Huawei Honor 9 Teardown

First of all, Let’s take a look at this Huawei Honor 9 specification:
5.1 inch 1080 x 1920 pixels (428 ppi pixel density) LTPS IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
HiSilicon Kirin 960 Octa-core processor (4×2.4 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A53) and Mali-G71 MP8 GPU
Dual 20MP + 12 MP, f/2.2, phase detection autofocus, 2x optical zoom, dual-LED (dual tone) flash
8MP, f/2.0 front camera
4GB RAM and 64GB ROM
EMUI 5.1 base on Android 7.0 Nougat

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We don’t find the screws at the bottom, and the Huawei Honor 9 uses double-sided glass design, so the screen and the rear panel should be fixed to the fuselage with glues.
There are only the speaker grille, 3.5mm headphone jack, and USB Type-C port at the bottom.

Let’s heat the back cover for about 2 minutes with a hair dryer.
Open the back cover a little bit with a suction cup. Then, insert a pick under the back cover and slide the pick along the edge until it is opened completely.

There are only two camera holes and a flash hole on the back cover.

You can see that the Huawei Honor 9 still uses the classic three-stage design. The upper is the motherboard, the middle is the battery, and the lower is the USB-C board.

In order to achieve better heat dissipation, it uses a large piece of graphite thermal stickers to cover the fuselage.

Remove all screws securing the metal plate to the motherboard.

You can see it using a whole piece of metal plate to fix a variety of connectors. The metal plate is also attached to some plastic materials, and its workmanship is relatively complex.

To ensure that the internal hardware is not damaged, we need to disconnect the battery connector first.

Disconnect the front camera connector and remove it.

I tried to remove the rear camera and then remove the motherboard but did not succeed, and the camera was fixed very solidly.
Lift up and remove the motherboard.

The rear camera is fixed on the fuselage with double-sided adhesive, and you must use a small tool to pry it slowly.

The metal shield is coated with thermal grease. Under the metal shield, it should be the processor, RAM and  ROM.

Rear camera: Dual 20MP + 12 MP, f/2.2, dual-LED flash
Front camera: 8MP, f/2.0

You can see that the front camera is assembled by O-Film.

Now, let’s take a look at the bottom of the Huawei Honor 9. The black part is the loudspeaker and is fixed by seven screws. The following should be the USB-C board.

After removing the screws, we tried to remove the loudspeaker, but it didn’t work. It looked very thin. I dare not use too much brute force, so I had to use the hair dryer to heat it up and then remove the loudspeaker smoothly.

As you can see, there are three metal contacts on the speaker that connect the speaker to the USB board.

Disconnect four connectors and a coaxial cable.

Remove the 3.5mm headphone port. As we know, the headphone jack is the most commonly used component, and separate headphone jacks are easier to replace.

The USB-C port with a rubber ring can effectively prevent water and dust from entering the fuselage.

Honor 9 does not use the common adhesive tape to secure the battery; it should use double-sided adhesive to fix the battery to the fuselage. If you replace the battery will be more trouble, after all, remove the battery is not so easy.

Skyworks 77643-21 RF Power Amplifier
RFMD RF5216A F709YX Quad-Band GSM, Linear EDGE Transmit Module
Hisilicon Hi6362 RF chip
Hisilicon Hi6421 power management chip
Hisilicon Hi6422 power management chip
Broadcom BCM47531A1 GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, QZSS receiver

Micron 4GB RAM + Kirin 960
SanDisk SDINADF4-64G 7142PR12JM24 64GB ROM
Hisilicon Hi6403 HiFi chip
Hisilicon Hi623 (unknown)

The Huawei Honor 9 does a pretty good job in terms of workmanship, and its metal frame makes the internal structure of the fuselage very sturdy. In order to achieve better heat dissipation, it uses a large piece of graphite thermal paste to cover the body, and the metal shield of the SOC chip is coated with thermal grease. And details like the rubber-wrapped USB Type-C port and the 3.5mm headphone port also perform quite well.

Each module can be replaced independently, and it uses a lot of double-sided adhesives and glues, so making replacement parts is not so easy.