A teaser image of a new phone has surfaced coming from the smartphone maker HONOR. This image shows a teal-colored phone with a dual back camera. The tagline "Xtraordinary photographer" is shown at the top, while the phone is revealed to be the HONOR 9X Lite in the bottom left corner. The HONOR X-series of phones has been some of the best budget phones on the market for the past few years. Their Lite versions of these phones come in at a lower price, usually sacrificing some display and camera quality to reach the lower price point.
The HONOR 20 Lite is the most recent Lite phone to come from Honor. As the budget version of the Honor 20 and 20 Pro, the phone had much lower specs that set it aside from the other entries in this series. While the chipset and RAM might be slower, the HONOR 20 Lite shared some of the same camera features that made the series unique. The triple camera setup features a wide lens as well as a macro lens. The continuation of the camera setup through the different phones is what ties a Lite version of a phone to its flagship version. Knowing this, we can make some predictions about the upcoming HONOR 9X Lite based on what we know about the HONOR 9X.
The HONOR 9X most notably featured a full-view display with a pop-up selfie camera. While it is currently unclear if the HONOR 9X Lite will also have this feature, we can make some pretty good guesses as to what to expect as for specifications.
The HONOR 9X Lite will have a 1080p display. The exact resolution will depend on if it has the same full-view display as the HONOR 9X shown above. The chipset will be the Kirin 710 or 710F which is Huawei's current-gen budget chipsets that are featured in all of their entry-level phones. The RAM capacity will probably max out at 4GB, but there is a small chance they'd go for a 6GB option. HONOR's most recent "Lite" phone was the Honor 20 Lite which came with 128GB of storage, and it's safe to assume the HONOR 9X Lite will also have this capacity.
The most interesting aspect of the new phone is going to be the 48MP camera. We have seen 48MP cameras in budget phones, but the Lite series usually hits a much lower price point, sometimes being under $200. If this happens, this could be one of the most affordable 48MP camera phones available.
Aside from what we can assume about the specs of this upcoming phone, we can also confidently say that this phone will ship with Google services. This is surprising considering the ongoing ban on Huawei coming from the U.S. However, these entries for the HONOR 9X Lite showed up on a Google services registration website.
In this screenshot we can see the model numbers for the new phone will be JSN-L21, JSN-L22, and JSN-L23. We will continue to cover this phone and provide updates as they come in.