After three years, Honor returned to India with HTECH (Honor Tech), which former CEO Madhav Seth led. They will continue to export the device to India from China under a license agreement. You can see this brand as a new brand in India because of the circumstances surrounding it.
If you did not know, they left India because they were a part of Huawei, and due to some major issues, Huawei could not offer Google Mobile Services. In India and most parts of the world except China, we need GMS. Later, Huawei sold its sub-brand to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co., Ltd.
Honour 90
This smartphone is just another smartphone launched in the Indian smartphone market. They have yet to have a competitive price despite having attractive features.
Design
The device’s design is premium, with a matte black matte glass finish and a quad-curved display. Combining all these features, the device offers a sleek profile, measuring 7.8 mm thick and weighing around 183 g.
Display
It comes with a 6.7″ AMOLED display with a resolution of 1200×2664 pixels. The display has a quad-curve design, which is curved from all sides. One of the primary highlights of the display is the 3840Hz PWM dimming, which ensures that the device’s screen does not flicker. The device also offers a 120Hz refresh rate, brightness adjustment, hardware-level eye protection, and other features.
Camera
This device has a 200 MP primary camera and a 12 MP ultrawide-angle lens. However, the front camera is a 50MP selfie shooter, which provides fairly acceptable camera performance. The camera performance seems decent, but video recording at night has much grain and is inconsistent. This device does not have OIS support at this price, resulting in less detail.
There are some features for the camera, such as the ability to switch from the rear to the front camera while video recording. There is even an AI model, multi-video modes, and more. The camera is okay, but as we mentioned, nighttime photos and videos are not impressive.
Performance
Under the hood, the device is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 1 SoC, paired with LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage. If we compare it to the competition, the Poco F5 comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen2, which provides better performance. You can expect 76% better performance for the price of 28K.
Software
This is another area where this device falls short. They have packed a lot of bloatware, including their apps. One issue that many people have mentioned is that notifications do not arrive on time, and there is a delay. This is expected to be fixed with software updates. Additionally, there are only a few features compared to others.
Honour 90 FAKE PRICE Marketing
HTECH officially announced its first smartphone in years, the Honour 90, which starts at 38,000 INR for the 8GB base configuration. On top of that, there are some discounts on cards from HDFC, SBI, and ICIC. You get a flat 3K discount and a 2K bonus for exchange. There are even some free TWS, which makes a total of 10K. They are marketing the device for a price of 28K, including all these cashbacks and goodies, resulting in a total deduction of 10K.
If you do not have a device to exchange or do not have a credit card, you will get the device for 38K. This misleading price marketing is unacceptable, especially considering that good alternatives are available at the same price, such as the IQOO Neo7 Pro, OnePlus Nord 3, Vivo V27 Pro, and OnePlus 11R.
Furthermore, Flipkart BBD sales are close, and you can expect good smartphones like the Nothing Phone 2 and Pixel 7A to have a price drop. Due to all these factors, the Honour 90 needs to stand up to the standard. The service center, PSAV Global, which handles their reviews, could be better.
Final words
This device has a lot of cons, such as a single speaker, no OIS support, no IP rating, no wireless charging, bad haptic feedback, and no good processor. It is worse that this device only comes with two years of software updates and three years of security patches. With Android 14 around the corner, you will only receive Android 15. Honour 90 is normal. We do not recommend anyone buy it; you can skip this smartphone.
Honour kills the excitement. We were all very excited about the comeback, especially with Madhave Seth, who is well-known for revolutionizing the tech space in India and giving good competition to Realme and Redmi.