Honor X9e Pro Malaysia review: One weekend with just one charge
So just last week, Honor finally brought their latest smartphone to Malaysia, the Honor X9e Pro. Their most ‘Pro’ X-series device yet, the Honor X9e Pro came with plenty of ‘extreme’ upgrades, especially to its battery capabilities and durability.
With such big claims, its only natural that we were excited to get one for ourselves to try out, and see just how ‘extreme’ the Honor X9e Pro is.
Struggling to kill it
Of course, we have to start with its massive battery. Coming in at a whopping 11,000mAh battery, the Honor X9e Pro is undoubtedly the smartphone with the largest battery in Malaysia, pulling ahead of the likes of the Vivo V80 LIte 5G, Redmi 17 Pro Max 5G and Realme P4 Power 5G.
What that translates to in real life usage though is, maybe not the full three days of use that Honor claims, but certainly a very comfortable two days with a little more for another half day of use. I mean, I started off the weekend with a full charge, and by the time I woke up on Monday, I still had about 20+% left in the tank, which honestly if I was willing to stretch it would probably be able to hit that three day claim.
It’s not just for texting and calls either; I was out and about taking photos, doomscrolling social media, checking emails, watching videos and so on. The Honor X9e Pro keeps up with little issue really, and it became almost a challenge just to kill it as the battery percentage just never seemed to go down. Even after it went down mind you, the 80W fast charging gets it back up to speed pretty quickly, and the 27W reverse charging came in handy when I found my power bank out of juice and needed to keep my iPhone alive.
And speaking of doomscrolling, the 6.8-inch AMOLED panel here is pretty good. It ticks all of the right boxes, with a 2788 x 1280 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, full coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, 3840Hz PWM dimming and impressively bright 10,000nits of peak brightness. The Honor X9e Pro’s speakers are also good, and get fairly loud without losing out too much in detail.
One thing we do wanted to highlight is that Honor is making a lot of bold claims about its durability, such as an F1 Halo-inspired anti-drop technology, a more resistant chassis with shear-resistant adhesives to keep the display panel secured, the ability to survive drops of up to 3m, and an IP68/69/69K dust and water resistance ratings. For what it’s worth, we didn’t actually drop the device (for obvious reasons), but we can at least say that the Royal Gold colourway, while a little gaudy at first, did grow on me a little the more I used it.
As for its actual performance, the Honor X9e Pro has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 system-on-chip, with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage on our review unit. It does the job fine enough, as you’d expect from a modern day midrange chip. Don’t expect the snappiest performance or the highest FPS in games, but I think for your average user it’ll be adequate.
What I wasn’t a huge fan of though is its software support policy. The Honor X9e Pro isn’t a cheap device, and we’ve really come to a point where we’d expect to be using our smartphones for at least three, maybe even four years. Which is why the two years of Android OS upgrades and two years of security patches are a little disappointing, especially when you consider that it comes with Android 16 out of the box, not the current latest Android 17.
The cameras are its weakest link
For all the upgrades Honor has given the X9e Pro, its cameras certainly feel a little lacking in comparison. You’ll find a 108MP, f/1.75 main camera here alongside a 5MP, f/2.2 ultrawide in that massive circular camera island, while a 16MP, f/2.45 selfie shooter sits upfront/.
The main camera itself is fine, mostly good enough for taking quick shots, and in well lit situations at least you do get a usable shot. There’s no dedicated telephoto of course, so the ‘3x zoom’ preset is basically just a digital zoomed in crop shot that again is okay if you don’t pixel peep. The ultrawide though is pretty rough, with no where near the same level of detail and colour found in the main camera, or even in any ultrawide in competing smartphones in this price range.
Another nitpick is that the preview shot actually looked pretty bad, and it was only after opening the photo in the gallery that you can see the huge amounts of post processing taking place to brighten and ‘fix’ the image, but this leads to pretty smeary images at times.
Worth it for the battery life alone
The Honor X9e Pro’s target demographic though is pretty obvious: if you want the best damn battery life on an Android smartphone then by all means the Honor X9e Pro will be for you. It’s not often that I struggle to burn through a review device’s battery, but the X9e Pro certainly excelled in that regard.
There will be some questions asked about its software support policy and camera chops though, especially considering it’s price. The Honor X9e Pro starts at RM1,899 for the base model with 256GB of storage, rising to RM2,399 for the model with 512GB of storage. This puts it firmly in the premium midrange and flagship killer territory, competing against the likes of the Xiaomi 17T and Nothing Phone (4a) Pro.
But I digress. The Honor X9e Pro still has a lot going for it besides its battery life of course, and for travellers or people who work outdoors a lot, the Honor X9e Pro is certainly a strong, durable and long lasting choice.
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