2.2 ultra wide angle camera riding shotgun. On paper, this setup allows for up to 3x zoom by cropping the main sensor and up to 15x digital zoom along with up to 4K@30fps video at up to 10x digital zoom. Up front the single 16MP f/2.45 selfie camera allows for selfies and up to 1080@30fps video capture.

What has been improved this time around is the integration of several enhanced AI tools for better shots. Honor has added in an AI Enhanced Night tool for better low light shots, an AI Enhanced Zoom that sharpens and cleans up shots beyond 3x zoom and an AI Enhanced Portrait mode that optimises subjects for better portraiture. 

Where the Honor X9e Pro gets the edge though is that the rear 108MP main camera has a CIPA 6.0 stabilisation rating  for much steadier shots which is especially apparent in low light scenarios. Astute readers will note that this is equivalent to the rating conferred to the Honor 600 Pro launched earlier this year.

In daylight shots, our Honor X9e Pro review unit manages to capture good detail and offers good colour rendition for both the ultra wide and main camera out to about 3X and with AI Zoom offering a bit better detail out to about 5X. Beyond that, shots start getting softer though AI Zoom does help retain some level of detail for architecture and if you stick to architecture shots or subjects with static, defined detail, the main camera delivers good results. 

When it comes to low light, the ultra wide angle camera encounters pronounced starbursts from light sources and somewhat softer than desired results though it’s still viewable for social media use.

The addition of OIS and CIPA 6.0 stabilisation for the main 108MP camera offers steadier handheld results and crisper results out to about 5X though this isn’t a preset focal length and you’ll have to manually dial it in yourself. By and large, you’ll get the best results in low light if you stick to the main camera and out to 3X. Beyond that, shots start getting softer with fine details becoming smeared like paint strokes. 

Interestingly, using the ultra wide camera for video caps footage to 1080p@30fps and it’s only with the main 108MP camera that you can snag 4K@30fps or a more practical 1080p@60fps video. 

For videos, you’ll get the best results from the 108MP camera with steady 4K footage with decent detail and colour rendition though you’ll need brightly lit conditions for best results with low light footage proving underwhelming. The front selfie camera is serviceable for selfies and video calls with good skin tones.

Should you buy the Honor X9e Pro?

The Honor X9e Pro brings to the table a more durable chassis that supports underwater photography and even better drop resistance than its predecessor, one of the largest batteries ever mounted in a phone with 80W fast charging and an impressively bright display. 

The compromises are mostly understandable for the price seeing the ongoing memory shortage. The 8GB RAM configuration is a step back from last year’s X9d while the 5MP ultra-wide is somewhat underwhelming.

What you get in return is a phone that is unusually hard to kill, lasts for days on a single charge, charges quickly for its enormous battery and has a display bright enough to remain genuinely usable outdoors. All in, you’re still getting one of the toughest phones that money can buy, a slew of extra accessories to go with it and exceptional durability to boot.

Honor X9e Pro review sample courtesy of Honor Malaysia. For more details please visit https://www.honor.com/my/shop/new-launch/