Honor Pad 9 review: good screen highlights a fine budget tablet

The Honor Pad 9 is lacking in power, but it offers good value for hobbyists.

A SPace Grey Honor Pad 9 tablet on a brown table
(Image: © Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

Our Verdict

It's not the fanciest tablet in the world, but the Honor Pad 9 has a big, sharp, bright screen and performance befitting a midrange tablet, but at a budget price. It may lack the grunt for pro users, but for casual users and hobbyist creatives, this tablet will offer very good value indeed.

For

  • Bright screen
  • Good sound for a tablet
  • Keenly priced

Against

  • No stylus included
  • Poor performance

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The Honor Pad 9 enters a chaotic, fast-developing market of tablets that want to be an alternative to the dominant iPad models on the market. But while Apple's offering is still one of the best tablets for creatives of all types, it's not exactly cheap, and it also locks you into a closed-shop, expensive ecosystem. 

So to see how one of its budget rivals would do, I got the Honor Pad 9 in for testing over a number of weeks, trying out creative, art and entertainment apps, as well as watching videos and trying out some gaming on it too.

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Chipset:Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 Mobile Platform, Octa-core
RAM:8GB (+8GB Honor RAM Turbo)
Storage:256GB
Display:12.1in (2560 x 1600) IPS LCD, 120Hz
Weight:555g
Dimensions:180.1 x 278.2 x 6.9mm (without camera bump)
Camera:8MP back and 13MP ultra-wide front
Battery:8,300mAh
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Honor Pad 9: Benchmark testing
Geekbench 6 CPU:Single-core: 921Multi-core: 2,636
Geekbench 6 GPU: OpenCL: 1,327Row 1 - Cell 2
The Verdict
7.8

out of 10

Honor Pad 9

It's not the fanciest tablet in the world, but the Honor Pad 9 has a big, sharp, bright screen and performance befitting a midrange tablet, but at a budget price. It may lack the grunt for pro users, but for casual users and hobbyist creatives, this tablet will offer very good value indeed.

Erlingur Einarsson
Tech Reviews Editor

Erlingur is the Tech Reviews Editor on Creative Bloq. Having worked on magazines devoted to Photoshop, films, history, and science for over 15 years, as well as working on Digital Camera World and Top Ten Reviews in more recent times, Erlingur has developed a passion for finding tech that helps people do their job, whatever it may be. He loves putting things to the test and seeing if they're all hyped up to be, to make sure people are getting what they're promised. Still can't get his wifi-only printer to connect to his computer.