Honor might not have a prominent presence in the local market, but it’s no doubt a well-established brand in the mobile world with sizeable market shares in most Asian markets including China and Malaysia. The company started off as a subsidiary of Huawei that focuses primarily on entry to middle-range smartphones which successfully garnered a huge fanbase among the more budget conscious consumers due to their value-for-money offerings.
However, it’s recent independence from Huawei had seen the company rapidly expanding it’s portfolio towards the higher-end segment with full-fledge flagship devices as well as foldable phones such as the recently announced Honor Magic V2. But despite the increasing emphasize on high-end offerings, the company is still putting every bit of effort needed to keep it ahead of competition within the highly competitive middle-range market.
The new Honor 90 5G is the company’s latest mid-range model that takes aim at some of the recently announced smartphones such as the Xiaomi 13T and Vivo V29 5G. Thanks to Honor Singapore, I’d gotten a chance to test out the Honor 90 5G for slightly more than three weeks and here are my honest opinion on this exciting piece of hardware.
Design & Display
At first glance, the Honor 90 5G inevitably reminds me of the Huawei P50 Pro (Review) smartphone especially with the adoption of an elegant dual-ring camera design on the back of the phone which gives it a distinctive outlook that really stands out from the crowd.
The model I had for review comes in a Diamond Silver colorway which features a shiny and reflective appearance from the outside. The main highlight of this color actually lies in the bottom-halve of the back panel where you’ll be greeted by a diamond motif design which looks really trendy and stylish. But in case you ain’t a fan of flashy colors like this, Honor also got you covered with slightly more understated colors such as Midnight Black and Emerald Green which do have their own charms as well.
@playfuldroid Honor 90 5G Full Unboxing ? #Honor905G #Honor90 #Honor #Smartphone ? The Irishman – Paul Velchev
Featuring an overall thickness of just 7.8mm, the Honor 90 5G feels really sleek on hand and is certainly a perfect phone for single-handed use as it weighs merely 183 grams. Unlike most other mid-range phones in the market, the Honor 90 5G also comes with a toughened glass back which not only helps to improve durability of the phone, but also adds an extra touch of opulence to the overall handling experience.
Over on the front side, the Honor 90 5G sports a spacious 6.7” display which offers plenty of screen estate for work and play. It settles with a punch-hole selfie camera which is way less obtrusive than those unsightly notches. The display itself is based on a high-end AMOLED panel featuring a sharp-looking 1200 x 2664 pixels screen resolution along with an ultra-fast 120Hz refresh rate which makes scrolling and animations felt smoother than before.
More importantly, the display also has no issue getting sufficiently bright even when I was using the phone directly under the sun thanks to it’s impressive peak brightness that’s able to reach up to 1,600 nits in auto brightness mode. In fact, this is actually the brightest screen you can probably find within this price point.
Performance
Under the hood, the Honor 90 5G is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 (Accelerated Edition) chipset which boasts a maximum clock speed of 2.5GHz. In day-to-day usage, it’s a pretty capable chipset which never disappoints me with it’s blazing-fast performance whenever I was multi-tasking or gaming on the phone.
Also, I hardly came across any notable heating issue during my hours-long gaming sessions despite the lack of dedicated cooling system that we normally see among gaming-centric smartphones such as the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate (Review). This is definitely important as it helps to eliminate the risk of thermal throttling which would otherwise lead to inconsistent frame rates.
On the memory side of things, the Honor 90 5G is backed by a generous 12GB RAM that provides you with more than sufficient headroom for multi-tasking. Likewise, there’s also an ample 512GB onboard storage which certainly makes up for the lack of microSD slot on the device.
Cameras
As far as photography is concerned, the Honor 90 5G is equipped with a versatile triple-camera setup lead by a 200 megapixels (f/1.9 aperture) main camera along with a 12 megapixels ultra-wide (f/2.2 aperture) and 2 megapixels (f/2.4 aperture) depth sensing unit.
Regardless of lighting condition, the main camera is able to capture social media-worthy photos with nice dynamic range and color reproduction that allow photos to look natural and flattering. Likewise, photos also look sharp and detailed with the adoption of a high-res 200MP Samsung ISOCELL HP3 imaging sensor that uses of 16-to-1 pixel-binning to output high-quality photos with 12MP resolution.
Although the Honor 90 5G doesn’t comes with a dedicated telephoto camera for zoomed shots, but it’s still able to capture decent-looking photos with 2x or 3x digital zooming thanks to the additional pixel count which helps to maintain image quality when photos are cropped digitally. That’s another benefit of having a high-res camera onboard.
Moving on, the Honor 90’s 12MP ultra-wide camera is also a pretty capable companion for taking landscape photography. In bright daylight, photos turn out well with acceptably good dynamic range and details but it does suffers a little in poor lighting environment where image noise becomes slightly more noticeable.
Battery & Charging
To keep it’s lights on, the Honor 90 5G is backed by a respectable 5,000mAh battery that’s able to last me through a typical work day with around 25 to 35% battery remaining before I head to bed. In fact, I occasionally find myself getting slightly more than 1.5 days’ battery life on days when I uses the phone sparingly.
To sweeten up the deal, the Honor 90 5G also features a super-fast 66W wired charging support that’s able to deliver a full charge from 0 to 100% in just around 50 minutes. Even if you doesn’t have that much time to spare, a mere 15 minutes charge is suffice to bring the battery level up to 50%.
Verdict
The Honor 90 5G is a wonderful option for those looking for an affordable smartphone with good performance and photography capabilities that serve well as ideal companion for day-to-day usage. Apart from it’s capable hardware, the Honor 90 5G is also among the best-looking smartphone you can find in this price range.
For those who’re interested, the Honor 90 5G is priced at just S$619 and is available for purchase through authorized HONOR retailers, selected consumer electronics stores such as Best Denki, Challenger, Courts and Gain City as well as e-commerce platforms such as Shopee, Lazada and TikTok.
