Honor Pad X9 review

Design

There is nothing particularly standout about the design of the Pad X9, but it does both look and feel very premium. The anodized aluminum body is not something you see too commonly in this budget price segment.

The Honor Pad X9 seems to only come in one color - Space Gray. Matte as it may be, the back panel still picks up fingerprints.

The Honor Pad X9 is pretty thin at 6.9 mm. The weight is quite reasonable as well at 495 grams given the 11.5-inch display size and 7250 mAh battery. That being said, the Pad X9 is still a hefty device and holding it with one hand is only feasible for short periods of time.

The reasonably-sized bezels strike a good balance between offering enough area to grab onto, all without making the design look dated.

Build quality

As already mentioned, the Pad X9 has quite a premium bill of materials for its price tag. Both its middle frame and back panel are made of aluminum.

There is some protective glass covering the display, which offers some peace of mind. However, Honor does not specify exactly what kind of glass it is. Also, in case you were wondering, there is no formal ingress protection rating.

Controls

The Honor Pad X9 has a pretty standard set of controls. Well, unless you count the six-speaker setup with two speakers on each of the short sides and two more speakers on the "bottom" of the tablet when you are holding it horizontally.

These two speakers, in particular, are meant to bounce sound from a surface you've placed the slate on, creating a 360-degree effect.

The opposite side of the Pad X9 houses a volume rocker and power button. These are positioned a bit high up on the frame, but there is no truly comfortable location to place these on a tablet. The buttons are nice and clicky, with good tactile feedback.

One thing worth pointing out is that the Honor Pad X9 lacks a fingerprint reader but this seems par for the course for tablets in this price segment.

The top of the device has a pair of speakers and not much else.

The bottom side of the Pad X9 has two symmetrical speakers and a USB Type-C port. There is no 3.5mm jack on the tablet.

There are also no dedicated POGO pins or anything of the sort for accessories like a keyboard.

Connectivity

As already mentioned, the Honor Pad X9 lacks cellular connectivity. You only get dual-band Wi-Fi ac and Bluetooth 5.1 support with LE. An LTE version does seem to exist and that one has GPS as well. The regular one lacks GPS. There is no NFC of IR blaster or anything fancy on board. The Type-C port is backed up by a USB 2.0 data connection, which means a theoretical maximum data transfer speed of 480 Mbps. The USB port supports Host/OTG but doesn't have anything else beyond that, like video output.

The Honor Pad X9 is kind of light on on-board sensors. It does have a lis2dw12 accelerometer and a sip1221 ambient light sensor. Beyond that, however, there is no gyroscope typically bundled with the accelerometer. Also absent from the Pad X9 - are a magnetometer, a compass and a barometer. The lack of a GPS receiver goes without saying in a tablet without a cellular modem.