Design

• Familiar look and feel
• Nicely made
• Not pushing any boundaries

Tablet design can only go so far before it starts to decline in usability. So while saying that the Honor Pad V9 is a black rectangle with rounded corners and some buttons on the side might sound like a criticism, as if it lacked verve and excitement, it’s actually the opposite. Phones and tablets have coalesced around the slate form factor for a reason: it works.

Therefore, refusing to budge from the tablet status quo is the best course of action any manufacturer can take. You instinctively know how to use this tablet as soon as you pick it up, as it works in exactly the same way as every other phone or tablet you’ve ever used.

So, as it’s 2025 and tablet design hasn’t changed much since the original iPad set the standard in 2010, we get a mixture of plastic, aluminium and glass that’s about 6mm thick, though without any visible white plastic bits above the antennas to allow the magic electromagnetic waves through.

There are speaker grilles made of circles exactly like the latest iPad – four of them in this instance – a rocker switch to adjust their volume and the tiny pinprick holes that speak of the microphones buried underneath, which need to breathe. There’s no MicroSD slot to expand its storage.

At £399, the Honor Pad V9 is skirting budget tablet territory. It’s not nearly as cheap as the Amazon Fire HD 8, but with its flat aluminium sides and back, it doesn’t feel like it either. The bezel around the screen is thinner than that of the 2025 iPad, and it’s almost exactly the same size and weight as Apple’s cheapest tablet, though it costs a bit more.

The selfie camera is places on the long edge of the screen – a much more sensible place to put it than at the top as it is in a phone, due to the way we use video calling apps – and on the back there’s a double-circle camera bulge, only one half of which contains any actual cameras. The other is flatter and has just an LED flash, for extra illumination during photos and videos.

The fact that this flash has the words ‘AI Camera’ printed next to it might lead you to think it’s a second lens, but the 2x zoom option for the main camera is a crop of the main wide-angle view, rather than being supplied by a separate sensor. 

You’ll probably want to keep the Pad V9 in a case, as the camera bump makes it sit unevenly on flat surfaces, and there’s no IP rating, so you’ll want to avoid using it in the bath.

A stylus and keyboard accessory are available, and may come bundled with the tablet when bought at retail, but neither was supplied for this review – all we got in the box was a 35W charger and a USB cable.

Screen

• Bright enough for outdoor use
• Decent colour and contrast
• Screen very reflective

The outbreak of OLED and Mini-LED screens across the tablet universe has led to top-end models that offer exceptional brightness and colour saturation. The Honor Pad V9 does not have one of those screens, merely an IPS LCD display, but that really isn’t an issue.

Sure, if you put it right next to a tablet that uses superior display technology, and get them to play identical content, you might be able to pick out the differences. But the Pad V9 is less than half the price of OLED-touting models.

Placed alongside an iPad Pro M1, with its Mini-LED screen, it’s really the extra size of Apple’s tablet that makes a difference, rather than any perceived brightness changes, although there is a hint more contrast from the Mini-LED.

Against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra, which has a wider aspect ratio and is thinner as a result, the black bars are largely absent at the edge of widescreen videos. However, the 3:2 ratio of the Honor is better if you want to use it for office documents or reading ebooks, and feels more versatile as a result. You’ll have to pay a lot more for an OLED tablet, and at this price point, the IPS screen of the Honor Pad V9 makes a lot of sense.

Luckily, it doesn’t perform too badly either. You get a very respectable maximum brightness – Honor isn’t giving out the exact figure, but suffice to say it’s bright enough to use outdoors on a sunny day, which is really all you need.

Reflections on the screen are a bigger issue than lack of brightness, and it’s quite common to see your own face looking back at you due to a lack of anti-reflective coating, and this can be seen even in lower lighting conditions.

Curiously, the eight speakers (presumably two to each grille) that surround the screen when placed in a landscape orientation aren’t bad at all – the IMAX Enhanced logo on the back of the casing perhaps meaning something. There’s a decent amount of bass for such small units, and the narration is clear when watching wildlife documentaries, though their maximum volume isn’t particularly high.

They’re still not as good as hooking it up to some of the best headphones, but they’re genuinely better than many built-in tablet speakers.

Camera

• Average quality
• Good enough for what you need
• Loses definition in low light

Cameras are rarely the main selling point of a tablet as they are on a phone, and with only a single rear wide-angle lens on the back of the Honor Pad V9, it would be wrong to expect it to hit the heights of the firm’s Magic 7 Pro. 

So what we’ve got here is a rear camera that’s just about good enough for the things you might use a tablet camera for – emergency snaps or videos when you can’t find your phone, photos of written documents you want to run handwriting recognition on, occasionally swapping to the rear camera during a video call so you can show your parents your new potted plants. That sort of thing.

There’s a lack of detail in darker areas, and the camera app tries to slap beauty mode on at any opportunity for extra smearing, but super-sharp portraits are hardly the target of this camera. It’s good enough and no more, topping out at 4K/30fps for video.

