Alright so, Honor back with yet another new smartphone for us to check out. It wasn’t too long ago that we had reviewed the Honor Magic 5 Pro, which was a very solid flagship device to daily drive albeit with a couple of nitpicks here and there. It’s been a couple of months since however, and so Honor has followed it up with a new premium upper midrange smartphone, the Honor 90.
Just like its flagship sibling, the Honor 90 brings with it a lot of upgrades in the camera department. However, unlike the Magic 5 Pro which went all out with software tricks to bump up its camera performance, the Honor 90 goes all out in the hardware side of things instead, boasting a 200MP main camera.
Having used it now for a couple of weeks, here’s our review of the Honor 90.
It’s a divisive design
Honor isn’t exactly known for their minimalist approach to smartphone design to say the least. The Honor Magic 5 Pro for instance had this gigantic circular camera bump on the back that they called the ‘Eye of Muse’—though it looked more like a hidden Mickey to me—while the Honor 70 before this had a shimmering, frosted look to it.
The Honor 90 though follows this up with a ‘diamond’ theme on the rear panel that’s just a little too garish and gaudy for me personally. Thankfully though, that’s only on the Diamond Silver Honor 90 that I was using, with the other colour options that the Honor 90 comes in not having any textured holes on the back. Honor had also sent us the Peacock Blue variant so you’ll be seeing pictures of both throughout this article, which has colour shifting properties to it. If you want a more basic looking smartphone though the Honor 90 also comes in Emerald Green, which is perhaps my favourite option of the three because it reminds me of British racing green.
In any case though, regardless of which colourway you end up going for the Honor 90 will still have a dual ring camera bump on the back that Honor says was inspired by fine jewelry. These camera modules aren’t perfect circles either, instead shaped in an ellipse that’s certainly one of the more unique designs on a smartphone we’ve seen. Turn the Honor 90 around though, and you’ll get what is perhaps my favourite part: the display.
Four curves, one speaker
Honor has a history of placing some very good displays on their smartphones; when I reviewed the Honor Magic 5 Pro for instance I called out its display for being one of the best in its class, and I can honestly say the same thing for the display on the Honor 90.
The Chinese firm has kitted out the Honor 90 with a large 6.7-inch, AMOLED quad curved display, with curves not just on the sides but also on the top and bottom of the display. I’m still not particularly sold on the whole ‘quad-curveness’ of Honor’s displays, but it’s a minor nitpick really. It comes with an impressive 2664 x 1200p resolution, a smidge higher than its FHD+ rivals, as well as 3840Hz PWM dimming that is said to reduce eye strain, a 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 1600nits. Overall, the Honor 90 display does feel more flagship than midrange when you look at it.
Unfortunately, Honor has again gimped its premium midrange offering just like it did with the Honor 70 and Honor 50 before it by giving the Honor 90 just a single paltry bottom firing speaker. Like, come on Honor, it’s 2023. A smartphone that’s supposedly aimed for the premium midrange market shouldn’t be coming with a single mono speaker anymore. This ends up becoming a not insignificant negative towards the Honor 90, which could’ve been a great device for watching content on the go if only it came with a pair of decent stereo speakers.
Under the hood meanwhile, the Honor 90 comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 Accelerated Edition, which is essentially last year’s upper midrange mobile processor clocked a little faster. With 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage to go along with it, day to day performance is fine for the most part. I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary when it comes to performance, and the games that I regularly play such as Marvel Snap worked just fine on the Honor 90, along with all the other apps that I use for texting, social media, videos and so forth.
It comes with Android 13 out of the box, skinned with MagicOS 7.1 over it. Like before though, it suffers the same few issues that plagued the Magic 5 Pro before it, with the UI just not feeling particular smooth or as polished as its rivals. At the very least, Honor had stated that it will be getting monthly security updates, albeit with only two OS upgrades and three years of security patches at best. Battery life meanwhile is solid enough, with its 5,000mAh battery comfortably lasting me the day after regular use. There’s no wireless charging on the Honor 90, though you do have support for 66W fast wired charging with the charging brick even coming in the box.
Two hundred megapixels, too little to show for it
Like we mentioned earlier, the Honor 90 is packing some serious hardware in the camera department, with a main 200MP, f/1.9 camera flanked by a 12MP, f/2.2 ultrawide and a 2MP, f/2.4 depth sensor in the pair of ellipses on the back while a 50MP, f/2.4 front camera handles your selfies. Unfortunately though, despite the sheer number of megapixels on offer, that 200MP main camera just doesn’t seem to live up to its name.
Don’t get me wrong, the Honor 90 will likely be fine if all you’re shooting for is social media or your own memory bank, but with such massive specs on paper I just had much higher expectations for the Honor 90. However, after going around and taking shots with it, the Honor 90 just seems to end up being a slightly above average shooter that performs good enough in decent lighting, rivalling other smartphones in its price segment. But lose just a little bit of light, and a lot of shots just end up becoming a little inconsistent, resulting in occasionally oversaturated shots while in other times you get grainy photos with the fine details becoming a blurry mess once zoomed in. The ultrawide also suffers similar issues with poor lighting, and just a lack of fine detail overall.
Not bad, I just wish it was better
In the end though, the Honor 90 isn’t a particularly bad smartphone, but it’s also lacking in a couple of key areas that end up stopping it from becoming a great one. Giving it stereo speakers for example would’ve been one of the easiest ways to give it a leg up against its competition; hopefully the Honor 110 or whatever it’ll be called won’t end up with a mono speaker again. As for the Honor 90 though, considering how much it’s going for, it will certainly be going up against some tough competition.
The Honor 90 starts at RM1,799 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, while for RM2,099 you’ll get the higher end model with double the storage. That isn’t too high of an asking price, but it’s biggest competitor in this price segment will likely be the Samsung Galaxy A54.
Samsung’s midranger comes in at RM1,899 and while you are getting a smaller display and a slightly weaker processor, what you are getting here is a better all rounder of a device, with an IP67 rating, stereo speakers and four years of Android OS upgrades with five years of security updates, not to mention One UI perhaps being more user friendly than Honor’s MagicUI.
