Huawei has dropped many a great smartphone over the previous couple of years. We’ve seen the likes of the Huawei P9, the Huawei Mate 8, and the budget-oriented Honor 8. The Huawei P9 was the first Huawei phone whose camera was co-engineered alongside Leica. That partnership is seen once again in the Huawei Mate 9, the latest flagship smartphone from the Chinese smartphone manufacturer.
A Forgettable design
If you’ve ever handled the Huawei Mate 8, you’ll recognise the same design build in the Huawei Mate 9. Huawei hasn’t looked to reinvent the wheel when it comes to aesthetics, going for a full metal unibody design. The result lends tangibility to the premium feel of the device. However, there are subtle differences when compared to its predecessor. For instance, the Huawei Mate 9 has curved edges on both the front and back of the phone, allowing for a sturdier grip.
And you’ll need a sturdy grip because the Huawei Mate 8 is on the larger side of the smartphone spectrum. Measuring in at 157x79x7.9 mm, it’s in the same category size-wise as the iPhone 7 Plus and the Google Pixel XL. Those dimensions conceal a vast armada of bits and bobs which together bring the weight of the Huawei Mate 9 up to 190g, adding a noticeable amount of heftiness to the product. Perhaps it’s just the illusion of the bulging backside of the Mate 9 that gives it that heftiness.
While it is a premium looking product, with the metal unibody, slim bezels & curved back, it doesn’t feel memorable. That’s especially pronounced when compared with other industry “XL” smartphones, such as the flammable Note 7 with its curved glass, or the Huawei Mate 9 Porsche edition.
The USB Type-C charging port is situated on the bottom face of the smartphone, right in between two speaker grilles. Don’t be fooled; it’s only a single stereo speaker placed in the right grille, that emits noise. The volume rocker and the power button are both situated on the right face of the Mate 9, with an ample amount of space separating the two, ensuring you won’t accidentally lock your phone when trying to reduce the volume or vice versa. The opposite, left face of the device, is bare of any obtrusions and houses the Dual SIM Card slot.
Thankfully, Huawei hasn’t gone down the route of the iPhone 7 or the Moto Z; there is a 3.5mm headphone jack situated at the top of the smartphone, sharing that space with the infrared emitter. The back of the Huawei Mate 9 houses an indented fingerprint reader which sits a few millimetres below the raised dual camera lens. While the front of the smartphone is largely taken up by the display (which is nearly edge-to-edge because of the slim bezels), the shiny Huawei logo sits at the bottom, whilst the front facing camera sits at the top, offset from the centre by a couple of millimetres.
A Not So Quad Display
The Huawei Mate 9 features a nearly borderless display thanks to the slim bezels on the device. However, for a flagship smartphone, it astounded me that the Mate 9 doesn’t feature a QHD display. Instead, Huawei has packed a 5.9-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen that has a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels into the Mate 9. It comes out to a pixel density of about 373 ppi. The lack of pixels is especially confounding when you realise the Huawei Mate 9 is one of the few Google Daydream-ready VR smartphones available on the market.
However, when it comes to general usage, the Huawei Mate 9’s display is more than adequate. Yes, I would have liked to view my photos on a QHD display, but the Mate 9’s display does a good job of accurately reproducing colours. Brightness is spot on as well, letting you use it out in broad daylight and the viewing angles are great, though there is some colour drop off when viewing it at an extreme angle. It’s a vivid & bright display, one that’s great for normal use, just don’t expect to be astounded by the VR experience.
Dual Cameras by Leica
While it may not have had the design or display you wanted, there is no doubt that the Huawei Mate 9 has one of the best camera lenses on the market. Shooting pictures with the Mate 9 was an absolute joy. The Huawei Mate 9 is the second smartphone from the smartphone maker to feature Leica’s iconic lenses. The newer module now includes a 12-megapixel/F2.2 RGB sensor and a 20-megapixel/F2.2 monochrome sensor and enhanced image fusion algorithms that work in concert to produce stunning photography.
