Honor 90 Lite Review: A Well Rounded Phone

The Honor 90 Lite is the younger sibling to the Honor 90. Both phones were launched together in Nepal and the 90 Lite is targeted more at lower mid-range users compared to the Honor 90. Still, the 90 Lite can hold its ground against other phones in a similar price range.

Howdy, welcome to our Honor 90 Lite review. We’ve been using the phone for about a week now and after extensive testing, have compiled what we think are the good and bad features of the phone. Alright, as usual, let’s get started by looking at the specifications below.

ALSO READ: Honor Mobile Price in Nepal (May 2024 Updated)

Honor 90 Lite Review

Good Design

• 162.9 x 74.5 x 7.48 mm
• Plastic back
• Soft touch finish

The Honor 90 Lite is made of plastic. Both the back and the sides of the phone are made from plastic but the material is quite good. Honor has used a soft touch finish at the back which does help reduce smudges. Would we have liked a glass back? Yes, but Honor’s decision should be honored as the phone is light and pretty slim due to this design. 

The camera module on the phone is split into two halves. The upper half houses the main camera while the lower half houses the ultrawide and the macro sensor. The flash is placed separately from the module and the phone wobbles a bit when placed on a table. 

The Honor 90 Lite is a pretty thin phone and the usage of plastic has made it lighter than other phones of the same size but at the cost of premiumness. 

Moving on to the button placements on the phone, the right side houses the volume rockers and the power button which also doubles as a fingerprint sensor. The fingerprint sensor is pretty fast and accurate. During our testing, we didn’t face any issues with the fingerprint sensor. The left side of the phone houses the Dual SIM tray. 

The bottom houses the microphone, charging port, and single speaker. While there is no headphone jack, a Type-C to 3.5mm converter does come included in the box. The top of the phone has a second mic for noise cancellation and what seems to be an IR blaster but it’s actually not. We had our doubts as there was no included Remote control app but a quick test confirmed that the phone lacks an IR blaster.

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Good Display

• 6.7 inches LTPS LCD
• 90Hz refresh rate
• FHD+ resolution

Honestly, we expected an AMOLED display as well but the phone comes with a standard LTPS LCD FHD+ display. It’s not bad by any means and the colors are pretty good. The display refreshes at 90Hz and feels pretty smooth. We didn’t notice any animation lags or hiccups with the display during our testing period. 

At the front is a hole punch cutout for the front camera. Our unit came with a screen protector pre-applied and we can definitely appreciate this small but careful attention to detail. 

Not getting an AMOLED panel was a disappointment but the included panel is of good quality. The display has good viewing angles and the colors are quite accurate as well. 

The viewing angles are decent. The phone comes with Widevine L1 so you will be able to stream your favorite movies and shows in full quality. When watching videos on youtube, we didn’t notice frame drops or other issues with the video.

Honor 90 Lite also comes with an eye comfort option which helps improve the circadian cycle and promotes good sleeping habits. You can enable this in the display options and you’ll also find the color adjustment settings there. However, it misses the 3840Hz PWM display you can find on the Honor 90.

Good Performance

• Mediatek Dimensity 6020 (7nm)
• Octa-core (2×2.2 GHz Cortex-A76 & 6×2.0 GHz Cortex-A55)
• Mali-G57 MC2

The 90 Lite comes with an octa-core chipset. The Dimensity 6020 to be precise. This chipset was announced in March of 2023 so it’s pretty recent and performs quite well. Just looking at the benchmark numbers, this chip lands somewhere between the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 and the Helio G99. 

But benchmark numbers are just a representation of the raw performance the phone can put out. But, what we’re really after is daily life usage. Well, it’s good. No surprises here as the chipset is a pretty capable performer in day-to-day activities.

App opening, closing and switching is fast. The phone also holds the apps in memory quite well. 

Talking about the read and write speeds, the phone performs well in this category as well. We were getting over 1000MBps on sequential reads and over 500MBps on sequential writes.

Our unit seemed to throttle at around 22 minutes into the CPU stress test to below 75%, but the phone itself was not very hot to the touch. In a few moments, the performance would return back to normal and this pattern kept repeating when we tried doing the test again. This however didn’t impact gaming performance. More on that later. 

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GAMING

Let’s start off with some Genshin Impact. We tried the game in High graphic settings to see how well or how poor really the phone can run it. Surprisingly, the phone ran the game pretty smoothly with an average fps of 30. There were a few dips here and there but the overall gameplay was very enjoyable. Combat was pretty smooth and navigating the vast open world was pleasant. We tried the game in this setting for 15 mins and the phone didn’t get hot at all and was very comfortable to hold.

As we found out about the throttling issue, we tried Genshin Impact in High settings (Motion Blur Off) for 30 minutes as well and the game played as usual.

Some frame drops here and there but an overall playable experience at around 30FPS. We had no issues with the CPU performance, and it certainly didn’t dip to below 75% as was shown in the CPU Stress Test. 

Afterward, we also tried using the lowest settings with FPS Limit set to 60fps to see the maximum frames the phone can push out. We got a pretty stable 45.8 fps on average. There were no noticeable dips and drops even when engaged in heavy combat. Overall, Genshin Impact was quite enjoyable in both graphical settings.

Moving on to Call of Duty, we were able to get a pretty consistent 60fps on both low and high graphic settings. We didn’t notice any dips in framerate and the gameplay was very smooth. If you look at the graph, you can see how the FPS line is basically flat and doesn’t have any huge dips indicating how well the game ran. 

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Asphalt 9 with High settings resulted in 28.2 avg fps. The game didn’t have any stutters and the large dips in FPS you see on the graph are during the menu sections in the game. The actual gameplay was pretty stable at around 30fps and the game was very enjoyable even with lots of particles and action happening in the frame. 

