HONOR 90 review: Gorgeous display and good-looking body

The HONOR 90 might be a good choice if you’re looking for a new mid-range Android smartphone to buy for Christmas. It has a pleasant design, a stunning display, a fast-charging battery, and a camera system that promises to capture beautiful photos. I’ve been testing it for some time as my main phone, and there are things that I like about it very much. Of course, it isn’t a perfect device and has some weaknesses. In this review, I’ll share with you my experience with the HONOR 90. By the time you’re done reading, I hope I’ll have managed to help you decide whether it is a good choice for you. Let’s start:

HONOR 90: Who is it good for?

The HONOR 90 is an excellent choice if you:

• Want an Android smartphone that looks good
• Are looking for a phone with a superb display
• Need a mid-range Android with good overall performance

Pros and cons

These are the things I like most about the HONOR 90 smartphone:

• Top-notch screen with a fast refresh rate, high resolution, and HDR+
• Pleasant design
• Good photography and video quality
• 66W fast charging and good battery life
• Good performance in daily tasks and gaming
• Plenty of storage space and lots of memory

There are a few things that can be improved:

• Doesn’t offer certified dust or water resistance
• Single-speaker configuration (mono audio)
• No wireless charging
• A lot of bloatware

Verdict

The HONOR 90 is an Android smartphone that looks good. Its large, high-quality display is eye-catching and represents, in my opinion, the main selling point for this device. The chipset delivers plenty of performance, the cameras offer good results, and I appreciate the battery life plus the fast wired charging. However, some things could be better when it comes to the HONOR 90. For instance, it’s a pity that this phone lacks a dual-speaker setup, that it doesn’t support wireless charging, and that it has no IP rating for dust and water resistance. Moreover, HONOR’s approach when it comes to apps that are preloaded on the smartphone could be a lot better, as well as the company’s approach to long-term support (system updates). However, all these shortcomings don’t make it a bad phone. I believe that the HONOR 90 is a capable Android smartphone that appeals to people who want a mid-range phone with a pleasant design.

Unboxing the HONOR 90

The box of the HONOR 90 smartphone is not too big or too small, and it has a simple design. It’s made of white cardboard that looks durable enough to protect the smartphone from any damage during delivery. The top cover and the sides of the box feature only the smartphone’s name and brand, but you should also find a sticker with more information about your model. The box of the HONOR 90 The phone, a fast charger, a USB Type-A to Type-C cable, a SIM eject tool, a protective case, and some documents should be in the box. Also, a screen protector has already been applied to the phone from the factory. Unfortunately, most of that is dependent on the region you live in, and in Romania (where I’m located) as well as in the rest of Europe, it appears that the HONOR 90 doesn’t bundle the fast charger or the protective case. What's inside the box The HONOR 90 looks good at first sight. Its box feels sturdy enough, and depending on where you live, the bundled accessories can make a difference. Unfortunately, in Europe, you don’t get the fast charger in the box, and that’s a shame.

Design and build quality

The HONOR 90 is a stylish smartphone that feels comfortable to hold and use, although it’s a fairly large device. With a 6.7” screen and measuring 161.9 x 74.1 x 7.8 mm (6.37 x 2.92 x 0.31 in) in length by width by thickness, the phone somehow manages to keep a low weight of just 183 grams (6.46 oz), which means it’s relatively easy to use with one hand. That’s something you don’t see often in a device this size. Moreover, the HONOR 90 has a sleek and smooth back that looks simple except for the massive rear camera rings.

