Huawei P9 and P9 Plus review: Once great, but in 2018 you can do better

Since Huawei launched the P9 and P9 Plus in 2016, the handsets have been replaced not once, but twice. The P10 was a decent follow up last year, and the P20 – despite some caveats – has done the trick again. You could even argue that Huawei has superseded it with the Mate 9 and Mate 10 as well. 

All of which is to say that while it was a good phone in its day, it’s not a great investment right now. On contract it’s hard to come by, and SIM-free, you’re looking at around £270-£300 – that feels a bit much for such ageing hardware, especially as this generation of Kirin chip wasn’t too hot on the 3D graphics. If this is your budget, the Sony Xperia XA2 and the Honor 7X fit nicely in that bracket, and both are that bit more modern and likely to have longer-term manufacturer support. 

If you can go for its original RRP, the OnePlus 5T remains the phone to beat at £450.

Sasha’s original review continues below

Huawei is gunning for the big flagships with this duo of high-end handsets – the 5.2in Huawei P9 and its bigger brother, the 5.5in Huawei P9 Plus. Combining top-of-the-range smartphone design with novel dual rear-facing Leica cameras, Huawei’s P9 pair are running straight into the fray of the smartphone war.

What exactly have Huawei delivered? Fantastically put together all-rounders that take no prisoners and should give the likes of Samsung and Apple sign to worry. Yes, they’re not without their flaws, but these are nevertheless high-quality phones with competitive price tags. Read on to see what we made of the P9 and P9 Plus’ design, camera, hardware and performance, along with our final verdict on Huawei’s P9 handsets. Buy the 32GB Huawei P9 from Amazon for £400 or get the 64GB Huawei P9 from Amazon for £549 (or from Amazon US for $421).

Huawei P9 and P9 Plus: Design & key features

It’s fair to say that Huawei has done a sterling job with the design. You’d expect nothing less than gorgeously-crafted metal and glass on a flagship phone in 2016, and the P9 and P9 Plus don’t disappoint.

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Both share a full aluminium body, fronted with a layer of glass that curves gently towards the edges, and measure a dainty 6.95mm thick. There is perhaps something of the iPhone 6s to the design – which is no bad thing – and the handsets feel rock-solid and sturdy in all the right ways, with nicely clicky buttons falling easily under the finger and a balanced yet none-too-weighty feel in the hand. The rear-facing fingerprint reader is superb, too, and although it seems awkwardly placed at first, it soon becomes second nature – and in my time with the P9, it proved lightning quick and super reliable, even with greasy fingers. 

Up front, you get a 5.2in Full HD display on the P9, while the P9 Plus ups the screen size to 5.5in but swaps the P9’s IPS panel for a Super AMOLED one and adds Huawei’s take on Apple’s pressure-sensitive 3D Touch technology, dubbed Press Touch. 

Battery life promises to be pretty special, too. The P9 has a 3,000mAh battery while the P9 Plus has a larger 3,400mAh power pack, and Huawei are claiming up to a day and half of battery life for the P9. Meanwhile, the P9 Plus gets a rapid charge mode which provides six hours of talk time after 10 minutes of charging. Whichever you choose, both phones have USB-C ports for charging and data transfer and support up to 128GB of expansion via micro SD.

Turn the P9 around, however, and this is where things get interesting. The aluminium rear comes in mystic silver or a darker titanium grey finish – sadly, the gold and rose gold versions are limited to the Asian markets – but the big news is that there are two cameras out back, both of which are “endorsed” by Leica.

Huawei P9 and P9 Plus: Cameras

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Unlike other handsets which have used twin cameras for 3D snaps and depth of field trickery, these work in tandem to produce colour photographs, with a dedicated Image Signal Processor and Digital Signal Processor each handling the steps of combining the output from the two sensors and then refining the final image. And of course, if you just want a great quality black and white photo, then the dedicated sensor handles that side of things.

If you’re wondering why you need two cameras, then the answer’s simple: two cameras are better than one. Three times better, in fact. As the black and white sensor doesn’t need an RGB filter in front of the sensor, Huawei claims that the twin camera arrangement is capable of gathering three times more light information and bumping up image contrast by 50%.

Meanwhile, Huawei’s Hybrid Focus combines three camera focusing techniques – contrast, laser and depth calculation – and claims to choose the best method depending on the shooting conditions.

As you’d expect given the involvement of the legendary camera marque, Huawei has worked with Leica to refine the P9’s camera app. A dedicated pro mode allows you to tweak the focal points, adjust the ISO range from 100 to 3200, adjust the shutter speed from 1/4000sec to 30 seconds, or manually tweak the white balance from 2800K to 7000K. Whether you’re an inveterate fiddler or a camera buff, you’ll have plenty to get stuck into with the Huawei P9.

Continues on page 2: The camera tests

Huawei P9: Camera testing

I’ve spent the last week or so with the P9 in my pocket, and it’s safe to say that the Huawei P9 is capable of serving up some pretty impressive snaps – even if it’s some way from smartphone camera perfection.

The good points are obvious from the very first snaps. Where even competent cameras such as the iPhone 6s tend to blow out highlights in awkward low-light conditions, the P9’s dual sensors manage to dig out just as much shadow detail while keeping bright highlights impressively under control. Autofocus is much more reliable, too, and where the iPhone SE in my back pocket struggled in some conditions, the P9’s ability to call on a trio of autofocus options paid dividends.

You can compare the two in the images below, where I’ve mirrored the output from the Huawei P9 (left) with the iPhone SE (right).

Black and white shots are beautifully dense and solid, thanks to the oodles of contrast served up from the dedicated sensor, and everyday photography duties are handled well, with the P9 serving up shots that are rich and detailed in, mostly, all the right ways. 

