Review: Huawei P9 fires both barrels at Apple, Samsung
Huawei’s P9 is the smartphone equivalent of a double-barrelled shotgun but it shoots photos rather than bullets.
Chinese smartphone makers are turning up the heat on Apple and Samsung and last week I had a chance to take the latest purported iPhone killer, the P9 from Huawei, through its paces.
The P9, which is set to hit the Australian market in coming months, sports not one but two 12-megapixel cameras on the back. It’s the smartphone equivalent of a double-barrelled shotgun but it shoots photos rather than bullets. The dual cameras are the P9’s calling card. But what about the rest of the phone?
Both lenses have the same specs: an f/2.2 aperture and 1.25 micrometer pixel size. But one shoots colour, the other black and white images, and software combines the two into a single image.
Huawei says the black and white lens isn’t constrained by having to record colour variations. So it can record more depth and contrast. It also means you can take shots with more of an arty feel. With manual settings there’s a chance for experimentation.
It’s a different approach to photography than that taken by Samsung, LG, HTC and Sony with their smartphones but it shows the Chinese vendor is serious about smartphone photography. (Added 20 April 16: Huawei in its P9 media statement of April 6 says the phone’s cameras were “co-engineered” in a collaboration with Leica. So they aren’t original Leica lenses manufactured by the German company.)
The P9 has an aluminium unibody construction and a grippy finish at the back. It’s thin with curved edges. Some earlier Chinese-branded phones tended to be less curvaceous and austere looking. That’s not the case here. The P9 has a larger 5.2-inch display when compared to the iPhone 6’s 4.7-inch screen, but with a tiny bezel that gives it a new-age look. The P9 is only marginally larger, and about the same thickness and weight as the 6s.
Huawei has avoided a 2K resolution display, settling on 1080p resolution on an LCD capacitive touch screen with 423 pixels per inch density. It’s high-end but not as highly specced as the gorgeous Galaxy S7 AMOLED display.
In general, IPS displays tend to not be as bright outdoors but the viewing experience was impressive nonetheless. The P9 matches Samsung with a fixed 3000 milliampere-hour battery and you should easily get a day’s general use between charges. The larger 5.9-inch P9 Plus has a feature called dual-IC rapid charging, which Huawei says offers six hours of talk time after a 10-minute charge. But you need the larger phone for that.
Huawei has reproduced two signature features of its Nexus 6P, which last year sold in more than 60 countries. One is the fingerprint reader on the back. I initially found it hard to adjust to a fingerprint sensor on the back when LG introduced it several years ago, but subsequently found it convenient for unlocking devices.
The other feature is a USB Type-C port used both for charging and data transfers. USB Type-C might annoy some users — Samsung chose to avoid it on the S7 — but it is the future and an emerging smartphone standard. The P9 has plenty of processing grunt with an 8-core Kirin 955 processor with four cores rated at 2.5 GHz, faster than on the S7. While it has an array of sensors, there’s no heart rate monitor or barometer for measuring steps, features we’re seeing on some 2016 flagships.
The phone supports up to 128GB of microSD card storage, although it retains add-on storage. Huawei told me the P9 doesn’t support the new adaptive storage feature of Android Marshmallow where the storage acts as a seamless expansion of internal storage.
My grumble is that Huawei persists with layering its EMUI user interface over standard Google Android. I’m a big fan of vanilla (unaltered) Android, which tends to run faster. Users find the vanilla version familiar. The fact the Nexus 6P with vanilla Android was a success for Huawei underlies this. Also, in Western markets the text font should be a more familiar type and size. Steve Jobs did not learn calligraphy for nothing. He rated font choices of prime importance.
Huawei’s high-end consumer smartphone line is a recent development. Last year Huawei’s revenue from phones and tablets increased 73 per cent and it sits behind Apple and Samsung in volume of smartphones sold globally. Overall Huawei has produced a classy smartphone that with both cameras firing just might shoot some holes in the competition.
Chris Griffith travelled to China courtesy of Huawei.
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