Honor 90 Review: A £449 Game-Changer!

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If I told you there’s a smartphone that features a super-bright variable 120Hz display, a 200MP camera, a 50MP selfie camera, a massive battery, and a premium, eye-catching design for £449.99 – would you believe me?

Surely I’ve got something wrong there, right? The display must be, at best, 90Hz and non-variable. That camera system, despite the big numbers, is going to be trash, isn’t it?

The Honor 90 breaks all of these rules. There are some concessions, of course – it doesn’t have the latest chip, nor does it have wireless charging or an official IP rating.

As it turns out, none of that matters. At all. This is a game-changing phone which easily stands up to the iPhone competition (and then some).

Pricing and specs

The Honor 90 is the latest in the company’s ’N’ range and it sits somewhere between budget and mid-range. Certainly, it’s smack-bang in the affordable smartphone category, which is rather refreshing given some of the other devices I’ve been playing with recently.

It comes in two flavours. The base model with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM costs £449.99, and the 512GB version bumps the RAM up to 12GB and costs £499.99. I was sent the former to review.

The Honor 90 is powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 and features a 5,000mAh battery that’s capable of 66W super-fast charging (it gains 20% of juice from dead in just five minutes). The display is a 6.7” quad-curved affair with the aforementioned dynamic 120Hz refresh rate, P3 colour, HDR10+ certification, and a massive 1,600 nits of peak brightness.

Rear camera duties are undertaken with a 200MP main camera, 12MP ultra-wide (which doubles as a macro lens) and 2MP depth camera. On the front, you’ll find a 50MP selfie camera.

Powering everything is a customised version of Android 13 known as MagicOS.

Design and display

Smartphone design is as subjective as camera performance (which I’ll get to in a moment) and it’s fair to say that the Honor 90 might divide opinion.

I’m a fan. The speckled metallic-look rear casing and the bold, jewellery-inspired camera housing looks far more premium than the price tag suggests and never fail to catch your eye whenever it catches the light. This is, in my opinion, a very handsome-looking phone.

The Honor 90 feels more premium than its price tag suggests, too. There’s less metal on display than, say, an iPhone, but those shiny curved edges and the aforementioned rear casing feel great in the hand. I love the size, too, which is refreshingly compatible with one-handed usage.

This brings me onto the display which is an absolute triumph. It is one of the brightest and sharpest I’ve seen at this price point and the fact that it has that 120Hz dynamic refresh rate immediately removes any chance of bad press for Honor from the ‘death to the 60Hz’ crowd. It’s a smart, brave move, and results in what is easily this device’s defining feature.

There’s lots of clever display tech going on behind the scenes, too. Local dimming removes any form of flicker and has helped Honor secure a TÜV Rheinland certification. There’s even a circadian night display mode which gently changes the colour temperature of the display throughout the day so that it’s warmer as you reach bedtime.

If you watch a lot of content on your phone, you’ll be glad to hear that the Honor 90 is also certified by Amazon Prime and Netflix for HDR content and I can confirm that it looks very lovely indeed. It also does a great job of enhancing standard-definition content, too.

Performance

Honor has made some concessions, given the price point, and the most obvious one is the chip powering the Honor 90.

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 isn’t Qualcomm’s latest but this accelerated version still performs pretty well be today’s standards. I noticed some lag occasionally, but it was never enough to spoil the party. A 147% bigger vapour chamber than the Honor 80 to aid cooling is doubtless assisting with this performance.

A quick Geekbench test provided the following scores for the Honor’s CPU performance:

• Single core: 1,098
• Dual-core: 3,189

Compared to the Pixel 7a (one of the Honor 90’s most obvious direct competitors), Google’s Tensor G2-powered budget phone delivered the following result:

• Single core: 1,364
• Dual-core: 3,294

Despite the performance deficit on paper, there’s little to separate the two in day-to-day usage. Unless you’re a power user who pushes their smartphone to the extremes (although, arguably, if you are, you probably have a larger budget) the Honor 90 can compete handsomely with the rest.

The battery is a superb performer, too. The 5,000mAh capacity ensures it can sail comfortably beyond one day of normal usage, and the 66w fast charging is genuinely useful.

As for MagicOS, this is my first experience with Honor’s operating system, and I’m happy to report that it is a considered, tasteful customisation of Android 13. As always, there are a bunch of apps installed by default that you’ll inevitably want to remove immediately, but MagicOS quickly redeems itself with an attractive design and a familiar yet bespoke feel for Android.

The camera

As always, a quick disclaimer about the photos you’re about to see. This is the most subjective area of any smartphone review; what I like you may dislike, and vice-versa. Regardless, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

The 200MP main camera on the Honor 90 features a 25% bigger sensor than the previous generation which promises better low-light performance. It’s a fast camera, too – there’s no noticeable shutter lag and although you witness a bit of processing time when reviewing photos immediately, it’s not enough to irritate.

As for the images produced by the Honor 90, I think they’re best described as natural. In fact, it often looks like there’s barely any processing taking place.

This does result in some images that could be described as less than spectacular, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

We’re so used to smartphone cameras these days which completely over-process everything, resulting in oversaturated images that are so far from depicting reality it’s laughable.

The Honor 90 is refreshingly honest with the photos it produces. I particularly like how it doesn’t overdo blue skies and greenery, which never stray into ‘ouch’ territory (a common complaint I’ve always had with Samsung phones in particular).

There’s a high res mode which produces massive 16256 × 12192 images that make full use of that 200MP sensor. This provides some nice cropping opportunities, but the file sizes do balloon, and I doubt many Honor 90 users are going to dig that deeply into the camera functionality. This really is intended as a point-and-shoot device.

We get some zoom options to play with, but not many. Shooting at 2x is great, and 3x is perfectly usable, but anything beyond that starts to get a bit rough.

The ultra-wide is great with minimal distortion at the edges and just as much detail as the main camera. It doubles as a macro, too, which, although you can’t get quite as close as an iPhone, does enable you to pick out detail and keep things sharp.

The 2MP depth camera makes itself known in portrait mode, where the Honor 90 does a super job at isolating the subject with fake background bokeh.

Even complex subjects are dealt with expertly. This really is one of the best portrait modes I’ve used in a smartphone to date.

When it comes to selfies, I’m a big fan of what the Honor 90 produces. They’re sharp, and detailed, have great skin tones, and don’t over-process anything.

As for video, the Honor 90 smashes it. There’s a concession on display here, which is the inability to shoot anything beyond 30fps in 4K (you can access 60fps, but only in 1080p), but that doesn’t matter at this price point. The image quality is superb, and the stabilisation in particular puts it almost on a level par with iPhone videography. And that’s saying a lot.

Conclusion

The Honor 90 is a seriously good smartphone for the price. In fact, I’d argue that it offers far better value than its closest competitor – the brilliant Google Pixel 7a.

What you choose will come down to design preference, camera preference, and whether or not you’d rather give your money to Google or Honor. It’s that simple.

The Honor 90 proves, categorically, that smartphone consumers shouldn’t settle for crippled feature sets and subpar performance when spending below £500. This phone is genuinely game-changing for that reason, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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