Huawei’s smartphones have been gaining in both quality and popularity in recent times, but until now it’s left the low-end to its partner brand Honor. That changes with the Huawei P9 Lite, a low-cost smartphone intended to take on the Moto G4 at its own game.
The P9 Lite is the third P9-branded smartphone we’ve reviewed recently and the cheapest of the lot. Not that you’d know it at first sight. Visually and physically, the P9 Lite is remarkably similar to its P9 siblings, and yet it costs only £190 – that’s around half the price of the full-whack P9.
It shares the lovely chamfered edges and clean lines of its pricier brothers and it’s just as sleek and slim. The shiny aluminium finish has been dropped in favour of an all-black, textured plastic body, but that’s a good thing – I found the P9’s rear picked up scratches and scuffs far too easily.
In all, for a sub £200 smartphone, the Huawei P9 Lite is uncommonly attractive and if looks are more important to than all-round performance, it’s more than worth the price of admission.
Huawei P9 Lite review: Display
But how about the rest of the phone? Let’s start with the display, which surprisingly given the phone’s “Lite” moniker, near identical to the standard P9’s. It measures the same 5.2in corner to corner and has the same resolution at 1,920 x 1,080 – it wouldn’t surprise me at all to discover it’s the same panel underneath.
Technically, it’s a top-quality display as well. It has a contrast ratio of 1,532:1 which is excellent, and this helps it produce images with plenty of impact. Its sRGB colour gamut coverage of 98% is great to see on a phone this cheap and sees the P9 Lite stretch out a lead over the Moto G4 – our current budget smartphone champion – which achieves a less stellar 90% sRGB coverage.
Peak brightness isn’t bad either at 482cd/m2. Sure, this gloomy British winter weather is hardly the best test, but this sort of figure means it should be readable when the sun eventually does come out to play. It isn’t quite as bright as the Moto G4’s dazzling 539cd/m2 panel, mind.
Huawei P9 Lite review: Performance and battery life
Inside, the Huawei P9 Lite looks to have performance nailed on paper. It has an octa-core Kirin 960 chip clocked at 2GHz and this is paired with 3GB of RAM. On the whole, it’s a reasonably nippy smartphone and with 16GB of onboard storage, (expandable up to 128GB) there’ll be just enough space for those important files and apps, too.
I had no qualms dipping in and out of multiple applications and browsing the web on Chrome was fluid and generally glitch free. It doesn’t feel as slick as its bigger siblings with their speedier Kirin 955 chips but, then again, the Lite is well under half the price of the P9.
Benchmark results are decent if not earth-shattering. The phone achieved a single-core score of 770 and a multi-core result of 3,359 in GeekBench 4. Running the Peacekeeper browser benchmark returned a score of 1,105. Both scores place it ahead of the Moto G4.
The P9 Lite comes up top trumps in games performance, too. An on-screen score of 8.3fps in the GFXBench Manhattan test might not sound like much but Moto’s G4 barely scraped by at 7. In-game performance wasn’t too detracting, with the slightest of frame drops only once the screen was crammed with enemies and laser blasts in Sky Force: Reloaded. All other games, such as Threes! worked without a hitch.
It’s a shame then, that the P9’s battery life isn’t up to snuff. Lasting just over 9hrs in our continuous video playback test, it lags only slightly behind the similarly priced Wileyfox Swift, and it’s and well behind the Moto G4’s long-lasting 13hrs and 39mins.
Considering the phone’s battery is quite large at 3,000mAh this is a disappointing outcome, especially when the regular P9 squeezed out more than 11hrs in the same test. You can expect to have to reach for the charger before you go to bed most days.
Huawei P9 Lite review: Camera
Another of the Huawei P9 Lite’s downsides lies in its 12-megapixel rear camera. It simply isn’t a patch on the Moto G4’s.
Despite sharing the same resolution, the P9 Lite’s camera suffered from smeared out details, even in well-lit scenes. Outdoor shots paled in comparison to the Moto G4’s and on a sunny winter’s day photographs looked noticeably gloomy, lacking any real vibrancy. In our main outdoor test shots, captured in the streets of Fitzrovia, central London, the brickwork on buildings was blurry and images were disappointingly under-exposed. Even the phone’s HDR mode, which can often fix these sort of issues, did very little to rectify the problems.
Likewise, indoor shots were a cause for concern. Detail levels in low-light conditions were terrible, with objects in our still life arrangement again lacking detail. In fact, images were far too grainy across the board and while the flash did help out a little the results still weren’t wonderful. There isn’t any way of fine-tuning your snaps either as the P9 Lite lacks the “pro” mode of the full-blown P9.
Huawei P9 Lite review: Verdict
It all started so well. The Huawei P9 Lite’s look and feel, performance and display all promised great things when I began to write this review, especially given the phone’s sub-£200 price tag. I even thought it might challenge the Moto G4 for the honour of best budget smartphone.
But while it is a very nice low-cost phone, a few critical things hold it back, namely battery life and a distinctly mediocre camera.
The result is that, for budget buyers at least, the Moto G4 should still be your first port of call. It has a better camera, a longer-lasting battery and it’s cheaper, too. The king isn’t dead just yet.
