Honor Pad V9 review: It's a good time with more Google than ever

Honor is putting the luxury back into the affordable tablet space with the Honor Pad V9, the company's first new tablet for 2025. With an aluminum chassis, a powerful MediaTek processor, a gorgeous 144Hz display, and eight speakers for the ultimate in surround sound from a tablet, this one means business.

It's the perfect tablet for productivity and media consumption, offering everything you need to feel good about using it full-time. It's got full support for the Honor Magic Pencil 3 and a keyboard folio case that turns it into a laptop replacement, plus a 10,100mAh battery that'll last all day long on a single charge.

Honor's strengthened partnership with Google means that it's even got Google Kids Space support out of the box, so you can set it up entirely for your kids to use with a special home screen launcher and set of apps or just make them their own profile with all the same great parental control features. Really, it's hard to know why you would need any other tablet.

Honor Pad V9: Price, availability, and specs

The Honor Pad V9 was announced on MWC 2025 on March 2, 2025.

The tablet is expected to retail for around $400 and is the follow-up to 2022's Honor Pad V8 Pro.

Honor Pad V9: What makes it great

The Honor Pad V9 has stunning physical features, and it's hard to pick the best one. The aluminum unibody design feels incredibly high-quality and far better than you might expect from a sub-$400 tablet. The bezels around the display are just the right size — not too big to look ugly and not too small to be uncomfortable — and the tablet is thin enough to be comfortable without being so thin that it's awkward to hold.

LCD screens aren't necessarily considered "premium" these days, but the one on the Honor Pad V9 might have you rethinking that position. At 144Hz, it's buttery smooth and uses dynamic dimming and refresh rate scaling to save on battery. The backlight looks superb and avoids the cheap glow or light bleed issues some LCD panels suffer from. It's also got incredible viewing angles and black levels, once again showing that this is better than the average LCD panel.

Honor Pad V9 PWM and dithering tests - YouTube

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It's a proper DC-dimmed panel and uses no PWM dimming, earning the full TÜV Rheinland Flicker Free Eye Comfort Certification rating. Plus, it blocks blue light at the hardware level and incorporates Honor's Defocus Display tech, so you can feel comfortable using it night and day without eye strain.

Aside from the quality, the display is coated with a NIL Nano-topography process that keeps it impressively fingerprint-resistant. I've let my son play on this thing for hours and can't believe how little there is to clean off the screen. I'd love to see some kind of anti-glare layer on this display in the future but it's still plenty bright and easy to see in a well-lit car.

Among the most premium features is the IMAX certified 8-speaker setup. Yeah, seriously, Honor packed eight speakers inside of this tablet, complete with impressive bass response. Movies and videos sounded best, with crystal clear voices and mind-bowing virtual surround sound.

I did a sort of double-take more than once while watching videos on this thing, wondering if it somehow was hooked up to my surround sound system in the living room. It sounds good enough to listen to music on all the time and I had it pumping beats on my desk while I was working more than once during the review period.

Parents will be thrilled to know that this tablet features Google Kids Space support out of the box. When setting up any account, it'll ask you if the account is for a child or an adult. Choosing child will enable a special setup that requires a Google Family Link account, complete with a special home screen, app launcher, curated content, and more.

The MediaTek Dimensity 8350 Elite inside is a great processor that's somewhere in-between a mid-range and a top-end processor. It feels like a high-end processor in most scenarios, including everyday usage, browsing, and productivity. Gaming on the tablet is a joy although you won't be able to run Fortnite at max settings and still expect a buttery-smooth 60FPS framerate.

If you or your kids are looking for a great tablet that supports a stylus, this is a solid choice. It works perfectly with the Honor Magic Pencil 3, including handwriting recognition and Honor's really cool math formula recognition technology. This functionality along with Kids Space makes this an ideal family tablet, especially since you can have multiple account profiles.

Honor Pad V9: What needs work

As a more affordable tablet, you'll find that Honor sells other tablets with faster processors, bigger and brighter displays, and slightly better speakers. I wouldn't say any of these are huge differences from what's offered on the Honor Pad V9, but know that this isn't quite a top-of-the-line tablet despite its premium leanings. It also has no water or dust ingress protection, so this one might not be best for bathtub reading time.

On the software side of things, Honor does a great job of enabling laptop-level multitasking and performance in many areas, but it needs to tweak just two things to bring this all the way to a laptop-replacement level. The taskbar at the bottom of the screen cannot be pinned in Magic OS 9 as it can on most other major Android-based tablets with the latest versions of Android.

Second, the notification shade is still split, so only quick toggles appear when you swipe down from the right side of the status bar, while only notifications appear from the left side. There's no reason these shouldn't be in the same notification shade as there's plenty of room for both — Honor's design even leaves a goofy white space on each half of the notification shade that should contain the other half.

Honor Pad V9: Competition

No matter where you live, the best Samsung tablets are often the biggest competition for the Honor Pad V9. The closest specific competitor is the Galaxy Tab S9 FE, which is in the same price range as the Honor Pad V9. Samsung offers a lot of similar functionality to the Honor Pad V9 including stylus support and a great OS for multitasking. However, Honor outclasses Samsung in most other areas, including processor performance, display quality and refresh rate, eye-friendly display options, and much more RAM.

If you're a smart home aficionado and use Google Home as your main control point, the Google Pixel Tablet is a pretty nifty choice. It's got a great charging stand that doubles as a powerful speaker, plus a custom lock screen that lets you control your Google Home-powered smart home faster than anything else. It's got a slightly better multitasking UI than Honor — the taskbar can be properly pinned to the bottom of the screen — but the processor is a lot slower, and it only has 8GB of RAM, while Honor offers a Pad V9 model with 12GB.

Internationally, companies like Xiaomi offer tablets like the Redmi Pad Pro that look very similar on paper. Honor offers more storage and RAM for its two models as well as a newer version of Android, plus a much faster processor. Xiaomi has the price advantage, though, and some people may prefer Xiaomi's Android skin over Honor's.

Honor Pad V9: Should you buy it?

The Honor Pad V9 sits nicely between cheap tablets like the Galaxy Tab S9 FE and more premium options like the OnePlus Pad 2. It's got a powerful newer MediaTek processor, an incredible 144Hz display that'll have you wondering why more LCDs aren't this good, as well as an impressive 8-speaker system that sounds too good to be in a tablet.

Honor even launched this one with the latest version of Android, fixing past mistakes. It also includes Honor's latest display eye care solutions, support for its best tablet accessories like the Magic Pencil 3, and battery life that'll get you through the longest of flights. It's a superb choice, so long as you don't need something special like ingress protection or cellular connectivity.