There’s a certain kind of phone that makes you paranoid the moment you unbox it. You handle it like it’s made of eggshells, you buy the case before you even turn it on, and you flinch every time it gets anywhere near a table edge. The HONOR X9e Pro is not that phone. In fact, it’s the opposite. HONOR basically dared me to stop babying it, and by the end of my time with it, I was half tempted to see if it could survive being dropped into my teh tarik.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the top.
HONOR has quietly built up a reputation in Malaysia’s mid-range smartphone space over the past few years, and the X Series has been doing most of the heavy lifting. We’re talking about a lineup that’s apparently sold over 130 million units globally, and locally it’s been the best-selling mid-range smartphone for four generations running, at one point commanding a jaw-dropping 77% peak market share for the HONOR X9d. That’s not a small claim. That’s “Pilihan Utama Rakyat Malaysia” territory.
So when the HONOR X9e Pro landed on my desk with five separate “No.1 in the industry” claims attached to it, I had questions. Biggest battery, toughest build, strongest water resistance, brightest display, and the most generous warranty in its class. That’s a lot of superlatives for one phone to live up to. I spent close to two weeks putting it through actual daily use, not just spec-sheet reading, and I’ve got thoughts on all of it.
Design: Chunky, But It Knows Why
Let’s address the elephant in the room first. At 203 grams and 8.08mm thick, the HONOR X9e Pro is not a slim phone. If you’re coming from something like an iPhone Air or one of those featherweight flagships, you’re going to feel the difference the moment you pick it up. But here’s the thing: once you know why it’s built this way, the extra heft stops feeling like a compromise and starts feeling like a trade you’re happy to make.
You don’t cram an 11,000mAh battery, military-grade drop protection, and a submarine-inspired water resistance architecture into a phone and expect it to be svelte. The HONOR X9e Pro wears its size the way a proper 4×4 wears its ground clearance. It’s there for a reason, and the reason is that this thing is built to survive things your average smartphone wouldn’t dare go near.
HONOR sent it over in what they’re calling Royal Purple, and I have to say, it’s a genuinely handsome colour. It’s got this deep, almost muted purple that doesn’t scream for attention but still looks premium under different lighting. There are three other colourways too: Dawn Gold, Reddish Brown, and Midnight Black, so there’s a shade for whichever mood you’re usually in when you’re picking a phone. The back has a soft, matte-ish texture that doesn’t turn into a fingerprint magnet, which, if you know me, you know I appreciate more than most people do.
The 6.8-inch display up front is big and immersive, and the bezels are tight enough that it doesn’t feel dated. It’s a phone that looks like it belongs in 2026, not one that’s wearing its toughness as an excuse to look chunky and cheap. HONOR clearly put effort into making sure “rugged” didn’t have to mean “ugly,” and for the most part, they’ve pulled it off.
Display: Bright Enough to Argue With the Sun
I live in Malaysia. The sun here doesn’t play nice, and neither does the glare bouncing off every LRT platform, every mamak table, every car windscreen at 2pm. This is exactly the kind of environment where a dim display becomes a daily source of frustration, and it’s exactly the environment HONOR built the HONOR X9e Pro’s screen to dominate.
We’re talking about a 10,000-nit peak brightness panel here, which HONOR says is 67% brighter than its predecessor, the X9d. On paper that number sounds almost silly, like a marketing flex with no real-world payoff. In practice, I noticed it immediately. Reading messages while walking out of a shaded mall into full afternoon sun, checking Google Maps directions in the middle of an open car park, glancing at notifications on a bright beach day, none of it required me to cup my hand over the screen like I usually do.
The display just stays legible. That’s a genuinely useful upgrade if you spend any part of your day outdoors, whether you’re commuting, doing deliveries, or just refusing to walk in the shade like the rest of us sensible Malaysians.
Beyond raw brightness, the panel runs at 2,788 x 1,280 resolution with 120Hz refresh rate, 1.07 billion colours, and 100% DCI-P3 coverage, so scrolling feels smooth and colours look properly saturated rather than washed out. HONOR has also packed in a stack of eye comfort features I didn’t expect from a mid-ranger: 3,840Hz PWM dimming to cut down flicker in low light, a dynamic dimming mode that claims to reduce eye fatigue by 18%, hardware-level low blue light reduction, and even a motion sickness relief mode for those of you who can’t handle scrolling on your phone during a car ride (you know who you are).