All this put together gave me one of the best camera testing experiences I’ve had. The Mate 9’s monochrome lens gave especially good B&W pictures, ones that are far better than you would get by simply applying a filter to an RGB image. There’s also a pro mode, letting you fine tune the ISO, shutter speed, exposure value, focus and white balance. The focus was something I found the Mate 9 to struggle with its automatic mode, often prompting me to switch to the Pro Mode.
Another key aspect of the Huawei Mate 9 is its Wide Aperture feature. When enabled, it will do its best to produce photos with a shallow depth of field. It’s a great feature to toy around with, blurring the background of your image while your main feature is focused clearly. However, much like with the P9, it does often get confused, being unable to decide what part of the image is the foreground or background.
The Dual-Lens camera also features “Hybrid Zoom”. Funnily enough, you can’t zoom in when taking pictures at 20MP, and the zoom at 12MP, while optical at first, goes digital halfway through.
The front-facing camera is a 8 MP, f/1.9 sensor that performs admirably well when it comes you selfie purposes. When it comes to video, the front-facing camera can shoot 1080p video whilst the rear lenses can shoot 2160p at 30FPS or 1080p at 60FPS.
Software; EMUI 5 is A Fantastic Refresh
Huawei’s Emotion UI is something I’ve never been terribly fond of. The lack of an app drawer and the abundance of bloatware is an instant turnoff for me. However, EMUI 5, the latest iteration of Huawei’s skinned version of Android 7.0, is fundamentally different from the previous version of EMUI. The first is the addition of the app drawer, letting you hide away apps that you don’t access often enough to merit them a space on your homepage. There’s also an immediate and noticeable lack of lag when compared to older versions of EMUI.
Quickness is a priority with EMUI 5.0, with over 50% of features being only two taps away, while over 90% of said features are no more than 3 clicks away. The drop down notification bar lets you quickly access a myriad of different features, with more obscure ones accessible through the settings button. There’s a fantastic eye comfort mode, which changes the colour reproduction when using the smartphone in darker conditions, preventing you from straining your eyes.
A Performance Powerhouse
Performance is another aspect the Huawei Mate 9 has a leading edge on. To be fair, Huawei has always been exemplary when it comes to powerful smartphones. Even their mid-tier phones perform admirably well. The Huawei Mate 9 is powered by their own Hisilicon Kirin 960 chipset, which houses an Octa-core (4×2.4 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A53) CPU and a Mali G71 Octa-core GPU. Backing the chipset is 4GB of RAM, which together provides a seamless experience, even with performance intensive apps.
For storage purposes, you have an internal storage of 64GB that is expandable up to 256GB by replacing one of the SIM slots with a MicroSD card. Battery wise, the Huawei Mate 9 houses a top of the line, non-removable Li-Po 4000 mAh battery that’s coupled with Huawei’s SuperCharge technology. The two combined can give you more than a day’s worth of battery on medium to high usage after a mere 30 minutes of charging. That’s thanks in part due to the HD display as opposed to QHD display as well as the software improvements of EMUI 5.0.
All said and done, the Huawei Mate 9 scored 2817 on Basemark OS, which is far below the 3,221 the iPhone 7 Plus has scored on Basemark OS, but above the Galaxy S7 Edge and Google Pixel XL.
Absolute Verdict
Compared to the Mate 8, the Huawei Mate 9 is a huge step. While it may not be as aesthetically innovative as other flagship smartphones nor does it come with a QHD display, the Huawei Mate 9 truly shines in the camera, performance and software category. EMUI 5.0 is an especially refreshing redesign of EMUI and is sure to attract Android users who were perturbed by the structure of older EMUI versions.
Pricing at AED 2299 in Champagne Gold and Mocha Brown in 64GB, it’s a worthy upgrade consumers should consider.
