The Honor 9X packs a seriously large battery considering the low budget price of the phone. The 4000mAh battery keeps the phone running effortlessly throughout a day's worth of usage. The ultra efficient Kirin 9X chipset keeps the phone running fast with minimum battery drain. In this article, we are going to look at the usage of the phone over the course of a day and see how it does.

Honor 9X

Specs

Display

6,59″ 1080 x 2340p (391 ppi)

Chipset

HiSilicon Kirin 710F

RAM

6GB

Storage

128GB

Main Camera

48MP/8MP (Ultrawide)/2MP (Depth Sensor)

Selfie Camera

16MP Motorized Pop-up

Battery

4,000mAh

Operating System

Android 9.1.0 EMUI 9.1.0


An Hour of Minecraft 9%

The first hour of use on my Honor 9X was spent playing some Minecraft. When gaming, I like to use the max settings on whatever game I'm playing, to get the best visual experience. In Minecraft, I set the render distance up to 11 chunks and all the other graphics settings on high. With most budget phones, Minecraft can seriously stress their hardware to it's limits. With the Honor 9X I played a solid hour of Minecraft with no heat issues, and no performance dips. The game was as smooth of a gaming experience as you can have on Android.

To help the phone in its gaming performance, I like to set the phone to Performance Mode in the battery menu. This mode prioritizes performance over battery conservation. With performance mode enabled, and the screen brightness set to 50%, I ended up using 9% in an hour of gameplay.


An Hour of Music 3%

For me, an hour of music a day is really overkill. In reality I'll probably listen to a few tracks while I'm headed out for lunch, just to find out that Popeye's is once again sold out of their chicken sandwich. But just to be thorough in my testing, I'll assume an average user will stream one hour of music on their Honor 9X. For this test, we will use Google Play Music to stream, and have the screen off. Streaming music is the best time to enable the Power Saver Option, since this isn't a graphics intensive task and wont affect the music playback in any way.

After an hour of streaming songs on Google Play Music, the Honor 9X only used 3% of its battery. This means that even if you're low on battery, you can still get hours of music time out of your Honor 9X. Long car rides is the most logical time to toggle on Power Save Option and just let your music play. This battery saving feature from EMUI is very effective.


An Hour of YouTube 11%

Aside from some intensive 3D gaming, streaming video is usually most stress you'll put on your smartphone battery. For the video streaming test, I'll play a one hour long YouTube video with the screen at 70% brightness. I will not have Power Save Option or Performance Mode on.

After an hour of streaming a YouTube video, I was able to get the battery down to 78% capacity. The video played in full-screen, only being interrupted by a few advertisements. In the hour of YouTube I only lost 11% battery in total. You should be able to comfortably watch several movies throughout your day, or binge a handful of episode of a show before needing to recharge.


Ten Minutes of Filming and 100 48MP Photos 7%

For this next test I'll take a look at camera usage. I filmed 10 minutes of footage at 1080p resolution and 60FPS. These are the max video settings supported by the Honor 9X. Next, I took 100 photos with the 48MP sensor.

Fun Fact: 100 photos at 48MP takes up 674MB

Ten minutes of filming is probably way more than you'd use on an average day, but it's important to know how much battery this will use if you're going to be using your Honor 9X to document a vacation, or shoot some videos for the internet. After filming for 10 minutes and shooting 100 photos at 48MP, I managed to kill about 7% of the battery over the course of 14 minutes.


An Hour of GPS 6%

GPS on Android phones is probably way more efficient than most people think. If you've got GPS running and have your screen off when you're not looking at it, GPS will barely touch your battery over the course of an hour. For this test, I left my screen on at 25% brightness and no battery save features were used. I took my phone out for a one hour ride on my electric scooter (which makes me look very cool btw) in the freezing cold temperatures. The app I used for GPS navigation was Google Maps.

After a full hour of usage, I drained another 6% from the battery on the Honor 9X.

Eight Hours of Sleep 6%

Alright it's bedtime. Nothing too significant will be done to prepare the Honor 9X for the night. The display will be off and the phone will be set to silent to test the standby drain.

In the morning, the battery had dropped to 59% while losing 6% overall during the night. With 59% we have a whole second day of use ahead of us before needing to recharge.

The Honor 9X has a very impressive battery life. You'll easily be able to get through an entire day on one charge, and most people will be able to go through two. See what others are saying about the Honor 9X in the community forums.

Honor 9X forums

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