Huawei P9

There’s no doubting the fact that the P9 is a sweet looking smartphone. It resembles a rectangular slab, with rounded edges and corners offsetting the geometry. It might not seem like it at first glance, but the P9 is a slim smartphone, measuring 6.95mm around the waist. It feels comfortable and nicely balanced, and at 144g, is lightweight without feeling flimsy. The P9 features a metal unibody design crafted out of aluminium, and our unit was a nice combination of a black façade and Titanium Grey rear. Unfortunately, as most metal phones are prone to do, the P9 is very slippery, and we highly recommend using a case for protection.

At a time when large screens top the popularity charts among smartphone users, there are still a few flagships that stick to compact screen sizes. The P9 with its 5.2-inch display is one of them. The 2.5D glass gets Gorilla Glass 4 for protection, but curved glass is still fragile, adding weight to our recommendation of putting the P9 in a case.

Huawei and Leica announced their long-term partnership for smartphone photography in January this year, and the P9 is the first device to emerge from that collaboration. The Huawei P9’s cameras might have Leica branding, but make no mistake – these aren’t Leica lenses. Instead, Huawei says the cameras have been ‘co-engineered’ with Leica. The twin lenses use Sony’s IMX286 sensors with f/2.2 aperture, while the module has been manufactured by Sunny Opticals, one of the world’s leading camera module suppliers. So where does Leica’s role come in exactly? There’s been a bit of controversy surrounding this fact, but the companies later issued a clarification, saying that the collaboration included work on the “optical design, imaging quality, image data processing, optimisation, and the mechanical construction of the camera module to the graphic user interface” – basically the cameras get the Leica stamp of approval.

You can’t have a Huawei phone without EMUI, and the Honor runs EMUI 4.1 built atop Android Marshmallow. We’ve had complaints about EMUI in the past, but over the last couple of years, Huawei has really polished its mobile OS, and we think it’s among the best skins you can find on Android phones these days. We’ve covered EMUI in detail in our reviews of both Huawei and Honor devices, so we’ll just skim through the basics.

The Huawei P9 is powered by the brand’s own octa-core Kirin 955 chipset (four 2.5GHz Cortex-A72 cores + four 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 cores), paired with 3GB of RAM. The processor is powerful enough to handle multi-tasking and intensive tasks with ease, although you won’t get the blazing fast speeds you’d find on the Samsung Galaxy S7 duo. Thanks to the Mali-T880 MP4 GPU, gaming on this device is a breeze – we had a few intense sessions of Dead Trigger 2 and Asphalt Nitro and the graphics rendered smoothly without any hiccups. The only issue we faced with the P9 was the occasional app crash or freeze – and this was particularly while using Snapchat. We know Snapchat has issues on Android, but we found it to be particularly problematic on the P9, with errors and crashes too frequent for our liking. The P9 gets warm after extended gaming and use of the camera, but apart from that we didn’t face any heating issues on the phone.