In London, Huawei has announced the next generation of the P-series, in the Huawei P9. This smartphone is actually a bit of a small one, but also a very interesting one as it’s their first smartphone made with their new Leica partnership. The Huawei P9 will be available in Europe and Asia, no plans for the America’s just yet.
Starting off with the display here, there’s a 5.2-inch FHD (that’s 1920×1080 resolution) 2.5D display. It’s powered by the Huawei Kirin 955 processor. This is a 64-bit octa-core processor. It’s a quad-core 2.5GHz Cortex-A72 and a quad-core 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 processor paired together, and a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU is also included here. Other internals include 3GB of RAM on the 32GB of storage model. There’s also a 4GB of RAM model which comes with 64GB of storage. Along with a 3,000mAh non-removable battery powering the device. Dimensions are 145mm x 70.9mm x 6.95mm and weighing in at just 144g.
The camera is what this phone is really about. We have two 12-megapixel sensors here on the back of this Huawei P9. There’s a monochrome camera and a RGB camera on the back, which make for some excellent pictures. In addition to that, there is a 8-megapixel camera around the front which will make for some great selfies.
All of this is running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow – not quite the latest, but pretty close. On top is the Emotion UI version 4.1. This is a slightly revamped version from what we saw on the Huawei Mate 8 when that debuted at CES in January. Pricing for the Huawei P9 is set at €599 for the 32GB of storage/3GB of RAM model and a €50 bump to €649 for the 64GB of storage/4GB of RAM model. The device will be launching on April 16th in a slew of countries including Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, United Kingdom and more. That’s just the first wave of markets, with more to come.
The Huawei P9 is a stunning looking smartphone, and if the camera really holds up as well as Huawei is hyping it to be, then it could be up for one of the best smartphones of the year.