The back of the HONOR 90 You can choose between four different colors for the HONOR 90 smartphone: Diamond Silver, Peacock Blue, Midnight Black, or Emerald Green. The model I had in testing was the latter, and although in the photos I took, it looks a bit blueish, in real life, the back of the phone changes color towards green depending on your perspective and how the light hits it. Color options for the HONOR 90 A small notch for the selfie camera interrupts the large 6.7” display, which fills the entire front of the phone, ending in curved edges with almost nonexistent bezels. According to HONOR, the screen is protected by reinforced glass, but I couldn’t find any mention of the brand and model used. Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t hold an IP rating for dust or water protection either. The screen of the HONOR 90 In terms of materials used for building the HONOR 90, its body frame is made of plastic and has a glossy finish. It looks nice and feels sturdy, but the edges get smudged easily. The back panel seems to be made of plastic too, although it’s reflective enough to possibly be made of some sort of glass. The back panel of the HONOR 90 The left edge of the phone is smooth, without any features. The other edges are where you’ll find the buttons, speakers, charging port, etc. The left edge is empty The right edge of the phone is home to both the power and the volume buttons. They are thin but long and slightly protruding, so it’s easy to locate them even if you’re not looking directly at them. There’s one catch, though: while it’s easy to press any of them if you’re right-handed, it’s quite hard if you’re holding and using the phone with your left hand like I do. In this case, even if you have long fingers, the volume-up button is difficult to reach. The right edge holds the power and volume buttons On the top edge, you’ll only find a small microphone hole. The earpiece speaker is located inside a very narrow cutout between the screen and the frame, and it’s barely visible. The top margin is home to a small microphone pinhole The bottom edge of the phone is the most crowded one. This is where the slot for the SIM card, the main microphone, the USB-C port, and the loudspeaker are all found. The bottom edge is home to the USB-C port, SIM tray, and loudspeaker Overall, the HONOR 90 has a conventional design. Still, it manages to attract attention thanks to its large screen, good-looking back panel, large camera rings, and almost invisible bezels.

Hardware specifications

The HONOR 90 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 Accelerated Edition chipset as its core component. This SoC (System on a Chip) is made with a 4-nanometer process and has an octa-core CPU with two Cortex-A710 cores running at 2.5 GHz, three Cortex-A710 at 2.36 GHz, and four Cortex-A510 at 1.8 GHz. The chipset also includes an Adreno 644 graphics unit, and because it’s an Accelerated Edition, it should be able to pump up some extra performance in gaming and demanding apps. This can only be good news for the mobile gamers out there. 🙂 You’ll see some benchmark results and how the HONOR 90 compares to other similar smartphones later in this review.

Specs shown by CPU-Z The HONOR 90 smartphone is available in three different versions in terms of memory and storage capacity: 8 GB of RAM plus 256 GB of storage, 12 GB of RAM plus 256 GB of storage, and 12 GB of RAM plus 512 GB of storage. The model I tested had 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of flash storage. However, the operating system and all the preloaded apps use almost 28 GB of storage space before any system or app updates. There’s no micro SD card slot available on the phone, but considering the amount of available storage space, you might not need one. The smartphone I tested had 512 GB of storage The HONOR 90 is a dual SIM smartphone, allowing you to simultaneously use either two nano-SIM cards or a nano-SIM plus an eSIM. This is a Dual SIM smartphone The pièce de résistance is the large 6.7-inch AMOLED display. On top of its large size, the screen offers a high FHD+ resolution (2664 × 1200 pixels) and an impressive 435 ppi (pixels per inch) density. Moreover, the display also features a 120 Hz refresh rate, can show over 1 billion colors, supports HDR10+, and has a peak brightness of 1600 nits. These are excellent specs for a mid-range smartphone. Details about the screen resolution and refresh rate The HONOR 90 features three cameras on the back and one on the front:

• The primary wide camera has a 200-megapixel sensor, an aperture of f/1.9, and phase-detection autofocus (PDAF).
• The second is an ultrawide camera based on a 12-megapixel sensor with an f/2.2 aperture and autofocus.
• The third is a depth camera with a 2-megapixel sensor and an f/2.4 aperture.
• On the front, there’s a 50 MP selfie camera with an aperture of f/2.4 and a 100˚ viewing angle (ultrawide).

