Huawei today unveiled its latest flagship handset, the Mate 9. In addition, the company also unveiled a special edition of the handset with higher specifications dubbed the Mate 9 Porsche Design.
Featuring Huawei’s in-house Kirin 960 SoC, the Mate 9 sports a 5.96-inch Full HD display. The Kirin 960 chipset is an octa-core chip featuring four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. It also features ARM’s latest G71MP8 GPU that promises significantly better performance than previous Kirin chipsets. The chipset also features an integrated modem that supports LTE Cat 12 and CDMA networks.
The 7.9mm thick handset features dual camera setup at its rear, similar to the one found on the P9 but with more tricks and features up its sleeve. The primary sensor is a 20MP shooter with a f/2.2 lens and OIS. This is paired with a 12MP black and white camera sensor. Thanks to a more powerful DSP, the Mate 9 is able to offer EIS while recording 4K videos. It also provides a bokeh effect that can be applied once a photo is captured. Simulating the 2x zoom found on the iPhone 7 Plus, the Huawei Mate 9 offers a “hybrid 2x zoom” which essentially crops a 20MP photo into a 12MP one. The Leica branding is also present on the device, though it remains unclear if the company actually provided any engineering input to the handset’s dual rear shooter or not.
Other specs of the handset include an 8MP front shooter with autofocus and a F/1.9 lens, 4GB RAM, 64/128GB UFS 2.0 storage, USB Type-C port, hybrid SIM and microSD card slot, fingerprint scanner located at the rear, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2, and dual-band Wi-Fi. All this is powered by a 4000mAh battery, which also features SuperCharge for quick charging. Unlike other fast charging implementations on the market, SuperCharge will dynamically adjust the voltage being supplied from anywhere between 3.5 to 5V with 5A to provide 3.5 hours of video playback after only 10 minutes of charging and up to 58% of charging in just 30 minutes. Like OnePlus’ Dash Charge, one has to use the charger being supplied by Huawei to take advantage of the charging speeds offered by SuperCharge.
EMUI 5.0’s smart and elegant interface makes it easy to love your #HuaweiMate9. pic.twitter.com/fA4SC6DoIE
— Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) November 3, 2016
Huawei is also giving its Emotion UI a huge upgrade with the Mate 9, which is now based on top of Android 7.0 Nougat. Emotion UI 5.0 comes with an app drawer and other features like dual window, ability to run multiple instances of the same app with different user data, and more. To ensure optimum system performance even a few months down the line. Emotion UI 5.0 will automatically analyze the apps you use and prevent other apps from running in the background that slow a device down.
As for the Mate 9 Porsche Design, it features a curved 5.5-inch Quad HD AMOLED display. It also features Huawei’s Kirin 960 SoC, 6GB RAM, 256GB storage, and carries a hefty price tag of $1300. The device will only be launched in the Asian Pacific region. Huawei says that Porsche has helped it in designing the hardware as well as the software of the Mate 9 Porsche Design, and it will also help the company with marketing and distribution.
The Huawei Mate 9 will be available in a handful of color options, including Space Gray, Moonlight Silver, Champagne Gold, Mocha Brown, and Ceramic White. The Mate 9 will be available for around $775 in Europe. It will initially be available in 12 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, with a US launch set for early next year.
