Honor Pad V9 vs Honor Pad 9: What’s the difference?

I first saw the Honor Pad 9 at MWC last year, so I wasn’t all that surprised to see the brand announcing a new tablet at its pre-MWC showcase this year. What was a little surprising was that it isn’t called the Honor Pad 10.

Instead, we have the Honor Pad V9, which reignites the brand’s V-series, and joins the Honor Magic Pad N-series and X-series tablets lower down the order. That amount of competing devices is ridiculous enough but at least the Honor Pad V9 is named differently from the Honor Magic Pad 2.

The same cannot be said for the Honor Pad V9 and the Honor Pad 9, however, with their naming differences equating to putting on a fake moustache and going back to the deli counter for a second free sample. The two tablets are actually quite different, with several key points that make this new tablet feel like more than a simple retread. Let’s start with a rundown of the specifications.

Honor Pad V9 vs Honor Pad 9: Specifications

Honor Pad V9 vs Honor Pad 9: Design, display and key features

So right away we can see a few major differences between the two tablets. For starters, the Pad V9 has a smaller 11.5in display and a tighter build in general, with the 6.1mm depth in particular being impressively skinny.

It’s also a real featherweight, at just 475g. That’s a good 80g lighter than the Pad 9 and even undercuts fellow 11in-ish) tablets like the Amazon Fire Max 11 (490g) and the Xiaomi Pad 7 (500g). We’ve also got slightly more choice in colour this time around; the simple grey of the Honor Pad 9 returns here but it’s joined by a stark white variant.

Despite the smaller dimensions, the Pad V9’s display is technically superior to the Pad 9’s. They’re both LCD panels but the V9’s screen has a sharper 2,800 x 1,840 resolution and a smoother 144Hz peak refresh rate.

The Pad V9’s internal components also appear to have the edge over the Pad 9. The 10,100mAh battery is a fair bit bigger than the Pad 9’s 8,300mAh cell and the Mediatek Dimensity 8050 chipset has a maximum clock speed of 3.35GHz – quite an advantage over the Pad 9’s 2.2GHz Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 platform.

Both tablets pair their respective chipsets with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space, so it’s even there. Equally, charging is the same, too, with both models supporting 35W wired charging.

The Pad V9 has quite the advantage on software, though. The Honor Pad 9 launched with Android 13 last year and promised only a single software update, topping out with Android 14. The Pad V9, meanwhile, runs Android 15 out of the box, with Honor’s own MagicOS 9.0 launcher layered over the top. There’s no word yet on how many years of OS updates and security patches we can expect, however.

The big new inclusions with Honor’s latest OS are AI features, several of which have made their way onto the Pad V9. These are the usual suspects that most brands are offering on phones these days – AI transcripts, note-taking, translation and summarising – but they’re still something of a rarity in tablet form.

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Honor Pad V9 vs Honor Pad 9: Early verdict

I’m really not a fan of the naming convention; this kind of arbitrary labelling only serves to confuse people and make it more difficult to quickly and cleanly determine which tablet is better. This easily could have (and should have) been the Honor Pad 10, or at least Honor Pad 9 Pro, to account for the additional features.

However, the Honor Pad V9 is only £399 and, at that price, it looks like a bargain. The powerful processor and massive battery bode well for performance and battery life (we’ll know for sure when it comes time to fully test it), the display is sharper and has a higher refresh rate and there’s even a handful of AI features, for those who seek out that kind of thing. I’ll have a full verdict in the near future, so check back in soon to see if this will be Android’s next iPad-killer.