Last year’s Huawei Mate 8 was an all round good egg of a phone, but it really blew us away with its astonishing battery life; in the months since its launch, a few rival devices have come within a similar ballpark of offering its many days of juice on a single charge, but none have exceeded it.
It really did set a new benchmark for battery performance. Understandably, then, we’re looking hopefully at the new Huawei Mate 9 successor; is this going to be a major step forward? Can it once again re-define the boundaries of battery performance?
Huawei Mate 9 Review: Design & Display
My first impression upon unboxing the phone is that the Huawei Mate 9 is a pretty cool looking device, and it quickly becomes quite obvious as to why; there are stylistic cues from the HTC 10 and Apple’s iPhone series - in fact it has quite a close resemblance to Apple’s larger “Plus” model devices. Original the design may not be. Derivative, even? Perhaps, to an extent. But even so, it is a sleek, all-metal, premium design that has been very well executed.
Maybe I’m being overly generous, but it doesn’t feel right to me to detract points (hypothetically, of course, we don’t do a points system round here) from Huawei just because there are similarities to similarly constructed smartphones elsewhere on the market. You want a big-screen, premium, metal-built handset? Well this is pretty much how they’re going to look, at least until we enter into the realms of flexible folding displays.
The rear panel appears to be made of some fairly thin aluminium, as there is a tiny bit of give and flex to the shell when gently squeezed, but the rest of the bodywork feels very solid indeed. The power key and volume rocker are both metal and have a really nice, solid, and clicky feedback.
The whole quasi-industrial design is executed very well with the integrated antenna bands and a bare minimum of ports and other visual interruptions, Huawei has clearly tried hard to integrate most needed components as seamlessly as possible. The base plate is rather eye catching and houses a Type-C USB port flanked by a pair of small screws and then a set of speaker grilles; rather than the usual round holes these use nice little rounded lozenge shaped openings.
A second speaker grille sits at the top of the front panel, above the display, it’s very small and discrete with a punched circular mesh design in a black colour to match the surround.
There’s one, flush-fitting card tray on the side and two small round openings on the top; a 3.5mm headphone jack and the other presumably a sensor or microphone.
On the back panel things are neat and tidy, with all the interesting stuff happening towards the top; a large lozenge houses a Leica-branded dual-camera sensor (complete with the Leica name emblazoned on the sensor array); it’s not flush-fitting, protruding from the bodywork by about 1mm, this is then flanked by two smaller lozenges, one a dual-LED flash module, and the other appears to be the hybrid autofocus module. Beneath the camera sensor is a small round circle recessed into the shell, this is of course the now obligatory fingerprint scanner. The recessed design makes it nice and easy to find with your finger by feel alone.
One of the most striking things here is the display, which pretty much dominates the front fascia leaving a bare minimum of space up top and around 3mm of bezel on the sides with a 77% screen-to-body ratio; Huawei’s also got the transition from glass to bodywork along the edges implemented very nicely indeed with a gentle contour and a seamless seal which not only looks good but feels very solid too.
In terms of image quality, it’s pretty accomplished as well, sure, it’s not Samsung’s Super AMOLED, but the 5.9in IPS LCD and its 1080p FHD resolution manages to offer up a respectable 373ppi pixel density which, to the naked eye at normal viewing distances, is not exactly lacking in clarity or sharpness. The contrast is good, and colour is punchy, while viewing angles are also nice and wide.
White purity is ok, though by default I noticed a slight yellowish tint, however, Huawei has sensibly included a software menu which allows you to pick between default, cold, and warm colour settings, as well as to manually pick your own hue on a colour wheel. With enough tweaking it’s not too difficult to get things looking “better” according to your own perceptions, but don’t expect 100% colour accuracy here.
Personally I found the Mate 9 display very satisfying to look at and operate in general smartphone use; it's a pleasing display for colourful games and films with a very high level of image quality. In terms of the exterior design, this is a solid device which is rewarding to handle, though it is on the larger side and you do have to give your digits a good bit of a stretch on occasion - smaller hands many struggle. I am fond of the aesthetic and how things have been kept nice and simple, but it should be noted that the Huawei Mate 9 doesn't keep up with rivals in offering additional practical features such as waterproofing.
Huawei Mate 9 Review: Processor Performance & Hardware
As we've seen from a number of other Huawei devices in recent years, the Mate 9 uses a model from the firm's own HiSilicon Kirin processor family and, being a flagship device, it unsurprisingly uses the very latest and greatest high-end chip; the Kirin 960. To date the Kirin processors have done some pretty amazing work, often besting their equivalent contemporary chips from the likes of rivals such as Samsung, Apple, and Qualcomm, and the Kirin 960 appears no different in being a powerhouse of a processor readily capable of taking on the big boys.
