Huawei is not a name that naturally rolls off the tongue when talking about smartphones. Names that do often end up being “Apple”, “Samsung”, “HTC”, “LG” or even “Sony”. This is probably because Huawei does a lot of their business in their home of China, but they’ve been moving into Europe and want to make waves in North America, soon as well. The Huawei P9 is the latest in a long line of flagship devices that the company sells across Europe, and this time around they’ve partnered with the fabled Leica camera brand. The P9 follows in the footsteps of last year’s P8, and keeps the same lower price while still offering some of the best specs available. With an intriguing dual camera setup that’s either “co-engineered” or “certified” by Leica (depending on who you ask and who you believe) can the P9 put Huawei on the map, or is it just another great phone at a great price that doesn’t quite have “it”?The Huawei P9 is a different beast from most on the inside, with some interesting high points and some offbeat low points, too. Huawei is one of the few – along with Samsung – manufacturers that can put together their system-on-chip to run the show in the P9. The model we have for testing is powered by Huawei’s own Kirin 955 CPU, which is itself a 64-bit octa-core CPU with a quad-core Cortex-A72 CPU clocked at 2.5 Ghz and a more efficient 1.8 Ghz Cortex-A53 quad-core CPU paired together. In terms of graphics, the P9 features a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. There are two models available, one which has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage, and another with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. There is a microSD card slot as well, which supports up to 200GB in expandable storage.
Enough about processors and RAM, the two cameras around the back will no doubt be a focal point. Each of the two cameras are essentially identical, but one of them is a monochrome sensor, taking photos only in black and white. Both sensors are a 12-megapixel Sony IMX 286 and they both feature Leica Summaritz lenses with f/2.2 apertures. Huawei promise 270% more light as a result of this setup than the iPhone 6S and 90% more light than the Galaxy S7, due to the combination of the two cameras together. These sensors are 1.76-micron pixel equivalent and while the front camera isn’t quite as good, it’s still a respectable 8-megapixel shooter. Seeing all of these pictures takes place on a 5.2-inch LCD Full HD display, which might not be as impressive as many had been hoping for, but it’s what Huawei has chosen to go with nonetheless.
Huawei’s P9 features what Huawei calls one of the most advanced fingerprint sensors on the market which includes 3D ridge depth scanning. One notable inclusion is the USB Type-C port, which allows for a reversible connector and much speedier data transfer as it’s a USB 3.0 connection. Elsewhere, the Huawei P9 features a non-removable 3,000 mAh battery, support for WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac in both 2.4 Ghz and 5.0 Ghz dual-band varieties, GPS, GLONASS, Bluetooth 4.2, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a smart antenna system. Huawei says this antenna system will quickly change when you move from a 4G to a 3G zone and also swap to a second antenna depending on how you hold the device in order to offer the best signal and performance. There’s a laundry list of specs included in the P9, and to keep this review just within the word count of War and Peace, we’ve included screens from AIDA 64 for those needing to know it all.
Huawei is known for offering up some pretty good value where smartphones are concerned, and the value also extends to what’s included in the package alongside the phone itself. In terms of packaging, the P9 features a fairly standard look and feel, with a flat, square design that displays the phone quite nicely. Underneath the phone itself there are three individual boxes, each of these is easy to remove from the packaging, and one contains a USB power brick, one a USB Type-C cable with a pair of standard iPhone-looking earphones and another that contains all of your paperwork. For whatever reason, the smaller box for the paperwork didn’t actually have anything in it in our review unit. Regardless, everything else was accounted for and while this is a fairly standard amount of add-ins for a smartphone of this sort of cost, it’s clear that Huawei have given a lot of thought to how they wanted the box and packaging to look.
Considering the P9’s price tag, this is some premium packaging, it’s nice and minimal and laid out well, giving customers a look at their device and clear pointers on how to get started and which part of the box has what inside of it.
The Huawei P9 ships with a 5.2-inch LCD Full HD display, giving it a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and a pixel density of roughly 424 pixels per inch. While a resolution of 1080p isn’t anything to scoff at, we would have expected something a little better from Huawei, especially given the excellent AMOLED Quad HD display that they shipped with the Nexus 6P last Fall. Pixels aren’t the only part of whether or not a display is any good of course, and for a lot of people, they won’t even notice the difference between this and a Quad HD display. Color and clarity is what counts, and while the P9 certainly has the color, it’s not all that clear in a lot of cases. Focusing on color for a moment, the P9’s display is fairly “okay”, and by that I mean that colors are realistic and they look as they should when watching videos or surfing the web, but they’re far from exciting, which will be a disappointment for some.
