Jessica Murgia of AndroidPit, Dominic Preston of TechAdvisors, James Peckham of TechRadar, and ZDNet's Sandra Vogel each rated the phone 4.5 out of 5 stars. Swedroid offered its recommendation and rated the phone 8.3 out of 10 overall. Android Authority's Gary Sims gave the phone a rating of 8.7 out of 10, and wrote in his review summary: 'The Honor 9 certainly ticks a lot of the right boxes: great performance, dual cameras, sleek design, and an IR blaster! The only downsides are the lack of toughened glass over the display and the slippery nature of the build materials.' Andy Boxall of Digital Trends wrote the following as a summary of his review: 'The Honor 9 impresses so much, it's a strong contender for one of the best reasonably priced smartphones available.' PC Magazine 's Thomas Newton assigned the Honor 9 a rating of 4 out of 5, meaning 'excellent'. Overall, initial reviews of the Honor 9 were positive, averaging 8.8 out of 10. It became available for purchase in China in June and for preorder in the United Kingdom on June 27. The phone was revealed in China on June 12, 2017, and debuted internationally in Berlin on June 27. In the spring of 2019, Huawei began to roll out Android Pie ( EMUI 9.0) for the device. The Honor 9 launched with Android Nougat (version 7.0) and Huawei's EMUI 5.1. During IFA 2017 in Berlin, Honor announced the new color variant for the Honor 9, which was the limited edition 'Robin Egg Blue.' The color became available in China in August, and was released in the United Kingdom in September.

The Honor 9 has a metal frame and a 3D curved glass rear, and it's official tagline is 'the light catcher.' The phone comes in 'Glacier Grey,' 'Sapphire Blue,' 'Midnight Black,' and gold, but some colors are not available in certain markets. Other features include dual- SIM support, a USB-C port, and a fingerprint reader located on the lower bezel. It can record video in 4K and has electronic image stabilization for Full HD video. The Honor 9 has an 8 MP front-facing camera and it's dual rear camera setup consists of a 12 MP RGB lens and a 20-megapixel monochrome lens. It has a 5.15-inch (13.1 cm) display with a pixel resolution of 1920x1080 and pixel density of 428 ppi. The phone comes with 64 or 128 gigabytes of storage and 4 or 6 GB of RAM, depending on the region. The phone has a HiSilicon Kirin 960 octa-core processor (four 2.4 GHz cores and four 1.8 GHz cores), a Mali-G71 MP8 GPU, and a 3,200 mAh non-removable battery. The Honor 9 is a flagship smartphone made by Honor, a sub-brand under the Huawei Group, as part of the Huawei Honor series.