HONOR X9e Pro Review — Battery Monster

Offer price: 1899

Currency: MYR

• Appearance - 8/10
  8/10
• Efficiency - 9/10
  9/10
• Features - 6/10
  6/10
• Materials - 8.5/10
  8.5/10
• Performance - 6/10
  6/10
• Portability - 7.5/10
  7.5/10
• User Experience (UX) - 7/10
  7/10
• Value - 8/10
  8/10

Summary

The HONOR X9e Pro makes a compelling case for itself at RM1,899. The 11,000mAh silicon-carbon battery with 80W fast charging is the headline, and it genuinely delivers on the promise of all-day and into-two-day battery life that makes real-world anxiety around charging almost irrelevant. The main camera punches above the price, the AMOLED display is excellent for media consumption, and the overall build quality and design are premium enough that the phone does not feel like a compromise even when you know the spec sheet.

Overall

7.5/10

7.5/10

Pros

• Battery Life That Genuinely Lasts
• Main Camera Punches Well Above the Price
• Design and Build Quality Feel Premium
• 6.8-Inch AMOLED Display Is Excellent for Media Consumption
• Comprehensive Accessories in the Box, Including 80W Charger
• RAM Turbo Helps Everyday Multitasking

Cons

• Ultrawide Camera Is a Significant Weak Point
• Gaming Performance Has a Ceiling
• MagicOS Has a Learning Curve
• No Wireless Charging
• AI Camera Features Are More Novelty Than Utility

• Shopee

Unboxing the HONOR X9e Pro

The HONOR X9e Pro arrives in a simple white box with an illustration of the phone’s rear panel taking centre stage, clearly designed to show off the camera module design before you even open the box. It is clean and unfussy. Inside you get the phone itself, an 80W charging brick, a USB-C charging cable, a protective case, a SIM ejector pin, and documentation. The inclusion of both an 80W charger and a protective case in the box is a genuinely thoughtful package for a phone at this price, and it means you are ready to use the phone properly from the moment you take it out without needing to budget for immediate accessories.

Walkaround

The HONOR X9e Pro in Royal Purple makes an immediate impression. The flowing contours on the rear panel catch the light differently depending on the angle, giving it a visual dynamism that is unusual for a midrange phone. The camera module on the rear is large and prominent, with a design aesthetic that reads as premium at a glance. Alongside Royal Purple, the phone is also available in Reddish Brown, Dawn Gold, and Midnight Black, giving a reasonable range of options across different tastes.

At 186g, the HONOR X9e Pro sits in a comfortable weight range for a phone this size, and the curved edges on both the frame and the rear panel make it sit well in the hand during extended use. The overall build quality is solid, with no flex or unwanted movement in the chassis, and the premium feeling materials belie the phone’s midrange pricing.

The display is a 6.8-inch FHD+ AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, and it looks excellent for the price. Colours are vivid, blacks are deep as expected from OLED, and the 120Hz adaptive refresh rate makes scrolling and navigation feel smooth and responsive. Peak brightness handles outdoor visibility adequately in most conditions, and the in-display fingerprint sensor is fast and accurate.

The HONOR X9e Pro has Ingress Protection ratings of IP68, IP69 and IP69K, along with SGS 5-Star Drop Resistance. This makes it certifiably durable, and allows you to take underwater photos in depths up to 10 meters, which is pretty crazy if you ask me.

Specifications

Performance

Starting off our benchmark suite with AnTuTu v11, the HONOR X9e Pro has decent performance for its price but nothing particularly noteworthy. It’s definitely not a chip meant for people who require a high performance device, but it should be within adequate levels for day-to-day use.

Moving on to Geekbench 6, we see a similar pattern here, albeit it’s more interesting as the multi-core performance is marginally better than the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 but the single core performance is marginally worse. On an overall level, you should definitely feel that it runs better than that older chip but don’t expect too much.

