According to reports, Huawei has sold over six million units of their flagship P9 smartphone, which was announced back in April of this year. Earlier in the summer, Huawei announced that it had sold 2.6 million units of the Huawei P9 and P9 Plus combined within the first six weeks of release. With that number now said to be around the six million maker and possible just for the P9 variant alone, this is likely to be good news.
The P9 is Huawei’s take on a mainstream flagship device for 2016. The smartphone, which is constructed from metal, is based around a 5.2-inch, 1080p resolution IPS LCD panel. It’s powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 955 System-on-Chip, which is a modern, 64-bit, big.LITTLE processor with a lower performance quad core cluster of ARM Cortex-A53 processors clocked at up to 1.8 GHz matched up to a higher performance quad core cluster of ARM Cortex-A72s, clocked at up to 2.5 GHz. The 32 GB model backs this up with 3 GB of RAM and the 64 GB model comes with 4 GB of RAM, but both use the ARM Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. There’s a fast charging 3,000 mAh battery complete with a USB Type-C port and the usual plethora of radios including Bluetooth 4.2, LTE and high speed Wi-Fi. For the camera, Huawei have given the P9 three: there’s a front facing, 8-megapixel unit and two rear facing 12-megapixel cameras. For the rear cameras, this arrangement was co-designed with Leica. One 12-megapixel camera unit is a reasonably conventional unit and the second is monochrome only, lacking the Bayer filter, used in color cameras. This means that the monochrome camera can capture up to three times more light than the color sensor, which makes it ideal for nighttime photography. Huawei’s software uses these two cameras in order to create bokeh effects, which the powerful processor can also show real time, and also to improve how quickly the camera can focus.
Given Huawei’s innovative camera technology, it’s perhaps no surprise that the company explains how customers love the P9’s “professional photographic effects” including “artistic black and white images.” However, the rest of the device is also impressive and highlights that Huawei, using many in-house components, can produce a great smartphone that competes with the industry regulars.