Huawei's sub-brand Honor may have been a latecomer in terms of Android updates until a year ago but it is slowly ramping up its speed with Android 9 Pie. Honor has been working on EMUI 9 updates based on Android 9 Pie for a number of devices and this is not limited to latest flagship, Honor View 20. Aside from the View 20, late 2017's flagship Honor View 10, last year's performer Honor Play, and budget-oriented Honor 8X have already received the stable Android 9 Pie update while Honor 8 Pro and Honor 7X are currently under the beta program. Now, the EMUI 9 beta is coming to two more devices - namely Honor 9N and Honor 9 Lite.
Honor 9N XDA Forums Honor 9 Lite XDA Forums
To become a member of the beta program, you must download Huawei's BETA tester app. Once you install the app and login with your HiCloud ID, proceed to the "Personal" tab. Under this tab, go to the "Join Project" option and then tap on "Available projects". In this page, you will be able to choose the EMUI 9 beta for your Honor 9N or Honor 9 Lite.
One of the main objectives of this beta test is to weed out any bugs in the Android 9 Pie update for the two devices. You can share your feedback with the developers from within the app linked above.
Both - the Honor 9N (sold as Honor 9i in China) and the Honor 9 Lite - are devices meant for the budget segment. So, it is exciting to see that Honor is not limiting the update to devices with high-end specifications. The two smartphones are fairly identical in most of the aspects, having an inseparable appearance of the back. The only differences are in terms of the display and the selfie cameras - the Honor 9 Lite features dual 13MP+2MP selfie cameras and an 18:9 display while the Honor 9N comes with a taller, notched display and a single 16MP selfie camera.
Among the features that the two smartphone share are HiSilicon Kirin 659 SoC, 13MP+2MP rear cameras, options between 3GB of RAM with 32GB storage or 4GB RAM with 64GB of storage. As mentioned above, both the devices are indistinguishable when seen from behind and have the same rear camera set up.
Note: Honor has stopped providing official bootloader unlock codes for its devices. Therefore, the bootloaders of their devices cannot be unlocked, which means that users cannot root or install custom ROMs.