We also tried PubG Mobile on the phone. While it doesn’t support the gyro controls, the traditional controls are pretty responsive. With HD graphics you can go up to High framerate and get a pretty stable 30fps. There were no noticeable drops in performance and the game ran pretty smooth. For people that want more FPS, albeit at the cost of graphics, we also tested the game in Smooth graphics with Ultra Framerate. We got a very stable 40fps on average. The phone can’t push 60fps even in the lowest setting but the gameplay was flawless.

Camera

• Rear Camera: 100 MP, f1.9
  • Ultrawide: 5MP, f2.2
  • Macro: 2MP, f2.4
  • Video: 1080p@30fps
• Front Camera: 16 MP, f/2.45
  • Video: 1080p@30fps

The phone comes with a triple-camera setup. A whopping 100MP f1.9 main sensor with an ultrawide and macro. All three sensors are user operable which is a good thing but the ultrawide and macro have pretty low resolution.

MAIN CAMERA 

Normal photos from the main camera are binned to 25MP. Photos are detailed and sharp. Even finer details like the intricate designs of Hindu temples were captured quite well. The dynamic range is quite good but the shadows can get crushed while maintaining the highlights. The photos have a natural depth of field and the overall images are pleasing. The camera interface could’ve been better, however. HDR image is tucked under more options which made it a hassle to check how the HDR performs. 

Something odd we found was there was practically no difference between 100MP shots and binned shots. A side-by-side comparison left us quite puzzled when we couldn’t identify the high-resolution photos. Now, while this may seem bad, it actually shows the capability of the phone to take good binned photos rivaling that of the 100MP ones. 

Ultrawide photos are decent at best. They don’t have a lot of details and are pretty low on sharpness as a lot of smoothening is going on to reduce noise, which is still visible when you zoom slightly by the way. The dynamic range is quite decent but the image processing could be better.

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Night photos are quite decent. With a source of light, you can get pleasing images. The overall image is not super sharp, but the colors and details are well-contained. You do also get a dedicated Night Mode. 

Night Mode-enabled photos have better highlights control but they boost the shadows so much that you could see noise and unnecessary details being added to the image. While the overall image got brighter, the forceful addition of details from shadows made the image look a bit, well, over-processed. In fact, personally, we preferred the normal night photos compared to the dedicated night mode shots.

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We also get a macro camera with the phone. Macro photos have different color science and lack details. It’s not unusable and instead was quite fun to use to get unique images, but if you’re strictly going for quality, the main camera image with a digital crop can yield better results most of the time. See for yourself and be the judge on this one.

PORTRAITS

Portraits from this phone come out quite good. The edge detection is pretty good and skin tones are natural. You do get an adjustable beauty filter with the portrait mode which tends to over-smoothen the skin and make it look very unnatural. Other than that, the contrast is pretty good and the dynamic range is somewhat wide enough to allow decent control in both highlights and shadows.

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You can also take portraits of objects and you get a dedicated mode for this called “Aperture”. It’s not perfect by any means and struggles with separating the foreground and background at times. Still, it’s a handy feature to have. Colors and contrast are good and the dynamic range is decent as well.

FRONT CAMERA

The phone has a 16MP front camera. The images are bright and contain good details on the subject. The background however lacks details and sharpness.

The skin tone is natural and the colors are on-point. There is a bit of noise even in daytime shots but nothing too noticeable. For the price, the selfies are quite decent.

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You can also take selfie portraits. Just like with the rear, the photos have good edge detection and the colors are pleasing. The background has a natural depth of field and doesn’t look overdone most of the time. The subject is sharp and has good details on them. Overall, we found the portrait photos to be more useful for selfies.

VIDEOS

The phone can capture up to 1080p@30fps videos. The videos lack stabilization and come out shaky.

The overall video quality is pretty average. It lacks sharpness and details. The colors and dynamic range however are pretty good. There is a bit of sharpening being applied to the videos which can make it look a bit over-processed in certain situations. 

ALSO READ: Best Phones Under 30000 in Nepal (May 2024 Updated)

Incredible Battery

• Non-removable Li-Po 4500mAh battery
• 22.5W fast charging

About the battery, the battery life is pretty incredible. It’s smaller by 500mAh compared to competitors who offer 5000mAh but the software has been optimized to conserve battery quite well.

Even with our testing which consisted of shooting photos/videos, benchmarks, and gaming, we were able to squeeze over 5 hours of Screen-on-time with a full day of usage. With lighter usage, we were able to push the phone to 2 days of usage.

One thing we noticed with the battery settings, the screen-on-time is reset every day not every charge, so, full disclaimer, we used third-party apps to confirm our testing. The application’s time, however, was pulled from the phone’s battery settings.

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The charging speed is also on the slower side compared to competitors. The 22.5W charger is included in the box and it took our unit 45 minutes to charge from 20% to 80%. A full charge will take over an hour.

Decent Software

• Android 13
• MagicOS 7.1

The phone comes with Android 13 out of the box with MagicOS 7.1 on top. The software experience was pretty good. There were a few bloatware apps on our review unit, but, only a few, some of which could actually be useful. See if you can recognize and separate the bloatware and the apps we installed for our testing. You can mention them in the comments below.

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The phone comes with decent customization options and also features gestures like flip to mute and others. We did notice that the developer options didn’t have a “Show refresh rate” option and we couldn’t confirm which apps were running in 90Hz due to this reason. Overall, we had no complaints about the software in general.

So that was our review of the Honor 90 Lite? How’d you like that? Let us know in the comments below!