The rumor mill is often a roller coaster, especially with more popular handsets that can sometimes go through many prototypes before being mass-produced. One such upcoming smartphone, the Honor 9, has recently been leaked a few times over, and the latest leak showed a very high-quality render that didn’t include the 3.5mm headphone jack. Given the fact that the Honor 9 has a USB Type-C port and what appears to be stereo speaker configuration on the bottom, this isn’t a particularly surprising leak, as many manufacturers have been removing the port lately. A post made earlier today on Chinese social network Weibo may signify this leak isn’t entirely accurate though, and that the Honor 9 may still ship with a 3.5mm audio jack.
In a post not necessarily directed at any one specific question, Zhao Ming, President of Honor, posed the question as to why the company would want to remove the 3.5mm jack at all. While not directly saying this pertains to the Honor 9, the fact that the Honor 9 is still rumored to be announced on June 21 certainly seems to point toward that fact. The upcoming Honor 9 is rumored to be priced at a rather budget-friendly 2,499 yuan, or around $360 USD. Whether or not the 3.5mm jack is actually being removed or not remains to be seen, but this may be one of the few changes to the flagship product compared to its predecessor.
The Honor 9 looks to feature a front-mounted fingerprint scanner inside of a capacitive button, much like the recently released Xiaomi Mi 6. The elongated circle design is common among Chinese OEMs and is a big departure from the rear-mounted fingerprint scanners of the past. Whether or not this is a good decision will depend entirely on user preference. The rest of the package looks pretty solid, sporting the same 5.2-inch 1080p IPS LCD panel as before, but packing in a brand new HiSilicon Kirin 960 SoC. This chip features the big.Little design of dual quad-core units working inside one package, and even ups the ante with the Mali-G71 MP8 GPU, the same one found in the Samsung Galaxy S8. For this price, Honor is looking to make a pretty compelling device, especially if it keeps the 3.5mm jack that so many consumers still rely on.