The year may be winding down, but it’s still in flagship season in the smartphone world, and today Huawei introduced its latest piece of kit.
The Huawei Mate 9 is the company’s newest Android flagship. Like the P9 that debuted earlier this year, the Mate 9 has a dual rear camera setup with that Huawei says has been “co-engineered” with well-known camera company Leica. The dual camera setup includes a 12-megapixel RGB sensor and a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor, and there’s also a 4-in-1 Hybrid Auto-focus feature here that combines laser focus, phase detection focus, depth focus and contrast focus.
Also included with the Mate 9 is Huawei’s new Kirin 960 processor. This chipset includes an octa-core CPU and octa-core GPU, and Huawei claims that the Kirin 960 offers the best multi-core performance of any smartphone processor while cutting power consumption by 15 percent. The 960 also utilizes the Vulkan graphics standard found in Android 7.0 for boosted graphics performance.
Other specs of the Huawei Mate 9 include a 5.9-inch 1920x1080 display, 8-megapixel front-facing camera, 64GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, dual SIM slots (one of which can double as a microSD slot), a rear fingerprint reader, and a 4,000mAh battery with fast charging support. When it comes time to recharge that battery, you do so over USB Type-C. Finally, the Mate 9 runs on Huawei’s EMUI 5.0 user interface.
Huawei today also introduced a limited edition Porsche Design Huawei Mate 9. This device is a bit different than the standard Mate 9, boasting a 5.5-inch 2560x1440 curved edge AMOLED display, 6GB of RAM, and 256GB of built-in storage. It’s also got Porsche Design branding on its front and rear.
The Huawei Mate 9 will launch first in China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates, and it’s also been confirmed to be coming to the US at some point, too. Pricing will be set at €699 ($774 USD) and color options include Black, Space Gray, Moonlight Silver, Champagne Gold, Mocha Brown and Ceramic White.
As for the Porsche Design Huawei Mate 9, it’ll be sold in Graphite Black for €1395 ($1544 USD). This model will be available at Porsche Design stores in Europe in late December and will hit other Porsche Design stores worldwide (except the US) in January as well as Huawei stores in Asia, Middle East, and Europe.
Huawei’s Mate 9 looks like a solid flagship offering. While not everyone will love its huge 5.9-inch screen, it appears to have slim side bezels and curved back that should make it a bit easier to handle. The Mate 9 checks many of the other boxes that you’d expect from a flagship in late 2016, like a fingerprint reader, 4GB of RAM, high-end processor, and so on, and so it’ll be interesting to see how it stacks up to the competition in real-world performance.
What do you think of the Huawei Mate 9?
