[Honor 9 Lite  Guides, News, & Discussion] xzyk:
Not very impressed with the Honor 9 Lite.

I did online research and read lots of review on the Honor 9 Lite.

What convinced me was a comparison some reviewer did with his current daily driver, a 1+3t, and was, as he put it, 'pleasantly surprised'. Since my current daily driver is also a 1+3t I relented and bought one, the 3+32GB version.

After using the Honor 9 Lite I don't think it comes anywhere close to a 1+3t. Now I appreciate and understand that it is cheaper than my 1+3t (even at its current value) but I'm not very impressed, especially with the way EMUI 8 completely rapes Android stock ! I knew this going in but never realised to what extent EMUI restrict customisation.

Let me give examples.

1. First thing I always do with every phone i buy is disabled all apps I don't need/use. Some of the apps on the Honor 9 Lite are cooked in and without root cannot be disables, frozen or removed; e.g. Files, Huawei Mobile Service, Themes.

2. Next thing is to replace any homelauncher with my favourite 'Nova'. Well as soon as you do this on the 9Lite you get a pop-up message stating something like 'changing home launcher uses more battery'...What ? Anyway you can force it through and then just change the default home launcher to Nova. Then some of the EMUI widgets, like weather, don't work anymore. That's ok, I expected that, what I did not expect is for it to show up as available but when you try to add it to your homescreen you get a FC and Huawei launcher is back, in effect removing your default launcher you just set.

3. Huawei badges also obviously don't work under Nova; again as expected.

4. Next I fired up Chronus widget so i can get a replacement for the now non-working Huawei weather service (which at least you can disable). Chronus now does not update the alarm. So you set an alarm in clock but Chronus does not pick up the changee unless you go into chronus change something and save it. This was even after i loaded up Google clock and set alarm through that.

All the above works flawlessly in my Oreo based 1+3t.

5. Lag..yes it is a lot worse than my 1+3t, now like i said because of the price difference i did not expect the Kirin659 to be on par with the Snapdragon 821 but the lag difference was much more noticable on the Honor9 lite than i expected.

6. Since Nova was basically non functional I had to return to Huawei's own launcher.

7. No way of hiding status bar. By the way I also tried play store apps, like GMD Full Screen, but it did not work properly.

8. Battery life is one day on normal use.

9. Cameras are acceptable but no better than my single camera 1+3t.

Conclusion:

Not impresssed, it looks great, weight is spot on for me, size is also great so is the screen brightness, but everything else is nothing special and that EMUI8 man, it just restricts you from most customisation which is the reason we all love android. If i wanted restrictions i would have gone for an iphone.

Why should i have to unlock BL and root to be able to do simple things like use full immersive mode. I'd like to keep android pay functioning so don't want to unlock,root and battle with magidisk to hide root. I just want control back of my phone.

Anyway, thought i would put this together outlining my experience with the Honor 9Lite, hopefully yours will be better and find acceptable.