Huawei P9 Review

Two years ago, Chinese networking giant Huawei sent me an unrequested Ascend P7 for review — an Android smartphone that keenly reinforced all the prejudices about Chinese copycats. The software was a tacky iOS ripoff, the industrial design echoed Sony’s Xperia Z line, and the battery life was nonexistent. But two years is a mighty long time in the tech realm, and today’s Huawei is a fundamentally different beast.

Having built the excellent Nexus 6P for Google last year, Huawei returns in 2016 with its most beautiful design to date and a partnership with Leica that promises to “revolutionize smartphone photography.” The P9 has a dual-camera system, which I think represents the first steps toward the future of mobile photography, however the Leica branding is mostly just hype. It’s not really the reason why my SIM continues to make a happy home inside the P9.

The P9 is a flagship phone in every respect but the price. In the UK, this smartphone costs £450, which is less than Samsung’s regular Galaxy S7, less than LG’s G5 without any modular extras, and a lot less than HTC’s 10. I’ve spent ample time with each of these devices and I can say with confidence that Huawei’s cheaper price doesn’t translate into a poorer design. Purely in terms of ergonomics, my favorite phone from this bunch is Huawei’s.

Notifications on the P9 are more refined than Android’s default. A Telegram message on the HTC 10 or Galaxy S7 drops in a big Material Design card from the top of the screen, which is no more informative than Huawei’s subtler sliver alert. I get much more information when reviewing notifications on the P9 because Huawei favors density — something that LG and Samsung could learn from. There are also granular app permissions and I’m alerted to apps that consume power in the background. That might be an annoyance to some, but it actually helps my obsessiveness with maximizing battery life, alerting me, for example, about Google Docs’ clandestine power draw. In past years, Huawei’s gimmicky gesture inputs might have been the only thing to distinguish its software. But now the company has truly useful add-ons like its Wi-Fi+ connection manager. It automatically switches the phone’s Wi-Fi radio off when I leave my home and back on when I return. And it ranks wireless sources by strength of connection, switching between them faster than any other smartphone I’ve used. You’ll appreciate this feature if, like me, you have multiple Wi-Fi access points in your house.

The Kirin processor that undermines the good news around Huawei’s big battery also plays the spoiler with respect to the P9’s performance. Small traces of lag and animation stutters are apparent on this phone that you won’t find on its Snapdragon 820 competitors. There’s clearly enough power here to handle intensive tasks — photos shot with the two cameras are processed almost as swiftly as a single capture on any other phone — but there are tiny delays and imperfections that detract from the smoothest user experience. If the Huawei P9 were that little bit faster and its camera were that little bit better, it could have been my favorite phone.