Related Article

HUAWEI Watch GT 7 Series Launches in Malaysia with Diabetes Risk Study and 21-Day Battery

Razer Huntsman V3 Pro Low-Profile TKL 8KHz Review — Maxing Out on Speed

MAXBY MT PLUS TF Card (32GB, 64GB, 128GB) Review – New Player Enters The Ring

Unsurprisingly, the HONOR X9e Pro couldn’t perform well for GPU-intensive tasks, performing worse than the Exynos 1680 found on the Galaxy A57. On the upside, it doesn’t run hot at all as it managed to achieve a stability rating 99% in our Wild Life stress test, making it one of the more thermally-efficient devices we’ve tested thus far.

Just to get a clearer idea, we also put it to the test in GPUScore’s Sacred Path, which yet again shows middling scores across the board. Gaming on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 covers casual and mid-tier titles comfortably. More demanding titles require graphics settings to be reduced to maintain consistent frame rates, and extended gaming sessions do see the phone warming up to noticeable temperatures but nothing far from alarming. The chip is a capable midrange performer but it reaches its ceiling in sustained heavy workloads more quickly than a flagship chipset would.

Lastly on PCMark’s Work 3.0 benchmark, the HONOR X9e Pro managed to get a score of 12,941, which isn’t anything excellent in this day and age but it’s capable enough to be a daily driver provided your daily use doesn’t involve anything too heavy like running Genshin Impact or doing extensive video editing.

Day-to-day use of the X9e Pro is smooth and responsive for the tasks most users will put a midrange phone through. The Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 handles social media, streaming, messaging, and general productivity without any noticeable hesitation, and the 16GB of physical LPDDR4X RAM keeps app switching fluid with no aggressive app killing during normal multitasking.

HONOR RAM Turbo is worth explaining briefly here. It is HONOR’s implementation of virtual RAM expansion, which allocates a portion of the phone’s UFS storage as additional memory headroom. The X9e Pro uses 8GB of storage as this virtual RAM buffer, bringing the stated total to 24GB. In practice, virtual RAM is slower than physical RAM and is most useful for keeping more apps suspended in the background rather than improving active performance. It is a meaningful quality-of-life feature for multitasking but should not be interpreted as equivalent to having 24GB of physical RAM.

The 11,000mAh silicon-carbon battery is the X9e Pro’s single strongest selling point. In our battery endurance test, it managed to last a whopping 24 hours (1,440 minutes), losing out only to the REDMI Note 17 Pro Max with a slightly smaller 10,000mAh battery. I do find it interesting that there’s a notable difference between the two despite running the same chip so it’s most likely a software optimization issue.

Heavy usage days including gaming sessions, video streaming, social media, and navigation closed with consistent battery remaining that most midrange phones with smaller cells simply cannot match. Two-day battery life under moderate use is achievable, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see certain light users stretching it to 4 full days.

As for charging, here’s what I managed to get using the included 80W HONOR SuperCharge charger starting from 2% battery life

• 15 minutes = 45%
• 30 minutes = 79%
• Full charge = 1 hour 24 minutes

This may sound like a strange figure but I do believe it’s just the behavior of the phone to heavily throttle the charging once it reach about 80%, thus leading to a noticeably longer time to reach full charge instead of it being another 10 or or so minutes. It’s not something new as it’s also present in other phones, whether it uses silicon carbon or lithium ion, but it’s likely more prominent here given the huge capacity.

Camera

The 108MP main camera is the headline of the X9e Pro’s camera system, and it delivers results that comfortably exceed what most midrange phones offer in well-lit conditions. The detail capture is strong, dynamic range is handled well, and the OIS keeps handheld shots stable even in lower light conditions. Portrait mode produces naturally blurred backgrounds with reasonably accurate edge detection, and the overall colour science is natural and pleasing without being aggressively processed.

Low-light photography is one of the stronger aspects of the X9e Pro’s camera. Night mode produces bright, detailed results with controlled noise, and the OIS contributes meaningfully to keeping long-exposure shots sharp. The results are impressive at this price point and hold up well under scrutiny.

The 5MP ultrawide is a notable disappointment alongside an otherwise capable camera system. The quality gap between the 108MP main camera and the ultrawide is immediately apparent, with soft detail, inconsistent colour matching, and poor low-light performance. A higher-resolution ultrawide sensor would have made the X9e Pro a much more well-rounded camera phone, and its absence is the most obvious compromise in the package.

