Best overall
Honor 9
No surprise — the best Honor phone you can buy is the venerable Honor 9. This 5.15-inch handset hits a sweet spot in terms of size and price. It'll set you back just a little over £300 at current prices, while delivering speedy performance thanks to Huawei's homegrown Kirin 960 CPU and 4GB of RAM. The dual camera setup similar to that of the Huawei P10 also makes it across to the new Honor phone, although without the Leica branding, nor optical image stabilization.
And on the outside, the Honor 9's glitzy metal-and-glass body stands out from the crowd, and battery life from the fixed 3,200mAh cell is easily enough to last a full day, thanks to its efficient internals. It's running Android Nougat out of the box, with an update to Oreo coming in early 2018.
Bottom line: The Honor 9 is an excellent sub-£350 phone with a few software quirks that may take a while to adjust to.
One more thing: The Honor 9 isn't available in the U.S. -- buyers in the states should probably wait for Honor's next big thing at this point.
Why the Honor 9 is the best
A whole lotta phone for 300 quid.
With UK pricing currently just over £300, the Honor 9 delivers excellent value for money. And if you can deal with Huawei's EMUI 5.1 interface — it's something of acquired taste, but way better than earlier Huawei software — there's an awful lot to like. The display — a 1080p LCD panel — is bright and vibrant, and the fact that you're not pushing a 2K panel means there are power savings to be had.
Meanwhile, the dual camera setup uses a full color 12-megapixel sensor and another black-and-white sensor combined, to produce clear daylight shots and photos with more detail in low light. EMUI's camera app also includes super night mode for getting the most from stabilized shots in the dark. And all that in an attractive glass-backed package.
Best value
Honor 6X
Honor's latest phone to launch in the U.S. is the only current product sold in the country. The Honor 6X packs an efficient Huawei Kirin 655 processor and 3GB of RAM into a metal body, with a surprisingly good 1080p LCD display. There's 32GB of storage built in (internationally you can choose beteen 32 and 64GB), and the recent Android 7.0 Nougat (and EMUI 5) upgrade brings welcome performance improvements and UI tweaks.
What's more you'll also get a great rear-mounted fingerprint scanner for biometric security — a feature that's still missing from many phones at this sub-$200 price point.
Bottom-line: The Honor 6X is a decent phone with metal construction and a fingerprint scanner for comfortably less than $200.
One more thing: The biggest trade-off for the Honor 6X is the lack of oleophobic coating on the screen, meaning it can get gunked up with fingerprints pretty easily.
Conclusion
All Honor's phones are competitively priced, but the flagship Honor 9 is the one to aim for. You'll get flagship-tier performance and build quality, an impressive camera and all-day battery life for considerably less than the bigger brands are charging. What's more, it's only going to get better once Android Oreo arrives in the coming months.
Best overall
Honor 9
No surprise — the best Honor phone you can buy is the venerable Honor 9. This 5.15-inch handset hits a sweet spot in terms of size and price. It'll set you back just a little over £300 at current prices, while delivering speedy performance thanks to Huawei's homegrown Kirin 960 CPU and 4GB of RAM. The dual camera setup similar to that of the Huawei P10 also makes it across to the new Honor phone, although without the Leica branding, nor optical image stabilization.
And on the outside, the Honor 9's glitzy metal-and-glass body stands out from the crowd, and battery life from the fixed 3,200mAh cell is easily enough to last a full day, thanks to its efficient internals. It's running Android Nougat out of the box, with an update to Oreo coming in early 2018.
Bottom line: The Honor 9 is an excellent sub-£350 phone with a few software quirks that may take a while to adjust to.
One more thing: The Honor 9 isn't available in the U.S. -- buyers in the states should probably wait for Honor's next big thing at this point.
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