Huawei isn’t the most well-known phone maker in the UK, but it’s kind of a big deal. The company sold over 100 million devices last year, most in its native China, making it the third biggest smartphone maker in the world after Samsung and Apple. The company announced its latest flagship phone in London today, the P9. Its standout feature is a Leica-approved dual-lens camera, but there’s plenty more to see here. Let’s take a look.
Cameras
Dual cameras definitely seem to be in this year, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this. The P9 comes with two 12-megapixel sensors, one of which is colour and the other is monochrome. This lets you take awesome-looking raw black and white images, but it also improves colour photos by providing more 50% more contrast data and capturing 300% more light data. The dual-lens setup is backed with a laser autofocus, although there’s no optical image stabilisation. The camera passes Leica’s quality controls and was “co-engineered” with the company, although it’s hard to know exactly what that really means. Wait for the first reviews to see how this all shapes up, but it definitely seems like a promising system.
Design
The P9 follows the current smartphone trends, with an slim aluminium body measuring less than 7mm thick. The phone’s 5.2-inch 1080p display has minimal bezels, dominating the front of the phone, but there’s still space for an 8-megapixel selfie camera. The display also supports the Force Touch technology that debuted on the Mate 8, which can be used like Apple’s 3D Touch (and for weighing oranges).
There’s a tray on the left side, with room for one nano SIM card and one Micro SD card; the volume and lock buttons are on the right side. The bottom of the phone has a speaker, a USB-C port and a headphone port. On the back, you’ll find the two rear cameras in the upper left, and a fingerprint reader in the centre, where your index finger would naturally rest.
Hardware
The P9 is powered by Huawei’s latest processor, the octa-core Kirin 955 which has four cores at 1.8GHz and four at 2.5GHz. This is backed with 3 GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of internal storage. The battery inside isn’t removable, but is fairly capacious at 3,000mAh. An IR blaster is also included on the phone.
UK price and availability
The P9 will be available from April 16th in the UK, at a cost of £449 SIM-free. It’ll also launch in China and several EMEA nations at the same time. Colour options include pink, gold and silver.
Huawei also announced the larger and more expensive P9 Plus, which has a 5.5-inch IPS display at 1080p, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a 3,400mAh battery. The P9 Plus goes on sale in May in both Europe and Asia. It’ll cost £449, and come in black, silver or gold.
Accessories
Of course, we’ve already begun stocking cases and accessories for the P9 and P9 Plus. Take a look at what we’ve got via the buttons below, and let us know what you think of the phones in the comments!
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