Huawei has had a tough time keeping the cat inside of the bag when it comes to the Mate 9. It was leaked just about everywhere, ahead of today’s announcement. But now it’s all official. And the Mate 9 is a pretty impressive smartphone from Huawei. The Huawei Mate 9 is sporting a 5.9-inch 1080p display, and is powered by their in-house Kirin 960 processor which was announced just a few weeks ago. That is paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, making for a pretty powerful beast of a smartphone. There’s also a 4,000 mAh battery inside, which should provide plenty of power for the Mate 9, enough to last two full days in the real world according to Huawei. With a large battery comes a very long charging time, but Huawei is using their “Super Charge” feature, which they say can fully charge the battery in 90 minutes.
On the software front, Huawei is running Android 7.0 Nougat and EMUI 5.0 on the Mate 9. They are actually calling this their biggest update yet, in terms of software as they’ve made a lot of changes to EMUI. One of the bigger changes to EMUI in this update, is the fact that you can now add an app drawer to the device. Prior to this, users had to download and install a third-party app launcher if they wanted to have an app drawer on the Mate 9. But that is no longer the case. Another useful feature included in the Mate 9 is App Twin. This essentially allows you to use two accounts simultaneously in apps like Facebook and WhatsApp.
Typically smartphone manufacturers make a pretty big deal about the camera in their smartphone, and that is the case here with the Mate 9. Huawei opted to keep the Leica dual-camera setup that they debuted on the Huawei P9 earlier this year. This dual-camera setup is once again in partnership with Leica. However, instead of using two 12-megapixel sensors, Huawei is using a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and a 12-megapixel color sensor. On top of that, the 12-megapixel sensor has OIS built in. Something that the P9 was missing earlier this year. Huawei did note that the Mate 9 is coming to the US, as well as Europe and China and users can read more on availability here.