There’s also Wet-Hand Touch and Glove Touch support, which sound like gimmicks until you actually need them. I tested the wet-hand function by deliberately splashing water on the screen mid-message, and yes, it kept registering my taps without going haywire, which is more than I can say for most phones I’ve used in the rain waiting for a Grab.
Battery: Three Days, No Charger, No Panic
Okay, this is the part I’ve been waiting to talk about, because this is where the HONOR X9e Pro genuinely surprised me.
I charged the phone to 100% on a Tuesday night at around 1am. Nothing unusual there. What was unusual is what happened next. I woke up the following morning and the phone was still sitting at 100%, like the overnight standby drain basically didn’t exist. I then went about my Tuesday using it the way I actually use my phone: WhatsApp and Telegram messaging throughout the day, a fair bit of mobile browsing, taking photos here and there, some light gaming sessions, an embarrassing amount of TikTok doomscrolling, and a few YouTube videos thrown in for good measure. By the time I went to bed that night, the battery was sitting at 72%.
Let that sink in for a second. A full day of genuinely mixed, heavy-ish usage, and I’d only burned through 28%.
I carried on the same way the next day. Started Wednesday at 70%, went through my usual routine of messaging, scrolling, browsing, and by midnight I still had 50% left. I went to sleep. Thursday morning, I woke up to 49%, so overnight drain was basically negligible again. I used the phone the same way I always do, well into the night, and when I finally called it a day, I still had 19% left in the tank.
By Friday morning, I was still coasting on that same charge from Tuesday night. I hit the 10% mark at around 11am on Friday, which is when I finally plugged it in. Do the maths with me here: that’s technically three full days of real, non-babied, normal daily use before I needed to reach for a charger. Three days. On one charge. That’s not a “if you barely touch your phone” claim, that’s a “I actually used this thing properly and it still lasted” result.
The 11,000mAh battery is the biggest HONOR has ever put into a phone, and it’s built using what they call Silicon Carbon Battery 4.0 technology, which is also rated to maintain a healthy capacity for up to six years, so this isn’t a battery that’s going to degrade into uselessness after eighteen months the way some phones do. HONOR also claims things like 66.8 hours of video playback, 164.5 hours of music, and 35.6 hours of TikTok scrolling on a single charge, and honestly, based on what I saw, I believe them.
When you do need to charge it, the 80W HONOR SuperCharge gets you back up reasonably quickly for a battery this massive, and there’s also 27W reverse wired charging built in, which means the HONOR X9e Pro can top up other devices. I didn’t have a dying iPhone lying around to test this properly, but HONOR says it can push an iPhone Air up to 80% in half an hour, and can also charge things like an Apple Watch, AirPods, or even power an external monitor in a pinch. If you’re the designated “does anyone have a charger” person in your friend group, this phone basically turns you into a walking power bank.
Toughness: The Feature That Made Me a Believer
I’ll be honest, when brands talk about “military-grade durability” or “extreme toughness,” I usually roll my eyes a little. Every phone claims some version of this these days. But the HONOR X9e Pro’s approach to durability isn’t just a badge on the spec sheet, it’s baked into the entire engineering philosophy of the device, and after seeing what this thing is designed to survive, I don’t think there’s another phone on the market right now that’s as genuinely tough as this one.
Let’s start with drops. HONOR rates the HONOR X9e Pro to survive falls from up to 3 metres onto multiple complex surfaces, and it’s earned an SGS 5-Star Comprehensive Reliability Certification for it. The tech behind this is what HONOR calls Ultra-Bounce Anti-Drop Technology 4.0, which is apparently inspired by the halo safety structures used to protect Formula 1 drivers.
Arch-shaped structures around the corners disperse impact energy away from critical components, high-strength metal reinforcements redirect force through the frame instead of letting it slam straight into the display or mainboard, and the screen itself is bonded with a shear-resistant adhesive that HONOR says provides roughly ten times more resistance than a conventional backing adhesive. In plain English: when this phone hits the ground, the frame is doing everything it can to make sure the screen doesn’t take the full hit.
And then there’s the water resistance, which is on another level entirely. We’re talking IP68, IP69, and IP69K ratings all at once, meaning this phone is protected against dust, low-pressure water jets, high-pressure and high-temperature water jets, and submersion. HONOR built this using a multi-compartment, submarine-inspired internal architecture rather than relying on a single protective barrier, with the display, middle frame, and back cover all forming separate sealed compartments, and every exposed area, from the buttons to the USB-C port to the SIM tray, individually sealed.