In terms of specs, it's a 64-bit octa-core setup using a 16-nanometre FinFET semiconductor architecture, together with ARM's big-LITTLE microarchitecture. That boils down to four ARM Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and 1.8GHz respectively. This is also teamed up with 4GB of LPDDR4 dual-channel RAM and a Mali-G71 MP8 graphics processing unit (GPU) clocked at 900MHz - Huawei claims that the GPU alone has an 180% performance boost over the previous T880 GPU.
When Huawei announced this chip it took steps to demonstrate just how capable the hardware is, showcasing its ability to handle some pretty intensive multitasking of a large array of apps simultaneously. I can confirm through my own use of the phone that this wasn't just talk or a specially curated demo; the Huawei Mate 9 is indeed a highly capable phone when it comes to hefting a significant workload.
You can, quite literally, rack up app after app and not worry about it stumbling over, and app load speeds are also impressively rapid. For those who like to keep tabs on memory efficiency, Huawei's multitasking UI also handily tells you how much memory you're currently using with your running apps, and how much you free up by swiping them away to close.
For general operation and interaction with the handset and the Android software the Huawei Mate 9 is, in short, an absolute joy, with silky smooth screen transitions and menu animations; there is zero lag here to speak of. With higher intensity applications like gaming it's also not going to break a sweat any time soon, it's quite easily capable of taking on the most graphically intensive games on Google Play with no holds barred. I was particularly impressed with how relatively cool the back panel remained despite gaming for longer periods, a testament to the efficiency of the architecture and design.
The Huawei Mate 9 features a single dual-slot card tray which accomodates both a Nano SIM card and a microSD storage card with support for cards up to 256GB. Dual-SIM compatible variants are available in selected regions, but in the UK we don't get those! Onboard storage is 64GB which for me is more than adequate; I will likely never fill that up, but if you're a power user who is used to stuffing 128GB capacity phones with films and photos you may be in trouble here, but at least you have microSD capability.
The rather attractive speaker grilles I mentioned earlier aren't just for show; audio quality from the stero speakers is very high indeed, superb even; it's not quite HTC BoomSound but it's not far off either. The Mate 9 also has the usual selection you'd expect from a high-end device when it comes to 4G, Wi-Fi and other connectivity protocols. The full selection includes Wi-Fi 802.11 dual-band, DLNA, WiFi Direct, WiFi Hotspot, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2 LE and Type-C USB, as well as a full suite of GPS capabilites.
Huawei Mate 9 Review: Battery Life
This is the big kahuna; the Mate 9 has a suitably massive 4,000mAh non-removable battery cell dwelling inside its sizeable phablet form. We often find the best measure for real-world intensive use is pretty much watching a long movie on full brightness from a full 100% charge and seeing what the damage is. Mad Max Fury Road, our test movie for this review, has a two-hour runtime which, by the end, saw the Mate 9 running at 70% charge. Not bad, roughly a 10% per hour discharge rate for media on full screen brightness, and certainly in-line with the Huawei Mate 8 and other big battery performers we've seen in the last 12-18 months. it doesn't, however, exceed them, so we can't say the Mate 9 appears to be pushing boundaries any further than its predecessor - not that this is a negative, it is still a stonker of a perfomer in the battery department and offers a much longer life than most other offerings around. In general operation on less intensive use the Huawei Mate 9 does just keep going for days of use on a single charge, you can easily get a couple of days out of it if you're using a fair few apps, calling, browsing, and messaging as per usual. If, however, you're one of those people who doesn't touch your phone too much, you can expect the Mate 9 to last a week on a single charge, going down by about 7-10% a day if largely left to its own devices; that makes it a good option for longer trips away, provided you can discipline yourself to give it some space!
In short, I am tremendously impressed with the Huawei Mate 9's battery performance, in so far as it's easily as good as its predecessor and the rest of the best of the current market. If, however, you were expecting the next-gen of boundary pushing battery life then, although what you'll find here is an absolute beast, it is not that.
Huawei Mate 9 Review: Camera
Christmas may have got in the way of this review progressing forward but what it also did was enable me to grab a bunch of colourful festive photos to amply demonstrate just how good the Huawei Mate 9's camera is. This isn't new tech, however, at least not brand spanking new anyway. It's the same setup from the Huawei P9 flagship, which means a Leica-branded dual-sensor setup with one 20MP sensor and one 12MP sensor, one of these for monochrome image data and the other for colour, with the built-in advanced image signal processor (ISP) merging the two snaps together into one high-detail image. The result is pretty astounding to say the very least. Other noteworthy specs include the f/2.2 aperture size (sure, it's not a 1.7 or 1.8, but still pretty wide), optical image stabilisation (OIS), dual-LED dual-tone flash, 2160p video recording, and hybrid phase-detection and laser autofocus. The front-facing secondary camera is an f/1.9 aperture, 8MP sensor with 1080p video capture.
