Goldgenie, a British company, founded in 1995, is in the business of taking an existing product – generally mobile phones, game consoles, and household items – and customizing them with gold, silver, copper, chrome, platinum, Swarovski crystals and diamonds. One might wonder how a business such as this can exist, but they have an international clientele that just cannot get enough of their unique gifts. Customers purchase over the internet and even send their own items to be customized. Their latest project was to take the Huawei P9 smartphone, give it a bath of 24K Gold, Rose Gold, or Platinum, and slap on a price tag of about $2,200 USD – phone included, of course. Anyone interest in purchasing one of the variants must first go to their website and put down 50-percent.
Huawei is finally making some inroads into the U.S. – in no small part due to the success of the Huawei Nexus 6P. It was a critical success and helped make people look at both Huawei as a company and Nexus as a viable flagship smartphone. Huawei worked with lens maker Leica to provide dual 12MP shooters and as a result Huawei, Leica, and Goldgenie is quite the combination. The all-metal clad body was the perfect subject to be 24K gold-plated and what you end up with is a beautiful device, inside and out.
Inside, the Huawei P9 sports a 5.2-inch LCD FHD display with resolution of 423 pixels-per-inch (PPI.) The P9 uses a 64-bit HiSilicon Kirin 955 octa-core processor with one quad-core clocked at 1.8 GHz and another clocked at 2.5 GHz. A Mail-T880 MP4 GPU provides stunning graphics. It is packing 3GB of DDR4 RAM and 32GB of internal memory that can be expanded 128GB via a microSD card. There is also a 4GB/64GB variant available.
The camera area with Leica optics is clearly the ‘focal’ point of the P9. It sports a pair of 12MP Leica lenses with Sony IMX286 sensors – one lens handles color photos and the other handles monochrome shots. They have an aperture of f/2.2, dual LED flash, laser autofocus, but oddly, no OIS. The Huawei P9 uses an 8MP with autofocus and f/2.4 for its front-facing camera (FFC) for selfies and video chatting. A 3,000 mAh non-removable battery powers the P9 for a price of about $650 to $700, which is quite a difference from the $2,200 Goldgenie version.