The end result is a phone rated to survive submersion up to 10 metres deep, which is nearly seven times deeper than the standard IP68 benchmark of 1.5 metres. It’s even designed to support actual underwater photography, and there’s a dedicated Underwater mode tucked into the camera app (Camera > More > Underwater) that adjusts colour tuning to reduce the blue and green cast you usually get in underwater shots.
But here’s the part that genuinely impressed me, because HONOR isn’t just talking about controlled lab drops. This is a phone that’s been demonstrated surviving being dunked in a swimming pool, cooked in an actual hotpot, shot directly with an airsoft gun, and used as a literal hammer to knock nails into a piece of wood, all without the screen giving up. I don’t say this lightly: I genuinely cannot think of another phone on the market right now that’s this confidently tough. Most flagships would need a coffin-sized case just to survive being placed face-down on a wooden table. The HONOR X9e Pro is out here getting cooked in hotpot broth and coming out fine.
HONOR backs all of this up with its Rakyat Care+ warranty too, which includes 730 days of front and back crack protection, 730 days of liquid damage protection, and a full year of extended warranty coverage on top, all included at no extra cost. If durability is the priority feature you’re shopping for, HONOR isn’t just making the claim, they’re putting their money where their mouth is.
Performance: Quietly Capable, Even If the Benchmarks Undersell It
This is the part where I expected to have complaints, and honestly, I didn’t.
The HONOR X9e Pro runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 chipset paired with 8GB of physical RAM plus 16GB of HONOR RAM Turbo, for 24GB of usable memory. When I first looked at that on paper, my instinct was that 8GB of actual physical RAM might feel a little tight by 2026 standards, especially with how memory-hungry apps have gotten. In practice, that concern never really materialised. Day to day use, whether that’s juggling a dozen browser tabs, switching between messaging apps, editing photos, or jumping in and out of social apps, felt smooth. No noticeable lag, no annoying stutters, no apps getting killed in the background when I didn’t expect it.
The benchmark numbers, if you care about that sort of thing, land in what I’d call the medium range for this class of chipset. In 3DMark Wild Life, the HONOR X9e Pro scored 4,691, and in the more demanding Wild Life Extreme test, it came in at 1,223. Those numbers won’t make anyone building a hardcore mobile gaming rig switch allegiances, and if you’re chasing the absolute best frame rates in the most graphically demanding games out there, this probably isn’t the phone built for that fight. But that’s not really the audience the HONOR X9e Pro is chasing. For everything that matters in actual daily use, from messaging and browsing to content consumption and light-to-moderate gaming, it handled itself without complaint.
Some of the credit here goes to HONOR’s Hummingbird Architecture 2.0, which is engineered to keep the phone feeling smooth for up to 72 months through things like AI Trajectory Compensation for smoother swipe animations, page-level scheduling that HONOR claims can launch apps up to twice as fast as competing devices, and a kernel-level engine that clears background cache to keep storage from clogging up over time. Whether all of that holds up perfectly six years down the line is something only time will tell, but the fact that HONOR is explicitly engineering for long-term smoothness rather than just day-one benchmark numbers is a good sign for anyone who keeps their phone longer than the usual two-year upgrade cycle.
There are a couple of small quality-of-life touches worth mentioning too. AI Free Grip lets the call answer button shift to whichever side of the screen is easier for you to reach one-handed, which sounds minor until you’re holding shopping bags with one hand and trying to answer a call with the other. There’s also Instant NFC Access built in, handy if your office or condo uses an NFC-based access card, since you can just tap your phone against the reader instead of digging around for a physical card.
Camera: More Capable Than I Expected From a Phone This Tough
Usually when a phone leads with durability as its main pitch, the camera ends up as an afterthought. That’s not really the case here. The HONOR X9e Pro packs a 108MP main camera with an f/1.75 aperture, a fairly large 1/1.67-inch sensor, and 0.64μm pixel size, paired with a 5MP ultra-wide camera and a 16MP front camera for selfies and video calls.
I came away genuinely impressed with what this camera setup could pull off. I took it out for a mix of daytime shots, some low light scenes, and general everyday photography, and more than a few of the results left me pleasantly surprised. Detail held up well in good lighting, colours came out looking natural rather than oversaturated, and even in trickier lighting conditions the main sensor did a solid job of holding onto detail without turning photos into a smudgy mess.