Regular:
Rich Colour mode:
HDR:
Huawei's camera UI is pretty easy to get to grips with, there are a few simple swipe gestures to access different menu screens for changing things like the resolution, toggling on or off features such as touch to capture, and so on. It's a pretty fully featured suite but there are a few things to note. Firstly, Huawei's use of a dual-lens setup means that the phone has the capacity for lossless zoom, but if you're on maximum 20MP resolution you can't use zoom at all.
HDR (both):
Another thing is the dual-lens also has the capability to allow users to re-select a focal point after capture, but importantly this isn't built-in, it can only be obtained as part of an optional software update. Incidentally, if I had one gripe with the Mate 9's camera it is some funny focus behaviour; the hybrid autofocus module is great as it's very fast, and most of the time it's fine, but sometimes is just seems to pick a really odd point to focus on and softens a bunch of the image elsewhere.
None of that applies if you swipe to the phone's much-anticipated Pro camera mode, however, which allows you to fine tune all the typical camera controls such as focus, exposure, white balance, ISO, and the rest. This is great for photography afficionados.
Regular:
HDR:
HDR & Rich Colour:
The Mate 9's standard capture mode is impressive, particularly on higher resolutions. There's also "Smooth Colour" mode, which from what I could see didn't appear to change anything, however, HDR makes things noticably punchier and is well worth using wherever possible. There's also an enhanced colour mode which really amps up the saturation; this might be good in some instances, say trying to capture a really vibrant image for a business card or your Facebook banner, but I felt for most other applications it was a bit over the top. Similarly, HDR and rich colour combined is a very robust image but a bit full on if you want something more natural.
Regular:
HDR:
HDR & Rich Colour:
Monochrome:
All in all the Huawei Mate 9's camera is one seriously competetive piece of kit; the image quality is high with great clarity, dynamic range, colour, and contrast. It's tooled up enough to be an engaging option for camera buffs, but in its default state is easily accessible for your average or casual user too. Top marks to Huawei and Leica here.
Huawei Mate 9 Review: Software & UI
The Mate 9 runs Android 7.0 Nougat out the box with Huawei's own Emotion UI (EMUI) 5.0 on top. As usual I'm a bit torn on EMUI, there are a lot of ways in which it seems to be similar to stock Android, but perhaps as many ways in which it's not - it's kind of annoyingly close and yet so far, but at the same time reassuringly close, if that makes sense, which admittedly it probably doesn't.
It's not stock Android, but it feels a bit like it, but there is a bunch of stuff you'll notice where it's definitely not stock Android. It's a weird mongrel of a UI which makes me feel like Huawei can't decide if it wants users to feel like they're using a Pixel or an iPhone or something else entirely. Fortunately it is highly customisable, even more so now that Huawei has given users the option of toggling the once-missing Android app drawer back on if they wish.
All that aside, it's fairly neat, clean, and tidy, and has some very nice aesthetic touches. EMUI has always had a habit of doing nice and clever things with background images if you want it to and that doesn't stop here. On top of this, performance wise it is fantastic, there's no hiccups or jagged transitions to be found running on the Kirin chipset.
Huawei Mate 9 Review: Conclusion
This is a very impressive phone and I have really enjoyed using it. It's not perfect, and there are rivals on the market which do exceed it in certain areas. I feel that Samsung still produces a better display, for example, but the difference isn't huge; the Huawei Mate 9 still has the ability to please in spite of this, as although while using its screen I could acknowledge that there were others I've seen that are marginally superior, this didn't detract from the enjoyment of what was still a brilliantly executed part of the phone. In pretty much all other areas, however, it's a fantastic device; the camera quality is truly something that needs to be seen to be fully appreciated, and the Mate 9 also doesn't leave you wanting at all when it comes to processor performance clout.
The battery aspect is very much a question of how you look at it; glass half full or half empty. True, it would have been nice to see boundaries pushed further and an even more impressive battery life than last year's model, but realistically, this is probably about as good as we can expect with current battery tech - having not moved forward much at all in recent years. Most of these gains are made by bigger and bigger cells, and better optimised hardware and software elsewhere on the phone, and even here there's a limit. All that said, it's still extremely capable in terms of battery life, both in and of itself, and compared against the vasy majority of what else populates the market.
In other words I prefer to look at it as a glass half full and appreciate the excellent battery life this handset offers, which is well above average.
With its big, punchy, and sharp display; extended battery life; and excellent audio experience, the Mate 9 is a great option if you're an avid lover of films, games, and music, particularly if you're on the go a lot and just can't seem to find a device which can go the distance in terms of juice, audio quality, and picture quality. It really does tick all the right boxes as a portable multimedia viewer. Then of course there's the photography angle ON TOP of all this.
