Honor has an update to the Honor 9X called the Honor 9X Pro. The Honor 9X came out outside of China this past October, so the 9X Pro doesn’t feature too many enhancements over its predecessor. The phone’s most notable hardware upgrade is a new, more power-efficient Kirin 810 processor. Huawei says the 9X Pro’s chipset features a custom-designed GPU the company claims will lead to better gaming performance.
Honor has announced that the pop-up selfie camera-equipped 9X Pro will be releasing in select European markets starting in March for €249 after launching in China last year. The 9X Pro and View 30 Pro will be Honor’s first phones to release outside China without Google’s apps and services.
Like all of Huawei’s new phones, it won’t have access to the Play Store or Google-made apps like Gmail. Instead, you’ll need to use Huawei’s AppGallery to download any applications you want to install on the phone. At the moment, the AppGallery isn’t a one-to-one substitute for the Play Store. The Honor 9X Pro will also ship with EMUI 9.1 which builds on Android 9, not the current version of the operating system.
Otherwise, the two phones are nearly identical. Like its predecessor, the Honor 9X Pro features a 6.59-inch IPS LCD. Internally, it includes a 4,000mAh battery and 6GB of RAM to support its new chip. For taking photos, there’s a 48-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. On the front of the phone, there’s a 16-megapixel pop-up selfie camera. That’s the same set of cameras that came with the 9X.
If you can get past Huawei’s software situation, the Honor 9X Pro might make a decent phone for the price. It will make its way to France, Germany, the Netherlands, Egypt, Saudia Arabia and Malaysia next month and cost €249 (approximately $270).
Alongside the 9X Pro, Huawei announced availability for the Honor View 30 Pro, a handset it announced late last year. The company says it will be available “soon” in Russia, with retail availability in other countries to follow.