Part of that comes down to the CIPA 6.0 image stabilisation on the main camera, which is a meaningful step up from what you’d usually expect at this price point. It’s particularly noticeable in low light, where longer exposures are needed and even the slightest hand movement can soften an entire shot. HONOR also layers in cloud-assisted AI imaging designed specifically for portraits, night scenes, and digital zoom composition, which processes and refines detail, colour, and clarity beyond what the phone’s on-device hardware alone could produce.
On the software side, there’s a decent spread of AI photography tools baked in. AI Enhanced Night automatically optimises photos taken in Night Mode, AI Enhanced Zoom kicks in once you go past 3x zoom to sharpen up the result, and AI Enhanced Portrait automatically fine-tunes portrait shots. There’s also a New AI Moving Photos feature with motion trail, motion clone, and slow motion effects, and an AI Image to Video 2.0 tool that can turn a single static photo into a short video clip based on a simple text description, which is a fun feature if you enjoy playing around with content creation on the fly.
And yes, given everything I’ve said about this phone’s water resistance, the underwater photography angle is a real, usable feature and not just a marketing bullet point. Between the IP69K rating, the 10-metre submersion tolerance, and the dedicated underwater colour tuning mode, this is genuinely one of the few phones I’d trust to bring along for a pool day or a light snorkelling trip without needing a separate waterproof housing.
Photo Samples
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Genuinely excellent battery life, easily stretching to two or three days of real, mixed daily use on the 11,000mAh cell
- Best-in-class durability, from 3-metre drop resistance to IP68/IP69/IP69K water resistance rated for 10-metre submersion
- Bright, vivid 10,000-nit display that stays legible even under harsh Malaysian sun
- Smooth day-to-day performance despite modest-looking benchmark scores
- Capable 108MP main camera with solid image stabilisation and decent low-light results
- Generous 730-day Rakyat Care+ warranty covering crack and liquid damage, plus an extra year of extended coverage
- 80W fast charging and handy 27W reverse charging for topping up other devices
Cons:
- Noticeably heavier and thicker than typical mid-rangers at 203g and 8.08mm, so it’s not the phone for anyone who prioritises slimness
- Only 8GB of true physical RAM, which may feel conservative on paper even though real-world performance doesn’t suffer
- Benchmark numbers land in the mid-pack, so heavy mobile gamers chasing top-tier frame rates may want to look elsewhere
- Only a single ultra-wide secondary camera, no dedicated telephoto lens
Pricing and Where to Get One
The HONOR X9e Pro launches in Malaysia in two storage configurations, both running the same 8GB RAM plus 16GB HONOR RAM Turbo combination for 24GB of usable memory:
- 256GB storage: RM1,899
- 512GB storage: RM2,399
It’s available in four colours: Royal Purple, Dawn Gold, Reddish Brown, and Midnight Black. Pre-orders are running from 24 September to 8 October 2026, and customers who pay in full during that window get a bundle worth up to RM1,626, which includes a free HONOR Pad X7 tablet and an RM100 instant rebate, on top of the standard Rakyat Care+ protection. You can grab it through HONOR Experience Stores, the official HONOR Malaysia website, or via their official stores on Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop.
More here: https://www.honor.com/my/shop/new-launch/
Conclusion: The Phone For People Who Actually Use Their Phones Hard
Here’s my honest take after living with the HONOR X9e Pro for close to two weeks: this isn’t a phone trying to win you over with the thinnest body or the flashiest camera array. It’s a phone built for people who genuinely put their devices through the wringer, whether that’s from long work days without a charger in sight, an active outdoor lifestyle, or just a habit of being a little rough with your gadgets (no judgment, we’ve all dropped a phone at least once this year).
The battery life alone makes a compelling case. Getting three real days out of a single charge, with proper heavy daily use and not some artificially light usage pattern, is not something I say lightly about any phone I review. Add in genuinely class-leading durability, a display that laughs in the face of Malaysian sunlight, and a camera that punches above what you’d expect from a “tough phone,” and the HONOR X9e Pro ends up being a lot more well-rounded than its rugged branding might suggest.
Is it the phone for everyone? No. If slim, light, and pocket-friendly is your priority, the extra weight and thickness here will bother you. But if you’ve ever cracked a screen, dropped a phone into a pool, or just wished your battery would stop dying by 3pm, the HONOR X9e Pro is one of the most convincing arguments I’ve seen in a while for choosing substance over slimness. At RM1,899 for the base model, it’s a genuinely strong proposition in the Malaysian mid-range market, and it’s easy to see why HONOR’s X Series keeps topping the sales charts here.