Announced in China last year, the 9X Global edition was launched in Barcelona last night. It’s the first Honor smartphone which is pre-installed with the Huawei AppGallery we discussed last month. It is, according to Honor “the start of an intelligent, mobile and interconnected ecosystem” away from Google Apps and they will be dropping “exclusive apps” into the Huawei AppGallery store too.
Spec-wise, it comes with a Kirin 810 AI CPU, a 48 megaxpixel triple camera setup and a 6.59″ FullView LCD panel (1080 x 2340 pixels, 19.5:9 ratio at around 391 ppi). Huawei / Honor have upgraded the GPU for gaming and there’s a liquid cooling system to let you play for extended periods.
This handset is going to be quite cheap, but it remains to be seen whether people will actually buy a phone which doesn’t have the Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps app. There’s no Google Play either and the Google Assistant has been swapped out in favour of the “Huawei Assistant”.
It’ll be available in France, Germany and the Netherlands from March 2020 for €249. Here in the UK we’re waiting on availability info. You you can get existing Honor 9X for £249. Honor are yet to confirm whether the handset will be coming to the UK.
Weighing in at 206 g, other specs include either 128GB or 256GB storage (depending on model), a microSD slot, 8GB RAM, a motorized pop-up 16 megapixel selfie camera, dual-band WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth 4.2, USB-C charging, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor and a 4000 mAh battery.
Update – Article updated to reflect that Honor can’t confirm to a UK release.