This is our own unboxing video of the HONOR X9e Pro, the phone HONOR is selling on toughness first: a 3-metre drop rating and an SGS five-star certification for it. The clip has no narration, just the reveal, so this is what it actually shows rather than a script written to match it.
It is the newest phone in a lineage we have covered before. We called the HONOR X9d a good mid-range phone with incredible durability, and before that the HONOR X9c the most durable smartphone we had tested. The X9e Pro is HONOR pushing the same idea further.
What our video shows
The curved display and slim bezels are the first thing the video lingers on, before it turns the phone over to the part HONOR is actually selling.
That single ring holding every camera and sensor is the design HONOR is betting on for this generation, and it reads as sturdier in hand than the separated camera bumps on older X-series phones.
Checking the durability claim against HONOR's own numbers
Our video does not read out a spec sheet, so here is what we checked separately on HONOR's own global and Malaysia product pages rather than taking the title's word for it. HONOR rates the X9e Pro to survive drops from 3 metres, with all-angle drop protection down to 1.2 metres, and the phone carries an SGS five-star certification for drop resistance after HONOR says it was dropped more than 1,000 times in testing. The same page lists IP68, IP69 and IP69K ratings, the main 108MP camera uses a 1/1.67-inch sensor with optical image stabilisation, and the battery is an 11,000mAh silicon-carbon cell, one of the largest HONOR has put in this series. None of those figures come from a reseller summary; they are HONOR's own published claims for the unit in our video.
A body built to survive 1,000 drops matters most to the person actually filming with it outdoors, on a shoot where a phone gets handed around, dropped in a bag or knocked off a gimbal mount. That is the same use case our own Pocket Cinematic course is built around: shooting cinematic video on the phone already in your pocket, without babying it.
What our video does not settle is how the X9e Pro actually shoots or holds up outside a box reveal. Fifty-five seconds is a first look at what came in the box, not a verdict after weeks of use, so we are treating this as an unboxing rather than a review until we have spent real time with the camera and the battery.
