Honor on Wednesday announced its latest Android mid-ranger in the form of the Honor V9 Play, unveiling a device that aims to offer solid value for money. The handset whose existence was already confirmed in late August debuted in two configurations and five color variants – Black, Blue, Red, Gold, and Rose Gold. All versions of the device will be offered with either 3GB or 4GB of RAM, with the more capable model being priced at 1,199 yuan, which translates to approximately $184, whereas the base version will set customers back 999 yuan, or around $153. The Honor V9 Play will be available for pre-orders later today and is scheduled to be officially released in China on Tuesday, September 12. The Huawei-owned original equipment manufacturer (OEM) has yet to share any details regarding the smartphone’s wider availability, though the company traditionally brings many of its offerings to Europe and some other markets after their domestic debuts, which will presumably also be the case with the Honor V9 Play.
The handset itself is equipped with a 5.2-inch LCD panel with an HD (1,280 x 720) resolution protected by 2.5D glass and is powered by the MediaTek MT6750, an octa-core system-on-chip with the Mali T860 GPU, four energy-efficient Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.0GHz, and a quad-core Cortex A53 cluster running at a maximum frequency of 1.5GHz. Both models of the Honor V9 Play ship with 32GB of internal flash memory (eMMC 5.1) which can be expanded by up to 128GB via a microSD card slot. The same slot also doubles as a secondary Nano SIM tray, with the device utilizing the Hybrid Dual SIM setup.
The primary imaging system of the Honor V9 Play consists of a 13-megapixel camera with an aperture of f/2.0, 1.12um pixel size, and phase detection autofocus support, with the module itself being accompanied by a dual-LED flash. The top bezel of the smartphone features an 8-megapixel sensor with an f/2.2 aperture and all of that hardware is powered by a 3,000mAh battery. The device supports 4G LTE networks, weighs 145g, and is 147.9×73.2×7.65mm in size, hence being a relatively compact offering. The official debut of the Honor V9 Play dispels rumors that the next smartphone from Huawei’s subsidiary is the Honor 7X, though that particular model may still be unveiled before the end of the year.