The phone’s cameras lack OIS but have gyro-EIS for videos. Both the rear and the selfie cameras can shoot 4K videos at 30 fps, and 1080p videos at 60 fps. The rear camera setup has wide, ultrawide, and depth lens The HONOR 90 is compatible with LTE and 5G networks, and it has Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6 on both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. It also has an NFC chip for wireless payments, and other sensors, such as an optical fingerprint scanner (under the display), an accelerometer, an ultrasound proximity sensor, a gyroscope, and a compass. The HONOR 90 supports Wi-Fi 6 The HONOR 90 gets its fuel from a large 5000 mAh Li-Po battery that is non-removable. It can power the phone for a whole day or more without charging. It also supports 66W wired fast charging, but it lacks wireless charging. The battery has a capacity of 5000 mAh For more information on the HONOR 90, including its features and technical specifications, you can visit its official webpage. HONOR 90 is an Android smartphone with a lot to offer. It has an upper-midrange chipset that should help it perform well both in everyday use and in games, it supports fast charging, it has a big battery, a gorgeous screen, and some promising cameras. How does the HONOR 90 perform in real life? On the next page, I’ll show you what using it was like for me. I’ll also tell you a bit about the phone’s cameras, software, and how it fared in a couple of benchmarks.

The smartphone experience on the HONOR 90

The HONOR 90 smartphone delivers a lot of performance for everyday use, and I also like its design. The Emerald Green version I tried has a smooth and comfortable back that makes the phone feel like a premium device. The Emerald Green model changes colors depending on the perspective I was impressed by the HONOR 90’s screen, which is large and bright enough to be visible even under direct sunlight. The display also has vivid colors that enhance the visual experience. The phone’s dimensions are generous, making it ideal for multimedia (watching movies, gaming, scrolling on social networks). For me, personally, it was easy enough to use the smartphone with only one hand. Well… except for reaching the volume-up button, as I mentioned earlier, but that’s only because I use my smartphone mainly with my left hand. This will also be true for those who have shorter fingers or smaller hands - if you fall into one of these categories, you’ll need to use both hands to navigate the phone’s screen. The screen of the HONOR 90 is gorgeous For phone calls, the HONOR 90 does a good job. The sound quality and the signal reception are excellent. When engaging in phone conversations on the HONOR 90, I could hear the people whom I was talking to clearly. They didn’t have any trouble hearing me either. Phone calls quality is good In daily use, the HONOR 90 delivers good performance: whether it’s browsing, watching videos, or listening to music, the smartphone can handle it all without any lag or stutter. For gaming enthusiasts, I can say that the device can run most games smoothly, as long as you don’t mind lowering the graphics quality in more demanding titles. The HONOR 90 is a reliable smartphone for everyday tasks: you can browse the web, play videos, and stream music without any issues, lags, or stuttering. If you’re a gamer, you’ll also enjoy most games on this device. While its chipset isn’t a high-end one, it does pretty well in sustaining good performance in games. The phone can handle any game The sound quality of the loudspeaker on this smartphone is good, delivering clear and undistorted audio even when maxing out the volume. However, the unpleasant thing about it is that the HONOR 90 has only one loudspeaker to speak of, unlike many of its competitors in the mid-range market that offer two-speaker configurations. The fingerprint reader works well and quickly. It’s better and more accurate than many smartphone fingerprint sensors I have used. The fingerprint reader is precise The HONOR 90 has excellent battery life and supports wired fast charging. Unfortunately, as the sample I got came without the bundled charger, I couldn’t run my usual battery charging tests. However, considering what I’ve seen in other similar smartphones, I believe you should expect the HONOR 90 to charge from 0 to 100% in less than an hour. The HONOR 90 is a great mid-range Android smartphone that performs well in daily tasks and is quite capable of sustaining decent framerates in games. I like its screen, and I appreciate its battery life and fast charging feature.

