Honor Pad V9 Review: Should the iPad shake in fear? – Ultra-Sim

The Honor Pad V9 is clearly aiming to take the fight to the latest Apple iPad family, and more specifically, to compete with the base Apple iPad 11th Gen. This slate comes with a bright and vivid 11.5-inch LCD display and a 144Hz refresh rate, a pretty potent MediaTek chipset, a big battery, and fast charging.This new Honor tablet is also very stylish in its all-aluminum unibody, and its size and weight are both comparable to that of the new 11-inch iPad. The only problem here is availability, as Honor isn’t available through carriers or big retailers in the States, while the iPads are basically everywhere.

With its price of around €499 (€459 with coupons and promotions), the Honor Pad V9 is a solid offering, but will it be able to fend off other Chinese competitors such as the Xiaomi Pad 7 and devices from the OnePlus Pad family in order to take the fight to the iPads? Let’s find out!

Honor Pad V9 Design and Display

Compact and stylish

There’s no denying, the Honor Pad V9 is one pretty-looking device. It has an all-aluminum unibody that’s just over 6 mm thick, flat sides, and a stylish circular camera housing on the back.

There are four loudspeaker grills on each side of the tablet, but they are home to two speakers each for a total of eight on this tablet. On the top we find the volume rocker button surrounded by a bunch of microphones, and on the left (or top side in portrait mode) there’s the power button.

The tablet is available in White and Gray, and the latter looks and feels fantastic—the matte gray aluminum on the back feels papery to the touch, and the overall look resembles that of a high-end device.

As far as weight is concerned, this 11.5-inch slate comes in at 475 grams, which is around the average for its class, and just a hair heavier than the 11-inch iPad (2025). The thickness is identical to the said iPad, and the bezels around the screen measure about 7 mm, and that’s close to iPad Pro territory.

Moving to the display part, the elephant in the room here is called LCD. Most of the mobile industry has already moved toward OLED panels, but we still get the occasional LCD tablet here and there. As a matter of fact, even the latest iPad devices still sport LCD displays.

Honor Pad V9 Performance & Benchmarks

Decent power from the MediaTek chipset

MediaTek has slapped the “Elite” moniker on the Dimensity 8350 chipset, and even though the raw power is not on par with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the 8350 inside the Honor Pad V9 is a decent performer. This octa-core chipset relies on one slightly overclocked 3.35 GHz Cortex-A715 performance core, three 3.20 GHz Cortex-A715 cores, and four 2.20 GHz Cortex-A510 efficient cores.

In normal day-to-day tasks, this slate is excellent. Everything runs smoothly with no hiccups and lag. Let’s see what the synthetic benchmarks can tell us and how this silicon stacks against the competition.

CPU Performance Benchmarks:

The MediaTek Dimensity 8350 Elite fails to impress in our single-core benchmark, mainly due to the single Cortex A715 core that’s not clocked particularly high as well. When it comes to multicore performance, it’s much closer even to the mighty A16 chip inside the iPad (2025).

Things start to get really interesting when we take a look at the graphics performance. It seems that the Mali G615-MC6 is a worthy opponent to the Adreno 730 and 735 found inside the OnePlus Tab 2 and Xiaomi Pad 7 Pro, respectively. The new iPad is still untouchable when it comes to raw performance, though.

The Honor Pad V9 comes with MagicOS 9.0 out of the box, and this proprietary UI is based on Android 15. Among the usual Android stuff onboard (all the Google apps are present), you will find Honor’s AI tools as well. They are not on the level of Galaxy AI or Gemini Advanced, but they work and are actually helpful.Magic Portal is present; it allows you to select text or an image and drag it to the side of the tablet where a shade opens and offers you a slew of apps. You can export the selection directly to those apps. Honor continues to work on its Notes app, and there are some AI features there as well. You can summarize a text, record or import an audio file, and ask Notes to generate a summary based on the nature of the recording—media briefing, interview, training, etc.

There’s also a feature called Handwriting Beautification that recognizes messy handwriting, and Notes can also deal with formulas and equations. Honor plans to bring its own AI Agent to all devices, but at the time of writing, there’s no sign of such an AI on the Pad V9.

Speaking of AI, Gemini is available if you long-press the power button, so you have the option to use Google’s AI system if you feel like it. Honor shared its bold plans at this year’s MWC in Barcelona to offer seven years of software updates, but we doubt this pledge will affect midrange tablets such as the Pad V9. Last year’s Pad 9 model received only one major OS update and will be supported with security patches for three years, and the same applies to the Pad V9.

Honor Pad V9 Audio Quality

The audio system inside the Honor Pad V9 is simply amazing. The slate boasts eight speakers and supports a long list of audio formats and enhancements, including IMAX Enhanced, DTS:X, and Hi-Res Audio, along with Honor’s Spatial Audio as well.

The sound coming from these eight speakers is really, really loud. You can feel the whole device vibrating and amplifying certain frequencies. The sound quality is also very good with minimal distortion even at max volume.

Overall, the audio is one of the strongest points of the V9, along with the great LCD panel. And given that most tablets are primarily used for entertainment (e.g., watching Netflix, YouTube, movies, and other audiovisual stuff), Honor has made sure those two areas are covered.

Honor Pad V9 Battery and Charging

The charging, on the other hand, takes a lot of time. The Chinese version of the tablet supports 66W wired charing but globally the model is limited to just 35W. Getting this huge 10100 mAh battery from zero to 100% takes more than two hours with the supplied 35W charger.

Another omission is wireless charging. Not many tablets in this price range have it, so it’s not such a big deal, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Honor Pad V9 Camera

It’s just okay

No surprises in this section; photos taken with the 13MP main camera look soft, and there’s a perceivable lack of detail. The exposure is not great either, especially indoors with a limited amount of light falling on the sensor. The 2X zoom shots display the same uninspiring qualities, despite all the AI magic going on in the background.

In good lighting conditions, when the sun is beating down on the thing or person you want to picture, the Honor Pad V9 gets the job done, although the colors are a bit blown out. The selfie camera is also nothing to write home about; there’s a Portrait mode, but we couldn’t find much of a difference from the normal mode, other than the beautify effects that you can apply.

Should you buy it?

The Honor Pad V9 is a great midrange tablet that does many things right. It ticks the right boxes for a tablet device—it comes with a beautiful display, albeit an IPS LCD, the audio onboard is amazing, and the battery life is impressive.

As an added bonus, you get a very stylish and sleek device with a thin all-aluminum body, clean sides, and pretty narrow bezels around the screen. At €499, however, there are a lot of alternatives, some of which offer a faster processor, a better camera system, or a brighter screen (the Xiaomi Pad 7 Pro comes to mind).

The main inspiration behind the Honor Pad V9 and also its biggest competitor—the new 11-inch iPad—can be bought for just $349, and if we storage-correct the equation, the 256GB iPad still costs less than the Pad V9 at $449. So, at the end of the day, the Honor Pad V9 is a decent Android iPad alternative, which not many people would actually buy.