Round the front, the selfie camera is a respectable performer when given enough light, but no more than that. It’s the sort of camera that you can’t really moan about, but it’s clear there are better performers elsewhere once you start looking around.

The camera system is possibly a victim of the push to keep the tablet’s cost down, being less important to a tablet’s audience. 

Performance

• Mid-range performance
• Not bad for gaming
• More powerful chips elsewhere

The Dimensity 8350 chipset found in the Pad V9 is the same as that in the Oppo Reno 13 Pro, and is a very decent mid-range choice. In the Geekbench 6 synthetic benchmark it pulls ever so slightly ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE Plus, but can’t catch the iPad 11th Gen with its A16 chip.

The Honor tablet costs slightly more than Apple’s (the cost of which goes up when you start adding accessories you can get in a bundle with the Honor), but much less than the Samsung, making it well priced when set against the Android competition.

It makes a nice little gaming tablet, with titles such as SimCity BuildIt scrolling and zooming smoothly – the 144Hz screen surely helps out here, enabling higher framerates from less demanding games – while Diablo Immortal didn’t judder with lots of enemies on-screen, though there was a jaggy quality to the graphics that suggested anti-aliasing might not be being applied as strongly.

The same is true of video streaming, with the apps loading snappily and playback smooth, though this is as much governed by the internet connection being used as it is anything inside the tablet.

Likewise, it does well with apps such as Google Docs and web apps in general – an 11in screen is just large enough for multitasking, such as having a Chrome window floating over a fullscreen app so you can quickly Google things, or splitting the screen between your browser and Keep for making notes.

Painting apps such as Krita had no problem, though are best experienced using a stylus (there’s nothing wrong with finger-painting, we just prefer to keep our screen free of fingermarks) and video apps such as Adobe Premiere Rush and CapCut ran well too.

A few years ago, we’d have been calling this a flagship tablet, but while it has been left behind by Apple’s M chips and the higher echelons of the Snapdragon 8, it still possesses enough grunt to be useful, rather than just a passive reading and streaming device.

Software

• MagicOS 9 based on Android 15
• AI lightly implemented
• Honor’s own apps aren’t bad

Honor’s MagicOS 9 skin for Android understands what tablet users need that’s distinct from phone users. And that’s a big dock at the bottom of the screen like a Mac, so that favourite apps can be switched between with ease. It’s still Android 15 underneath, which is always a slick place to hang out with lots of neat features.

Honor’s Docs app, which comes pre-installed, is a comprehensive office suite that might have the company’s lawyers staying awake at night, such is its similarity to Microsoft Office. New text documents have a ‘W’ icon, spreadsheets an ‘X’ and presentations a ‘P’ (perhaps that one makes sense without the context of PowerPoint), and you can export files to MS formats as well as PDFs and images. 

As an office app, it’s certainly comprehensive, with all three aspects contained in the one interface, and with handwriting support too, so you can annotate documents – though there’s no handwriting recognition to turn this into editable text, which is a shame. 

There’s AI in Honor’s Notes app, which means your handwritten scrawls become searchable – something that worked on even the worst examples of dragging a finger across the screen and making vague letter shapes. You can use it to summarise your notes, as well as transcribing voice recordings.

There’s also the ability to sync between devices – Honor devices, that is – by signing in with an Honor account. This is something the tablet will nag you to do constantly, but isn’t actually necessary to use the device once you’re signed in with a Google account and can use the Play Store. If Honor Notes could sync via Google Drive and thereby send its content to any Android device, irrespective of manufacturer, it would be more useful.

Outside of the apps themselves, the OS uses a lot of swipe gestures to enable multitasking, with a ball menu that can be invoked to quickly open an app alongside the one you’re using. While it’s not ineffective, it does require a bit of memorisation, and doesn’t seem intuitive at first, becoming more so the more you use it.

Battery life

• Whole-day use
• 35W charge speeds
• Charger in the box

The 10,100mAh battery inside the Pad V9 is almost exactly the same size as the cell in the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE+, and just as with that tablet, it allows good long endurance between charges.

The main culprit for running down the battery is the screen – IPS models typically use a little more energy than OLEDs – and with the sort of brightness the Pad V9 is capable of putting out, you’ll see it drop more quickly if you’re using it in a well-lit environment.

Move the slider down to a more reasonable 50% brightness (there’s an adaptive mode that will set it automatically, but you don’t have to use it) and you can get over 13 hours of constant use out of Honor’s tablet, which probably translates to two days’ usage in reality – or even a week if you’re a sporadic user who reads articles in the evenings.

It’s not a bad result for the Pad, beating the 11th-gen iPad, but not the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE+.

There’s a charger in the box – ours has a Euro-style two-pin plug on it, which we used via an adapter, but hopefully UK models will come with a three-pin model instead. It’s a 35W USB-C block with a USB Type-A port on it, and an A to C cable is provided too.

Should you buy it?

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