Just when you thought Huawei couldn’t possibly release another handheld this year, its Mate 8 upgrade shows up. Huawei smartphones have shown some pretty impressive signs of improvement in 2016 alone, with the P9 Plus and Nova, and now the Mate 9 looks set to blow the others out of the water.
Veering off from the Mates of old, the Mate 9 is a premium handset, now at a far more premium price. Brexit criticisms aside, the Mate 9 is £200 more than the Mate 8 was, even if it does bring with it some impressive new upgrades.
Huawei’s own notoriously cluttered EMUI Android overlay is far cleaner in this latest version and is the best update yet. Not only that, but we get a 2.4GHz Kirin 960 chipset this time around, a speedier upgrade on the Mate 8’s Kirin 950, all while retaining that weighty Mate feel.
The Mate 9’s 5.9in, 1,920 x 1,080 display outputs seriously vibrant and deep colours, with EMUI 5’s subtle use of whites and blues looking wonderfully austere. Large screens aren’t usually my thing, but the Mate 9 comes with a couple of features that reject misplaced fingers on the display, stopping them from accidentally launching apps you don’t want opened.
Take a look at the back and you’ll spot a bunch of sensors, with both the flash and IR sensor symmetrically placed either side of the vertically fixed dual-lens camera in the middle. With the combination of both 12- and 20-megapixel lenses, images can be shot in monochrome with the former shooting in colour, just like with the P9 Plus. It’s a strange system at first glance, but having a lens solely dedicated to monochrome shots should help increase the dynamic range of monochrome images. Full 4K video is on the cards, too.
Cast your eyes below the camera and you’ll find a handy fingerprint scanner, as on most recent Huawei smartphones. The phone’s edges are laden with a 3.5mm headset port on the top and a USB Type-C port nestled in between two grilles at the bottom.
Huawei’s Mate 9 launches with the latest octa-core Kirin 950 chipset, with four 2.4GHz ARM Cortex-A73 CPUs and another four lower-power 1.8GHz Cortex-A53s. Memory wise, there’s 4GB of RAM and a microSD slot supporting up to 256GB, with 64GB of onboard storage. There’s a fancy Porsche-branded curved-screen model too, with a colossal 6GB of RAM and four times the storage.
The Mate 9 is all about long-term performance. Most phones nowadays are super speedy out of the box, but will slow down significantly after a couple of years. This shouldn’t be the case with the Mate 9, in theory, thanks to its intelligent optimisation processes and memory recycling, that’ll hopefully outperform the rest of its predecessors later in its lifecycle.
While lethargic performance is never warranted, Huawei’s approach does raise a few questions. This way of doing things may well undermine any future smartphone launches, lessening the importance, say, of getting the latest handheld two years down the line.
Current output adjustments and automatic voltage techniques make for some speedy charges too, with what Huawei is touting as “Supercharging”. You shouldn’t worry about Note 7-levels of overheating the 4,000mAh battery either, thanks to the intriguing temperature level monitoring. Supposedly, the Mate 9 will charge four times faster than the iPhone 7 Plus, with just ten minutes plugged into the wall socket giving you enough juice to last you around three-and-a-half hours.
That being said, Huawei has shifted from the usual mid-range price, instead asking for €699 (£622) for the base model. That’s around £200 more than the Mate 8 went for, if you’re keeping count. Like the look of the stylish Porsche Mate 9? You’ll have to fork out just over £1,200.
In a market awash with high-end flagships costing eye-watering levels of money, it would have been welcome to see Huawei offer a premium product that didn’t fetch a premium price, but the Mate rulebook seems to have changed. Of course, it won’t be long until you can read my final verdict of Huawei’s Mate 9, so check back soon to see how it fares.