HONOR Pad 9, 12.1-inch Wi-Fi Tablet, 8GB+256GB, 120Hz 2.5K Eye Protection Display, 8 Speakers, Android 13, Space Grey

The HONOR Pad 9 really exceeded my expectations. The display is sharp, vibrant, and perfect for streaming, reading, or casual gaming. Performance is smooth — multitasking, browsing, run without any issue. The build quality feels premium and lightweight in design that’s super comfortable to hold for long periods.Battery life is another highlight — I easily get a full day of use with mixed tasks. The speakers are also surprisingly loud and clear for a tablet at this price point.If you’re after a solid Android tablet that feels more expensive than it is, the Pad 9 is a fantastic choice. Great value, great performance, and zero regrets.

I have this tablet with 6 days. The first thing I must get out there is when you boot the tablet there will be about 2 firmware updates a small google security patch and a small performance patch. The tablet will be upgraded to Android OS 14 and the September 1st 2024 android security patch. It has the August 1st 2024 Google Play system update installed. As of Thursday 10 October 2024 the tablet has all the latest google updates running Magic OS 8.0 build version 8.0.0.194(C431E154R2P1).I am very impressed with it. The tablet has really really good sound. Apps launch real fast with it. The picture is really good too. Its not OLED or AMOLED good but it has really good black levels. For an IPS Screen the contrast is really good with deep blacks. Of course it doesn't have inky black blacks but it has very dark blacks without crushing shadow details. The colours are good too but the picture is a very slight bit over saturated.I havent tested the tablet with games. I don't know what gaming is like with the tablet. I didn't buy the tablet for gaming. I bought a 12.1" tablet for media consumption like Netflix , Prime video , Disney+ , youtube , Videos I have converted from DVD and blu ray etc. I have 10.1" samsung tablets but I wanted a bigger screen tablet (I really wanted a 13"+ screen but this is a good compromise) for media consumption.I have all of my Christmas movies that I have on DVD , Blu Ray and 4K Blu ray converted to file format. At first I was disappointed because the built in video player on the tablet wouldn't play the videos saying it was an unsupported format. But I downloaded a different video player on the google play store and to my surprise I discovered something that isn't mentioned by Honor about the tablet. Nowhere will you find in their advertising and the specifications that this tablet supports 4K HDR10 and 4K HDR10+ video playback. Seven of my Christmas movies are on 4K Blu Ray with HDR. I played the converted videos and there it was 4K HDR10+ on some videos and 4KHDR10 on others playing smoothly without any stuttering. It plays the videos perfectly smooth and theres no lag in the system when its playing the 4K Video files.Plus the screen does get bright. Watching videos or doing anything on the screen looks good with a decently sharp image with its 2560 x 1600 screen resolution. I would have been happy with a 16:9 2560 x 1440 screen resolution though. In my opinion you don't need 4K or super high resolutions in a screen smaller than 32". This being a 12.1" screen unless you have super eyesight you really won't see a big difference between the 2560 x 1600 screen resolution and 3840 x 2160 on such a small screen format. Its a really really good screen for the money you pay for the tablet.Plus when they say theres 8 speakers in the tablet I'm not sure about that but there's definitely 6 speakers. When I played a Dolby 5.1 video on the tablet I could actually hear the individual channels. For instance with the front left sound I could hear the sound on the top left speaker. If sound played on the front right sound I heard it on the top right speaker. If sound played on rear right I could hear it play on the lower left side speaker and the same goes for the opposite side rear sound. When sound panned left to right or right to left I could hear the sound pan left to right or right to left.Theres really good clarity in the sound too. In the movies I played I could hear background sounds as well as foreground sounds perfectly. Don't expect a lot of bass. The speakers are really small after all. But compared to any phone I've had and any tablet I've had before this tablet is very very impressive. I have two Samsung tablets here. One with four speakers and compared to the Honor PAD 9 the samsung tablets have rubbish sound. Theres good highs , Good mids and a small bit of bass. The bass is present but theres very little bass. Its nothing to write home about in the bass department.Another thing I found after spending a while in the settings was that you canforce any app to be landscape mode. If you have any apps that force ortrait mode on tablets then you go into settings > Large screen features > force device orientation. In there click on the app you want to lock into prtrtait mode and a popout will appear giving you 4 different options and the bottom option in that popout box is Full-screen landscape orientation. I absolutely love this and all tablets should have this feature because theres a few apps I use that lock itself to portrait mode (Phone screen / tik tok style). With them locked into landscape mode works very good. It isn't flawless but it works much better than I expected.Now after all mu gloating and praise of the tablet I have a few cons. First of all it takes a long time to charge. The tablet doesn't come with a charger. I tested it with the 67 Watt charger that came with my phone to see how fast it charges. I didn't actually time it but it does take much longer than an hour and a half to charge and that's not even from an empty battery.Another disappointment is there's no SD card slot. I would have liked to copy some of my Christmas movies onto the tablet around Christmas time. I won't have them on there all year round but I would love to be able to have the movies on there on an sd card.Also the +6GB ram using storage can not be disabled. This will put unnecessary wear on the tablets storage. 8GB of ram is enough (although 16GB Physical ram would be preferable).I would have loved if this was a 13" tablet thats a 16:9 screen format. I think tablet designers and tablet manufacturers should consider making tablets aibed primarily at media consumption in their lineup. The 12.1" screen is nice but with it being a 16:10 screen format when you watch 16:9 videos there's black bars on the top and bottom reducing the size of the video. If they made a tablet with the same specs as this but with a 16:9 13" or 14" screen screen it would be perfect to me. Yes its not OLED but if it was an OLED screen it would cost a whole lot more because for some reason OLED is still a very expensive technology thats more than 10 years old. You would think OLED would start become affordable by now.Another con is The facebook app that came installed on the tablet doesn't work. You need to uninstall it and go into the google store and install facebook from there. But this seems to be an older facebook app on the google play store too. Theres no dark theme in this version and it locks itself to portrait mode. I had to use the lock the app into landscape mode feature on this. I haven't found a tablet version of facebook for this yet. Plus it took about 5 attempts to login into facebook for the login to stick in the tablet. But it did work eventually.Sure there are tablets out there that are more expensive with more powerful chipsets and OLED screens. But if youre just like me who only wants to watch movies , watch TV shows , do some light web browsing , do some amazon or facebook. Then I would highly recommend this tablet.

