It is hard to find a fault with the Honor 90 without looking at its price tag and that, ladies, and gentlemen, is the too long; didn’t read (TL;DR) review of Honor’s comeback phone in India. The Honor 90 starts at Rs 37,999 for 8GB/256GB. The top-shelf 12GB/512GB model will set you back by Rs 39,999. If you’re even remotely interested in these things, and planning a purchase as we speak, the name OnePlus 11R should have popped up in your head already. The OnePlus Nord 3 is fantastic, too, and a bit cheaper as well. More probing should bring up a few more good options. The point is not to make a list of alternatives— which is also fine by the way— but to tell you how competitive the ~40K segment is. Every spec, or the lack thereof, is checked with remarkable amount of vigilance. Then, there’s judgement. And the Honor 90 must face it.
Honor 90 review: Design
To be clear, Honor did not exit the smartphone space globally, only in India, which is to say reviewers in this part of the world have had to mostly rely on external sources to get a sense of its portfolio. Long story short, the brand’s pulling of some interesting stuff including foldables, some of which have the potential to put Samsung on notice. The Honor 90 may not be as magical or breathtaking, but it carries one big Honor gene— the penchant for good looks. Even when Honor was servicing this market before, it was making some of the most eye-catching designs the smartphone world could fathom. The Honor 90 feels like Honor never left the building.
The phone’s being billed as an epitome of luxury. Inspired by fashion and jewellery. Two of its colours are, in fact, called emerald green and diamond silver. The former uses matte-frosted glass with a layer of sparkle, enough to spark up a conversation. The effect is subtle. Elegant. The latter’s a bit more razzle-dazzle. A more run-of-the-mill midnight black option exists for those looking for, well, just that. The make of the glass is not specified. It curves into the plastic frame gradually.
The Honor 90 is fairly slim and light. It measures 7.8mm and weighs 183g. For a 6.7-inch phone, that’s another luxury. The tapering edges are a nice touch. Makes the phone naturally grippy. All in all, a big thumbs up to Honor’s choices. I do wish there was some sort of water-resistance, too.
Honor 90: Display
The Honor 90 is packed to the gills with hardware quirks to make it seem less of a stretch for when you’re curled up in bed incessantly watching one Reel after another, late at night. The best thing to do would be abstaining but who are we kidding right? So, Honor took it upon itself to help as best as a smartphone brand can. The irony. The Honor 90’s AMOLED panel supports 3,840Hz risk-free dimming, which as far as I know, is the highest in the industry at the time of writing.
Brands like Realme have been pushing the boundaries as far as making smartphone displays more adapt to eye-care, but the Honor 90’s stats take things to an all-new level. What those numbers mean is that the phone’s display would be virtually flicker-free, especially at lower brightness (and low ambient lighting), leading to more comfortable and strain-free experience. Speaking of brightness, the Honor 90’s panel can peak 1,600nits when playing HDR10+ content. There’s no constraint in terms of colour science as well with the Honor 90 usually preferring signature AMOLED pop regardless of the mode you’re using.
The phone gives you more control over resolution and refresh rate than probably any other phone I’ve come across in this price range. You can dial the resolution down to 199x900p. To 2442x1100p too. It can go up to 2664x1200p. Refresh rate can similarly be locked at 60, 90 and 120Hz manually. Choice is good. There’s no cap on high refresh gaming as well.
Honor 90: Performance, cameras
At the one end, the Honor 90 boasts of a massive 200-megapixel main camera, at the other, Honor chose to outfit it with a relatively mundane Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. It tries to lessen the blow by calling it an “accelerated” edition but still, the choice of chipset pales in comparison to the rest of the package. Even more so when you factor in the competition.
The Honor 90 performs brilliantly in day-to-day use, doesn’t throttle, or get hot under stress (RAM and storage, too, are generous) but this is not a phone for those seeking pure power (as you can probably tell from the photo below). Gaming is not its big USP feature, so you’re better off looking elsewhere.
The software is a mixed bag. MagicOS 7.1 is a breath of fresh air in a sea of sameness from other Chinese counterparts, but you can tell iOS was a big source of inspiration for a lot of its aesthetic workings. A top-down swipe from the right brings the control centre, while incoming notifications are accessible from the left. An in-house assistant “YOYO” suggests apps based on activity and you can also set it up as a widget (Honor calls them cards) on your home screen for quick reference. The phone lets you extract text from images and share files wirelessly with computers on the same network. The Honor 90 is also one of the few phones in the market to ship with the Microsoft SwiftKey keyboard by default.
Most importantly, everything works seamlessly and cohesively with barely a hiccup. That said, we were promised a clean, bloat-free phone at launch but that is not the case with the Honor 90. Also, Honor is committing to two years of major OS and three years of security updates which falls short of the current industry standard.
I expected longer battery life but the Honor 90 failed to impress me, even with a 5,000mAh capacity. 66W fast charging is fast, but not the fastest in the segment. Honor gives you a 30W charger in the box.
But while none of these apparent shortcomings are a deal-breaker, the cameras, well, they are a different story. In part due to some odd choices. The Honor 90 puts up a good show with the specs. It has a trio of sensors on the back including a 200-megapixel primary. It’s paired to a 12-megapixel ultrawide. It has autofocus. Nice. So, it can double as a macro. But no optical image stabilisation on the main camera is almost criminal at this price. A 2MP depth wraps things up. The front camera is a 50-megapixel. No autofocus. A good thing about the Honor 90 is that you can record 4K@30fps from both front and rear. It might seem like a small thing, but it’s hardly a common phenomenon in the industry.
That was hardware and hardware only tells you half the story. But don’t keep your hopes high. The other half isn’t a bestseller either. Regardless of the camera you choose, the Honor 90 fails to capture good detail. Photos come out soft, generally, and dynamic range is average at best. Colours are punchy, sometimes too punchy, something that could irk some purists. I am hoping things would get better with time with more updates, but I won’t bet my money on it.
Honor 90: Should you buy it?
Was the Honor 90 the best option to come back to India? People behind the comeback believe yes. I think so, too. It’s practical. Foldables would grab more eyeballs, but it would be more short-term. Even in its first run, Honor wasn’t particularly fond of bringing super premium phones to India. A fresh start needs to be a bit more encouraging from a sales point of view. Pricing becomes very critical in that case which is probably why the phone launched with some real tantalising offers and was available for as low as a net effective Rs 26,999 on Amazon and mainline stores. Chances are, we’ll keep seeing such “heavy” discounts with the Honor 90, at least until the time their next phone comes to market.
Should you buy the Honor 90 at its original price though? No. Even with its glorious spec sheet and luxurious design, the Honor 90 is not a threat to the OnePlus 11R. Should you buy it at lower prices would depend entirely on how much you can trust the brand. Product-wise, the Honor 90 is solid. Same as before. Nothing’s changed. What’s changed is the route. HTech, the venture behind Honor’s second coming, has big plans. It plans to start local manufacturing next year and hopefully, customer support would get clearer and more streamlined. And then when the foldables arrive, eventually, we can all get behind Honor once again.
The Honor 90 is almost magical. I have loved using it. Made be go back in time and reminisce about all the cool Honor phones I have reviewed before the brand wound down its operations. With buyers becoming more and more woke and vocal about brands selling rebranded “surrogate” products under different names, Honor’s comeback is warm, refreshing, and full of promise.