Honor has just introduced the Honor 9 in Berlin, Germany, and the phone is exactly what we’ve all expected. This is not exactly a surprise considering that this very same handset launched in China earlier this month, though that variant of the device comes with different LTE bands, of course. In any case, the Honor 9 is a successor to the quite successful Honor 8 smartphones, and it builds on the Honor 8’s design. The Honor 9, unlike its predecessor, comes with a curved back and a front-facing fingerprint scanner, while it retains Honor 8’s size and metal + glass build, not to mention the glass design on the back with a number of glass panels which are placed one on top of the other, and thanks to that, they create a really unique reflection.
During the press event, Honor announced that the Honor 9 is coming to Germany, Italy, Spain, France and the UK starting in early July (it will become available for pre-order later today, though, on both vMall and Amazon.co.uk). So, you will be able to purchase this smartphone in any of those markets via Amazon, and even though Honor did not talk about offline availability, chances are that the phone will become available through retailers and carriers in some of those countries as well. This essentially means that the phone will be available in a number of countries in Europe, as Amazon can ship those phones to other European countries as well. Honor currently has no plans to launch the phone in the US, but it might happen sometime later this year. Now, as far as pricing is concerned, the Honor 9 will cost £379.99 in the UK, SIM-free, and we’re talking about the most affordable variant here, the model of the phone which comes with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. It’s also worth noting that this very same variant will cost €449.99 in other European countries, and both France and Italy will get the 6GB RAM variant of the phone as well, though it’s still unclear whether that variant will ship with 64GB or 128GB, because both of those models were introduced in China earlier this month. On top of all this, it’s worth noting that the phone is coming in Glacier Gray, Midnight Black and Sapphire Blue color variants. If you buy the Honor 9, you will also get the Honor Monster earphones in the box, as a result of partnership between Honor and Monster.
The Honor 9 is a rather compact smartphone, as its predecessor was. This handset sports a 5.15-inch fullHD (1920 x 1080) display, along with 6GB / 8GB of RAM and 64GB / 128GB of native storage. Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 960 64-bit octa-core processor fuels the Honor 9, and the device packs in a 3,200mAh battery on the inside. On the back of the Honor 9, you will find a 20-megapixel monochrome, and a 12-megapixel RGB sensor, while a single 8-megapixel unit is available on the device’s front side. Android 7.0 Nougat comes out of the box on the Honor 9, with Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI) 5.1 skin on top of it. The device also offers fast charging, and a Type-C USB port is placed on the bottom of the device. A 3.5mm headphone jack is also a part of this phone, and so is an IR blaster, which is quite interesting. The Honor 9 measures 147.3 x 70.9 x 7.45mm, while the phone weighs 155 grams.
