Gadgets
A mid-range smartphone with ‘super’ display
By - 16 Feb 2024 09:25 PM
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After being away from the Indian market for three years, Honor came back in 2023 with a mid-range phone. Now, the company is launching its mid-tier Honor X9b.The Honor X9b comes at a time when the smartphone market is quite mature and fairly saturated. If you want to spend around Rs 25,000 on an Android phone, it is very unlikely that you will be stuck with a truly bad one unless you are intentionally deciding to make poor choices. With the X9b, Honor has seemingly decided to pin its hopes on what it is calling the “ultra-bounce anti-drop display,” which the company claims can withstand “1.2 times the impact of a drop, whatever that means. The truth of the matter is that I am not quite equipped to do the kind of specialised testing to see if those claims are true. Honor says that the X9b is the “first phone to get a five-star overall drop resistance certification from Switzerland’s SGS.”Certifications like this are meaningless unless they provide a benchmark to compare against. What I can say for the phone is that my clumsy self dropped it twice — once from my bed a foot or two above the ground and one from my table that is less than a metre above the ground. There was no damage.Also, my friend’s pet cockatiel Kiwi took a liking to perching on the phone when I held it up around him. Kiwi’s sharp claws scratch my shoulder when he sits on it, but it did nothing to the phone. Of course, I am not sure how much of that can be attributed to the applied screen protector and the free transparent case that comes with the phone. The massive 6.7-inch screen has a 2652×1200 (1.5k resolution), giving it a very high pixel density of 429 pixels per inch. The sides of the phone’s screen curve away from the user in a way that reminds me of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. Maybe that is not what you remember that phone for. I am usually sceptical about phones that have a curved display because I am not sure how well they deal with palm rejection but that did not seem to be an issue here. That may be because the actual screen does not really curve as much as the glass’s design makes it appear. |
