The Huawei Mate 9 is coming to the US. Here's what we think so far.
The Huawei Mate 9 is officially coming to the US and it’s bringing along a friend. At CES, Huawei announced they are officially entering the flagship market here in the States and they’re bringing over their Mate 9.
The packaging the Mate 9 comes in is very high quality-- exactly what we expect from a Huawei flagship and similar to their previous Mate launches. The Mate 9 is a beautiful device with a 5.9-inch Full HD display, ours in the Moonlight Silver color. On the back is a pair of cameras co-engineered with Leica. It has a 20-megapixel monochrome camera and a 12-megapixel full RGB camera, both at f2.2. Internally is a Huawei-made Kirin 960 Octa-Core processor with a Mali-G71 GPU and 4GB of RAM and it comes with 64GB of storage but a microSD card slot accepts cards up to 256GB.
The design of the Mate 9 is very Note 7-esque, which is not a complaint at all. The Mate 9 is one seriously good-looking phone but we sort of which they brought over the Mate 9 Pro with those curved edges. The design is a complete uni-body construction and just feels amazingly solid in the hand. Also amazing is the software onboard, 7.0 Nougat is here with EMUI 5.0, Huawei’s custom skin. With the onboard hardware, the phone definitely feels very speedy and enough to compete with the best of the best like the S7 and S7 edge and things like the Pixel. Also a huge plus in the hardware department is USB Type-C and a 4,000mAh battery to power you through the day.
But one big announcement with the Mate 9 here in the States is Alexa, which is now coming to your phone. The Mate 9 will be the first device to feature Amazon’s Alexa featuring a few Amazon products and third party products. The virtual assistant will be available on the device in the future and do things like turning on and off lights, calling Ubers, and ordering things right off of Amazon.com. An interesting twist for a personal assistant but perhaps not the best for an Android flagship device.
Our review will be published soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, let us know what you think of the Huawei Mate 9!