Honor Pad V9 Review: A Low-Price Tablet With A Loud Bark And A Little Bite

The search for a tablet often yields two different results. You can have a tablet that is basically a junky content consumption machine like an Amazon Fire tablet, or you can have a high-powered productivity tablet like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Plus. If you aim in between those two points, there are some options, but often you'll find pretty big tradeoffs in order to bring the costs down.

The Honor V9 Pad is not one of those devices. Rather, this is a very good tablet that can be had for not a lot of money. While Samsung's high-end tablets command $800 or more, Honor is quietly releasing a large tablet with a high refresh rate, good battery life and a few other bells and whistles for around a third of that. That makes for a pretty compelling package, which is why I wanted to check it out. It just launched at MWC 2025, but I've been using a review sample provided by Honor for about a week and this is my full review.

Starting off with the specifications, they don't really feel midrange. The tablet is powered by a Mediatek Dimensity 8350 Elite and the tablet packs 8 or 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of onboard storage. Of course, the most important part of a tablet is the display. It's a huge 11.5-inch with a 2800x1840 resolution, 291 pixels per inch and brightness up to 500 nits. The screen has a refresh rate of up to 144 Hz, which I can't really see, but if you're a fan of refresh rates, you'll be pleased.

It's an LCD panel, which is not ideal, but I think the screen is quite vibrant. It could definitely be brighter, especially if you plan to use the tablet outdoors. The 11.5-inch screen is great for multi-tasking and side-by-side apps.

All that is powered by a 10,100 mAh battery which lasts a good long time. I've been able to go multiple days before a charge. When it is time to charge, the table takes up to 35W through its USB port. Meanwhile, the tablet is just 6.1 millimeters thick, which is simply lovely (that's about the diameter of a standard No. 2 pencil, for comparison's sake).

One of my primary use cases for a tablet is content consumption so in addition to a really nice display, I like to hear solid sound. The Honor Pad V9 delivers with a remarkable eight speakers — four on each side when you hold it in landscape.

The speakers are certified with IMAX Enhanced, DTS:X and Hi-Res audio. Of course, you don't get the super low end tones you might be looking for, especially while watching a TV show like "Reacher" but the volume is sufficient to make sure you don't miss any dialogue.

On the whole, I wouldn't say these are the best speakers I've heard, but they're close. You won't be disappointed by the sound coming from this tablet, especially considering its thickness, or lack thereof.

The Honor V9 Pad runs MagicOS version 9.0, which is based on Android 15. The tablet comes preloaded with a decent amount of bloatware, including apps and games I never tapped to fully install. A lot of the interface seems like it's stuck from about 10 years ago with shading and depth effects that just look old and dated.

I like the folders you can resize to basically any size you want. Apps within those resized folders are a tad smaller than on the desktop, and they're selectable without having to first open the folder.

All that being said, there is no app drawer — which some may find objectionable. I don't tend to use app drawers much on phones, but I like them on tablets. The fact that there's just no option for that takes some getting used to.

The tablet has two cameras — one 13-megapixel shooter on the back and one 8-megapixel camera on the front. The camera on front is good for video calling, which is about the only reason you should use a camera on a tablet. Biometric login works too, about half the time. The rear camera is equally fine, but also not amazing. I was able to use it to log into 1Password, which made me reluctantly happy that the camera was there, but if you tell anyone I said that I'll deny it.

What's annoying about the camera is the double camera bump on the back, for seemingly no good reason. The tablet is only 6.1 millimeters thick, so and argument could be made that camera bump was going to be necessary, but I struggle to find the reason for the double bump. I guess it could be called a design choice, so at the end of the day, it's subjective. But it also prevents you from laying the tablet flush on a table, so it's less than ideal.

The tablet runs on a MediaTek 8350 Elite processor which is a nice midrange processor. It's an octa-core processor, four of which can run at up to 3.335 Ghz. Games like "Genshin Impact" have surprisingly good performance at default graphics settings. The tablet also doesn't warm up during 20-minute gaming sessions.

As for Geekbench 6, the tablet clocks in at 1,295/4,061 single and multi-core scores. That's on par with a flagship phone from a few years ago. That's fine, because this is not meant to be a top-of-the-line tablet. Normal day-to-day tasks do not stutter or lag. This is definitely a tablet that can do a bit of heavy lifting, though I wouldn't' go replacing your laptop with this tablet. It would make for a very nice coffee-table tablet, good for some nice gaming and watching movies. Anything more than that, and you'll find the tablet struggling to keep up, but this is not meant to be a flagship by any stretch.

This tablet will be coming to market for 250 Euros (approximately $260 if you convert to USD right this minute) — and that price may be a bit different depending on your region. You are getting a lot of tablet for that price. Arguably the most annoying parts about this tablet are the dated software, and the apps you didn't ask for. Aside from those two things, you're getting a lot of tablet for your money.

It's definitely better than an Amazon Fire tablet for one main reason — Google. The Google Play store has all the apps and games you could want for this tablet. There are some other options at this price point, but this is by far my favorite. It's large, thin, and has really good sound and can be had for a good price.

Make no mistake, this is not a flagship device, so you shouldn't treat it like one. But this tablet is capable of some heavy lifting in a pinch, and it can easily handle all your other gaming and content consumption needs. Depending on where the pierce actually lands, this could be anywhere from a good deal to a steal.