The camera experience on the HONOR 90

The HONOR 90 offers a camera system that includes a 200 MP main camera, a 12 MP ultrawide camera that can cover a 112˚ field of view, and a 2 MP depth camera on the back. The front-facing camera is a 50 MP selfie shooter with an ultrawide 100˚ field of view. The main cameras on the HONOR 90 The Camera app is easy to use, and its user interface is similar to what you find on many Android phones. You shouldn’t have any issues finding what’s what, even if you’re coming from a smartphone made by a different manufacturer. The various photo and video recording modes can be selected by tapping on their names or by swiping on the screen. There’s also a professional shooting mode available, which gives you access to more complex settings. The Camera app on the HONOR 90 HONOR 90’s cameras do an excellent job in daylight photography. The main and ultrawide lenses produce clear, well-lit, and detailed images. The photos are relatively noise-free even when zoomed in at 2x and have balanced exposure and realistic colors. You can zoom more than 2x, but that’s done by the software rather than the lenses, and the results aren’t great. One aspect that I appreciate is that there’s no noticeable difference in color temperature between the main and the ultrawide cameras. Photo quality is good in daylight The phone’s main and selfie lenses produce high-quality portrait images too. The skin texture and colors look good and have plenty of detail, the colors feel natural, and the subject separation is effective more often than not. The HONOR 90 takes good selfies In night and low-light photography, the HONOR 90 also fares well: the details are mostly preserved, and both the main camera and the ultrawide cameras produce clear and well-exposed photos. Darker areas have a bit of graininess to them, and the highlights are a bit too bright, but that’s to be expected in dim lighting conditions. Night photography is handled well Overall, the HONOR 90 smartphone offers a neat camera experience. If you’d like to see some more photos shot with it, check the gallery below. It contains the original samples I took with this phone without any resizing or optimization: Regarding video quality, it’s worth noting that the smartphone can shoot 4K videos at 30 fps with both its wide and ultrawide cameras, as well as with the selfie one. The main cameras can also do 60 fps in 1080p mode, for a more cinematic effect. The rear cameras have EIS (Electronic Image Stabilization), but the phone doesn’t offer OIS (Optical Image Stabilization). As you can see in the next clip, which I shot in 4K resolution and 30 frames per second, the HONOR 90 manages to capture clear details with natural colors and good dynamic range. Next, you can see another clip that I recorded to get a better idea of what to expect in terms of video quality when more movement is present. In this case, I recommend using 1080p resolution and a higher framerate: 60 fps. HONOR 90’s photo and video performance is good. Both the main, ultrawide, and selfie cameras deliver excellent quality for a mid-range device.

Android 13, MagicOS 7.1, and bundled apps

The HONOR 90 uses the company’s own MagicOS 7.1 user interface, which runs on Android 13 at its core. Unfortunately, the company’s policy is to deliver only two years of Android system updates and an additional one year of security patches. I say unfortunately because many of its competitors have changed their policies during the last few years, offering system and security updates for longer periods of time than HONOR does. HONOR 90 comes with MagicOS 7.1 After using the HONOR 90 smartphone for a while, I can tell you that the MagicOS interface manages to offer a smooth user experience. Navigating it is intuitive, and you get a lot of personalization features, such as customizable themes and widgets. Moreover, the MagicOS system found on HONOR devices like this one offers full support for Google’s apps and services, including the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, and Maps. The MagicOS user interface The part that I don’t like about HONOR 90’s software is the company’s approach to bundled apps. When configuring the smartphone, I didn’t get any option to choose what additional apps were installed, and the list included some that I really didn’t need or want to use. Here’s the list of apps I found on the HONOR 90 by default, besides all the standard Google ones:

• Booking: helps you plan your trips and book your accommodations.
• Calculator: a handy tool for solving math problems.
• Calendar: helps you organize your events, tasks, and appointments.
• Clock: obviously, you can use it to keep track of time and wake up on time. 🙂
• Compass: helps you find your way on Earth…
• Contacts: lets you manage your contacts.
• Device Clone: helps you move data from an old phone to your new HONOR 90.
• Email: lets you manage multiple email accounts from different providers.
• Facebook: connects you with friends and family and also helps you get up to date with old news. 🙂
• Files: handy for managing the files and folders on your smartphone.
• Gallery: an alternative to the Photos app from Google, letting you see and manage your locally stored pictures.
• Game Center: a hub for your games? Can’t say more as this app apparently isn’t available in my region (Romania).
• Game of Sultans: a strategy game for Android devices.
• HONOR App Market: an alternative app store to Google’s Play Store. This, too, is not available in my region, so why bundle it?
• HONOR Health: can be used for tracking your daily activities like steps, calories, heart rate, and sleep.
• HONOR Notes: lets you take notes and create to-do lists.
• Lords Mobile: a mobile strategy game that lets you enter a fantasy world where you build kingdoms and armies and battle others.
• Mirror: uses the phone’s selfie camera to help you see yourself.
• My HONOR: allows you to read news from HONOR, get themes, and AOD (Always On Display) skins for your smartphone.
• Netflix: the app of the well-known movie streaming service.
• Recorder: a tool that lets you capture audio with your phone’s built-in microphones.
• System Manager: lets you check your phone’s status, as well as perform tasks such as cleaning up junk files or scanning for malware (using Avast’s antivirus engine).
• Themes: lets you download and apply themes, text styles, wallpapers, etc.
• TikTok: that platform/social network that offers endless scrolling and distraction for those who have too much time on their hands. 🙂
• Tips: an app that gives you hints, tips, and tricks for using your smartphone.
• Train Pal: probably useful if you need train tickets in the UK and a few other European countries (Spain, Italy, Germany).
• Trip.com: helps you plan travels, book tickets, and make reservations.
• Voice Access: this is an accessibility feature that helps you control your phone using your voice.
• Weather: predicts the weather.
• WPS Office: a popular office suite for Android devices that lets you create, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, etc.

HONOR’s MagicOS offers a good user experience, mostly. Navigating and customizing it is easy, and it feels quite snappy in daily use. However, the HONOR 90 has a big problem, in my opinion, and that’s the excess of bloatware. There are apps that I don’t need nor want, but which HONOR preloads without any choice for the user.

Performance in benchmarks

To evaluate HONOR 90’s performance, I ran several tests to see how it handles multitasking, gaming, and everyday tasks. Here are the scores it obtained: In Geekbench, HONOR 90 got 1124 points in the Single-Core tests and 3206 points in the Multi-Core tests. The GPU Compute scores were 2611 for OpenCL and 2943 for Vulkan. These numbers are similar to those you’d get on other mid-range Android phones. For instance, although the single-core score is lower than that of a Google Pixel 7, it’s close to that of an older Samsung Galaxy S21 5G. On the other hand, the multi-core result puts it on par with the Google Pixel 7. Benchmark results in Geekbench 6 Next, I tested the HONOR 90 with 3DMark’s Wild Life and Sling Shot benchmarks. The phone scored 3219 in the first one and 7412 points in the latter. These results are not outstanding, but they’re better than what many mid-range smartphones actually offer. In other words, the HONOR 90 should handle casual and even demanding games pretty well. Although it’s not a smartphone for passionate gamers who want the best of the best, it will run any game you want at decent performance. Benchmark results in 3DMark I also used PCMark for Android to test the smartphone’s daily performance in more common tasks. The HONOR 90 got an excellent score of 12290 points in the Work 3.0 performance test. However, the Work 3.0 battery life test failed with an unknown error every time I tried to run it. Still, I can say that during the time I had this phone, it easily lasted for a day on a full charge. Benchmark results in PCMark The HONOR 90 also performed well in the wireless connectivity tests I ran on my 1 Gbps Wi-Fi 6 network. Using Speedtest, I’ve measured a maximum download speed of 756 Mbps and an upload speed of 552 Mbps. These are good numbers. Moreover, Speedtest also showed that the HONOR 90 can handle 4K video streaming smoothly and without any issues. Benchmark results in SpeedTest Benchmarks show that the HONOR 90 is a smartphone capable of offering excellent performance in everyday activities, as well as in games and other demanding apps.

What do you think of the HONOR 90?

This was it! Hopefully, you now have a clearer idea of what to expect from the HONOR 90 in terms of design, features, performance, and camera quality. What do you think of this smartphone? Do you want to buy an HONOR 90? Let me know what your opinions are in the comments section. And, if you want to see more reviews from us, you can subscribe to our newsletter.