The Huawei P9 family has been leaked several times now, first appearing at the end of 2015. The P6 will be the fifth generation Huawei P-series device to appear, which started with the Ascend P2, moved to the Ascend P6 in 2013 and then to the P8 (less the “Ascend” moniker) in 2015. There are likely to be four models in the P9 family consisting of the vanilla P9, a less expensive version similar to the 2015 Huawei P8 Lite, a larger version similar to the P8 Max, but it might have the word “Plus” in the name. There is also reputed to be a high end variant, not too dissimilar to the Sony Z5 and Z5 Premium device. The devices will come with a dual rear camera set up. Each of these cameras is a 12MP unit behind a Leica lens and the device will come with some clever software tricks that are expected to represent a refinement of this technology, which Huawei first used on the Honor 6 Plus. It will be interesting to see how Huawei’s dual camera technology works.
The standard P9 variant has a full HD, or 1080p, 5.2-inch display panel and will be powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 950, backed up by 3 GB of RAM. The Kirin 950 is one of Huawei’s newest chipsets and uses an octa core, big.LITTLE architecture design reckoned to have a 2.5 GHz higher performance quad core cluster consisting of the ARM Cortex-A72 design. This is combined with a lower performance, higher efficiency quad core cluster of ARM’s Cortex-A53 application core clocked at 1.8 GHz. The standard P9 is also reputed to come with 32 GB of internal storage and a high capacity battery of either 2,900 mAh or perhaps 3,900 mAh capacity battery. The device also comes with the reversible USB-C connector and a fingerprint sensor. The premium version is reputed to use the newer, higher performance HiSilicon Kirin 955 chipset backed up by 4 GB of RAM, and either 64 GB or 128 GB of internal storage. All models should run Android 6.0 Marshmallow under Huawei’s own custom user interface.
Whilst we believe that there are at least four variants of the Huawei P9 going on sale, at the time of writing we do not know the exact launch time or pricing of the individual models. The source cites the family will be released in the second quarter of the year, so some time between the start of April and the end of June.
