Table of Contents
Introduction
Huawei’s charge towards becoming a global brand continues with the Huawei P9 and P9 Plus. Both are sleek metal phones with a powerful chipset and a unique dual-camera setup, the duo is all set to tackle the global flagships.
The Huawei Mate 8 is taking on the large phablets with its 6″ screen, so it falls to the P9 to battle the 5-inchers – Galaxy S7, LG G5, HTC 10, you name it. Let’s play a quick game of “2016 flagship bingo” and see if the Huawei checks all the right boxes.
Huawei P9 at a glance:
- Metal unibody, 6.95mm thick
- 5.2″ IPS LCD screen with 1080p resolution (424ppi)
- Android 6.0 Marshmallow with EMUI 4.1
- HiSilicon Kirin 955 chipset (16nm): 4x Cortex-A72 at 2.5GHz + 4x Cortex-A53 at 1.8GHz, 3GB/4GB of RAM, Mali-T880 GPU
- 32GB/64GB storage; microSD slot
- dual 12MP camera with Hybrid autofocus, dual-LED flash; 1080p video; 8MP selfie camera
- Dual SIM (hybrid slot); LTE Cat. 6 with global roaming; USB Type-C; Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC
- Fingerprint reader on the back
- 3,000mAh battery (non-removable)
The only thing that’s “off” is the screen resolution – 1080p instead of QHD. Huawei’s CEO has long held that QHD is a waste of battery life and he stands by this claim over a year later.
It’s definitely not due to a lack of processing power – Huawei has been building up its chipset brand and the latest HiSilicon Kirin 955 is a proper beast. It combines four Cortex-A72 cores at 2.5GHz (plus four “little” A53 cores) with a Mali-T880 GPU, basically what the Exynos 8890 would have been if Samsung didn’t switch to custom “big” cores.