You wouldn't believe this is classed as a budget tablet! I am very impressed.With a metal case and excellent display, build quality is excellent. It puts my wife's swanky iPad to shame.Having what is classed as a "mid-range" processor, the tablet may stutter slightly with some very heavy duty games. That said, for me personally, it is very quick and responsive in all aspects. Display quality is brilliant and sound quality is surprisingly good (from its 8 internal speakers).My previous tablet was a Lenovo M10 and this one is in a different world!Like many, I am a simple general purpose user - mainly email, word processing, web browsing, the odd game, and watching videos etc. This tablet is more than adequate for my needs.I took advantage of the Amazon deal price of £215 (paid in 5 monthly interest free instalments). That's excellent value and one of the reasons I chose this over the Kindle Fire 11 and Lenovo M12.Honor's MagicOS does rather slow down the initial set up but otherwise is fine and unobtrusive. After the usual poking about, I used Google to restore the apps from my old Lenovo tablet. All came across but I ended up with some duplication and conflicts between Google and Honor equivalent apps - but these were easily sorted. Fortunately, there is little bloatware - which can be quickly eliminated.There were a number of immediate software updates. Among these I was pleased to note MagicOS 8 (aka Android 14). That's very good news.I then changed the home page to my favoured "drawer" mode and eliminated the abominable Google Discovery page and the so intrusive Google Assistant.The cameras, similar to many tablets, are adequate but certainly not spectacular - but then, I am not expecting to lug a 12+" tablet round to take photographs - that's what mobiles are for!Battery life is good and easily lasts me a day. Charging is reasonably fast (~90 minutes) when I use a 35W PD power adapter. The 256GB of memory is more than adequate for my needs. I use FileManager+ (from ASUS) as it gives me seamless access to our home TerraMaster NAS for managing documents, photos, music and videos etc. I use VLC and PLEX for media access.I have found the Honor Docs app to be particularly useful in lieu of a branded office suite. I have a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and Pebble mouse. Both work fine. In addition, I have a generic stylus which also works as anticipated.Some apps annoyingly block the casting of certain video clips. But, with Android 14, I can use "Mirror Screen" (via our Roku box) to display streaming content on our TV. It works rather well!I suspect Honor designers had to work to budget and did cut a few corners.Namely:-- There is no headphone jack socket, so I use Bluetooth ear buds.- There is no SD card slot for adding storage. However, the USB C port supports OTG devices. I have used a Samsung 500GB SSD and a mini TF card reader successfully.- A power adapter is not included (a disappointing but growing trend). Note that a 35w PD adapter is required for fast charging.- As advertised, there is no SIM card slot or support.- The tablet does not support auto wake/sleep so opening a case cover has no effect. However, a double tap on the screen does the job.- There is face recognition but no fingerprint sensor.- Alas, there's no WiFi-6, but I generally find WiFi-5 to be fine. That said, large file transfers take noticeably longer.These are relatively minor gripes and they have have not adversely impacted my enjoyment of an excellent tablet. It's certainly much better than the Kindle Fire that I almost talked myself into buying!The nearest competitors are probably the Lenovo M12, Amazon Fire 11 and Samsung S9+.- The M12 has some advantages over this tablet but, it has much less storage, a poorer screen and it costs more.- The Fire 11 is more expensive, has a smaller screen, is lumbered with the very restrictive FIRE OS and limited app support.- The S9+ is comparatively very slow, relatively more expensive, and has less inbuilt memory.There are some other (cheaper) tablets out there. Mostly from oddly named brands. I may be wrong, but they all appear to suffer from a lack of support, no OS upgrades, and/or reliability issues.I think I made the correct choice! 👌👌👌Update.I ran the Passmark Performance Test app - see the photo for the results. The CPU rating was 37358. This compares reasonably well when compared with my Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 (scoring ~55000) - which cost 5x more!

I've used a lot of android tablets over the years - mostly use them for light stuff - web browsing, emails on the train etc. It's been interesting seeing how they've developed over the years and this is by far the best one I've ever used.Pros:1. The 60hz screen is incredibly smooth and sharp2. The keyboard is very good and the case + keyboard feels pretty solid3. It feels much more premium than the price.4. The split screen feature is actually really useful. e.g. if you click on a link in gmail it will open the browser in the second half of the screen.Cons:1. No LTE. There is an LTE version but this doesn't come with the keyboard.2. The keyboard is bluetooth - it doesn't connect physically to the tablet. So you have to keep it charged separately which can be annoying.3. For me personally I've realised that 12in is a bit big for a tablet, even if it's relatively thin and light.