Honor 90 Review - Mid-Range Champion of 2023?
/This is the Honor 90 and is a strong contender for the mid-range champion in 2023. And if you stick around, you'll see why I say that.
This phone has a lot of strong attributes. But straight out of the gate. Let me tell you something, this phone has a 200MP primary and an insane 50MP selfie. That's pretty crazy.
Unboxing
So let's stop wasting time and get this out of the box. And Honor has full access to Google Play services. The Honor 80 promised 2 years of security updates; it's the same here on the 90. But It'll be worth checking the website to see if Honor has extended this.
So in the box is the phone, a silicon case, a 66W charger and a cable that can take this phone's 5000mAh battery from 3% to 45% in 15 minutes with Honor's supercharge tech.
First impression
My first impressions are the power button, and volume are in the perfect spot. The in-display optical fingerprint reader is also perfectly positioned. It's nice and light at 183g. The back has a really nice texture. They say this texture is inspired by diamond grid patterns on expensive jewellery.
And most importantly, the back isn't a fingerprint magnet.
There are four colours available with great names. Diamond silver, peacock blue, midnight black and this one Emerald Green. And the camera module has a very unique design. Honour calls it the dual-ring axisymmetric design. It's also called a Mirror Luna design, inspired by moon phases...
Flip to the front, and you'll notice the bezels are slim all around. And the glass is curved on all four sides. This makes navigation gestures smoother than a flat display.
Display
Now let's talk about this display because this is something special. It's 6.7" 120Hz HDR10+ Amoled. Full DCI P3 colour gamut. 2664 x 1200 pixels which is 435 ppi. With 1600 nights of peak brightness. Which is very bright for a mid-range phone. And it's so good that Netflix & Amazon prime video gave it their HDR certificate of approval.
And something special about this panel is that it uses PWM dimming tech. To explain this simply, it's an anti-flicker technology. I know you probably don't think your phone's screen flickers; that's because it's usually so fast it's imperceivable to the human eye.... but it does, and it will cause eye strain without you knowing.
So Honor says this PWM tech can and will reduce eye strain by 18%. So if you are the type of person who stares at your screen for long periods, this is designed to help your eyes.
And one area that has improved since the Honor 80 is the built-in speaker. Yes, I said speaker as singular. It's a downward-firing driver, And it's clearer and louder than before. But of course, you have to make a conscious effort not to block it with your hand when gaming or watching movies without headphones.
If you hold it with the volume rocker and power button on the top edge, you shouldn't experience any issues.
Now if you're wondering about IP or IPX rating, while there is no official one, you can see when popping the sim tray, some efforts have been made to prevent water from seeping in. And you'll notice that the sim tray is a dual sim & support two 5G sims at the same time.
Speed & power
And that's because the brawn's beating heart and brains are behind the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. The 8 series is, of course, the top tier; the 7 is one step down but powerful enough for most people. And even gamers. I tested out Genshin impact on the Honor 90 with graphics set to High and frame rate on 60FPS, and it stuttered a little at first but then became pretty smooth when I used the game enhancer
And here are the benchmark results if you want to quantify how powerful this chip is. Honor has thrown in 12GB of Ram to speed things up even more. And the onboard storage options are 256G 8GB, 256GB 12GB and 512GB 12GB. The operating system is Android 13 with Magic OS 7.1 skin. And something that I like about Magic OS is the card tiles which are slightly different from your traditional widgets.
It does, by default, use windows Swiftkey for the default keyboard. I prefer G board, so I switched that immediately.
Camera
Now, I save the best for the cameras. The primary camera is a 200MP 1/1.4" sensor. It uses 16 in 1-pixel binning for better light capture & so far, I'm impressed with the performance. The maximum video resolution and frame rate is 4K 30FPS. And the quality is good.
It's also got a 12MP ultrawide which doubles up as the super macro, and again, the results are excellent. And the last sensor is a 2mp depth sensor specifically for improving depth information, and you'll see this in action when taking portrait photos with the rear cameras.
The front-facing camera is another big gun. It's a 50MP sensor, a crazy number for a selfie camera. This one uses 4 in 1-pixel binning, which helps to capture better detail in low light & it is a wide-angle lens with a 100-degree field of view. So it's suitable for capturing group photos.
So overall, the Honor 90 ticks a lot of boxes. So let me know in the comments. Is the Honor 90 a phone that you could see yourself using on a daily? What's the most impressive feature here… also, if there's anything I missed in this video, let me know. It will help me make better videos in the future.