The AI camera features, including AI Eraser for removing unwanted objects from photos and various scene enhancement modes, work as described and produce usable results. They are more novelty than necessity and are unlikely to be features most users reach for daily, but they add versatility to the editing options available directly in the camera app without needing third-party software.

The 16MP front camera handles selfies and video calls well in good lighting, with accurate skin tone reproduction and a natural bokeh effect in portrait mode. Low-light selfies are acceptable though not as strong as the rear camera’s low-light capability.

The Good

Design and Build Quality Feel Premium

The Royal Purple colourway with its flowing light-catching contours, the solid chassis construction, and the curved edges that sit comfortably in hand all contribute to a phone that feels and looks more expensive than it is. The 7.68mm thickness is also impressively slim for a phone housing a 11,000mAh battery, and the overall aesthetic would not look out of place alongside phones at significantly higher price points.

6.8-Inch AMOLED Display Is Excellent for Media Consumption

A 6.8-inch FHD+ AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate at RM1,899 is strong value for money. The display is vibrant, smooth, and well-suited to streaming, gaming, and social media consumption. The in-display fingerprint sensor is fast and reliable, and the overall screen experience is one of the highlights of the package.

Comprehensive Accessories in the Box

The combination of an 80W charger, USB-C cable, and a protective case in the box is a generous inclusion that reduces the immediate additional spend required after purchase. It is a small but meaningful detail that demonstrates HONOR’s awareness of what budget-conscious buyers actually need.

Getting from zero to full charge in approximately 50 minutes via the included 80W charger is an impressive result for a 11,000mAh battery. The fact that the charger is included in the box rather than sold separately adds real value to the package at RM1,899 and means buyers can use the fast charging capability immediately without additional cost.

RAM Turbo Helps Everyday Multitasking

While HONOR RAM Turbo virtual RAM should not be interpreted as equivalent to physical RAM, the practical effect of having more memory headroom for suspended apps is noticeable in everyday multitasking. Switching between multiple apps without the aggressive background killing that plagues many midrange phones is a genuine quality-of-life improvement for users who run several apps simultaneously.

The Bad

Gaming Performance Has a Ceiling

The Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 is a capable midrange chip that handles everyday tasks well, but demanding gaming titles require settings reductions and the phone warms up noticeably under sustained load. For casual gaming this is manageable, but dedicated mobile gamers will find the performance ceiling limiting in graphically demanding titles.

MagicOS Has a Learning Curve

MagicOS 9 atop Android 15 is feature-rich and generally well-implemented, but the interface takes adjustment for users coming from stock Android or other flavours of Android skin. Certain settings and features are located where intuition does not naturally lead, and the overall experience requires a familiarisation period that more streamlined Android skins avoid.

No Wireless Charging

The absence of wireless charging is not unusual at this price point, but given the strong charging package otherwise, its absence is worth noting for users who have built wireless charging into their daily routine.

AI Camera Features Are More Novelty Than Utility

The AI Eraser and scene enhancement tools work as described but are unlikely to become part of most users’ regular shooting workflow. They produce adequate results but do not approach the quality of dedicated photo editing applications, and their primary appeal is convenience rather than capability.

HONOR X9e Pro Verdict

The HONOR X9e Pro makes a compelling case for itself at RM1,899. The 11,000mAh silicon-carbon battery with 80W fast charging is the headline, and it genuinely delivers on the promise of all-day and into-two-day battery life that makes real-world anxiety around charging almost irrelevant. The main camera punches above the price, the AMOLED display is excellent for media consumption, and the overall build quality and design are premium enough that the phone does not feel like a compromise even when you know the spec sheet.

However, the ultrawide camera is a clear weak point that undermines the overall camera package, and gaming performance has a ceiling that enthusiast users will hit. MagicOS requires patience from users unfamiliar with its layout. For buyers whose priorities are battery endurance, main camera quality, and daily usability at a midrange price, the X9e Pro is a strong recommendation. With that in mind, I award the HONOR X9e Pro with our Silver Pokdeward.

Big thanks to HONOR Malaysia for sending us this smartphone for the purpose of this review.