I say mostly, though, as there are some tell-tale traits which aren’t so impressive. One bugbear is the P9’s insistence on pushing up the ISO settings and cranking down the shutter speeds to the point that the slightest hand-shake robs images of crisp focus and leaves colours looking rather washed out compared to its rivals. Granted, it is possible to manually tweak these settings using Huawei’s Pro controls, but while that can help in certain situations that can’t change the physical limitations of the P9’s hardware: where the Samsung Galaxy S7’s sensor has larger 1.4um pixels, the P9’s twin sensors have to make do with 1.25um pixels. In low light conditions, this seems to give the S7 a noticeable edge over the P9’s ingenious twin-sensor arrangement.

The biggest downside I’ve noticed so far is the occasionally heavy-handed image processing in the Huawei P9’s shots. Indeed, where the iPhone tends towards softness rather than risk sharpening or noise artefacts, the Huawei’s over-zealous processing can leave textures such as fabric and brickwork looking smeared and unnatural – and that’s something I’ve noticed more than a few times. 

All told, is it a good camera? Yes, it most definitely is. Is it the best? It certainly has its moments, but it’s got some hugely capable competition on its hands. The HTC 10 serves up some delicious RAW images with pleasingly little in the way of image-enhancing artefacts, and the Samsung Galaxy S7 is a veritable tour de force in the smartphone camera camp. It’s a pretty close run thing, though, and I suspect that most people will – like any good photographer – learn to work with and adapt to the P9’s limitations. 

Continues on page 3: Hardware and performance

Huawei P9: Hardware and performance

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Huawei gave Alphr the 32GB P9 for testing, but even in this guise the result of all this high-end hardware is a very, very fast phone. The Kirin 955 isn’t quite up there with the Apple’s triple-core A9 for raw single-core performance, but as you can see from the results below, it’s only a whisker behind the monumentally fast Samsung Galaxy S7. 

Sadly, the P9’s Mali-T880 GPU isn’t quite so spectacular. That might sound surprising given that it’s nominally using the same GPU as the Samsung Galaxy S7, but there’s a good reason for that – while the Samsung uses a Mali-T880 with 12 cores, Huawei has made do with four. GPU performance takes a dramatic tumble as a result, with the Huawei P9 falling behind pretty much all its major competitors, and a handful of last year’s flagships, too. If games just aren’t top of your priorities then this may not bother you, but more demanding titles will see the P9’s hardware reach its limits far more rapidly than the other big-name phones out there.

Huawei P9: Battery life

With a 3,000mAh battery wedged inside its super-slim body, Huawei have claimed that the P9 will keep on going for around a day and a half of normal usage. In my experience, that’s probably a little over-optimistic, and I normally found the P9 scraping by on single-figure dregs by the end of every day.

If you want to squeeze every last drop of potential from the P9, you’ll need to make judicious use of Huawei’s Smart and Ultra Power Saving battery modes. Similarly, the ROG Power Saving mode dumps the screen resolution down to 720p, which also claims to eke a little more from the Huawei’s hardware. I’ll be re-running our standard tests across these modes in the coming days, so will report back to see how much impact these modes actually make. 

At the phone’s default settings though, the usual Alphr-certified video-rundown test – which has the screen calibrated to a brightness of 170cd/m2 and Wi-Fi turned off – saw the P9 last for 11hrs 24mins. That’s 14 minutes longer than the LG G5, and 44 minutes behind the HTC 10. It’s hours and hours less than the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, however, both of which soared over the 17 hour mark. In short, the P9 doesn’t wow on the battery life front, but it doesn’t dramatically drop the ball either – and compared to Huawei’s previous generation, the P8, that’s definitely a big leap forwards.

Huawei P9: Display quality

It’s fair to say the P9’s screen really is quite lovely. What is particularly delightful, however, is how the P9’s screen stretches almost right across the phone’s body – there’s only a sliver of bezel at the sides, and it makes for a 5.2in phone that feels surprisingly compact and manageable as a result. It’s bright, crisp and contrasty in all the right amounts and looks just as good as the best I’ve seen, at least to the naked eye. There’s nothing ground-breaking in terms of the Full HD screen resolution, nor the 424ppi pixel density, but that’s nothing to get het up about.

The benchmarks tell a pretty heartening story, too. Put to the test with our X-Rite colorimeter, the display puts in a pretty solid set of numbers. The IPS display soars up to a very respectable 469cd/m2, hits a fine contrast ratio of 1211:1 and the wide colour palette allows it to cover 99% of the sRGB colour gamut and a whopping 94% of the far larger DCI-P3 colour gamut. 

The downside of such a wide gamut is that the P9’s screen does tend to oversaturate certain colours, but it’s largely all kept under control. Sadly, unlike Samsung’s phones, there’s no preset colour settings to tweak the colour reproduction to suit, but with an Delta E of 2.82 the Huawei’s tendency towards exaggeration isn’t too heinous. Most people will probably enjoy the slightly overblown colours anyway – not everyone is as picky about colour accuracy. 

Huawei P9: Software & operating system

While Android 6 Marshmallow is doing the business behind the scenes, Huawei has taken its time to add its own Emotion UI 4.1 skin to the operating system. This does add a little clutter and cruft to the standard clean lines of Android 6, but it doesn’t seem to have any grand performance impact. Screens slide by with the silky smoothness you’d expect from a flagship phone, and it all looks pretty neat and tidy.

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There is some room for improvement, though, and the insistence on tweaking, adjusting and adding visual fluff and unneeded apps to stock Android just hasn’t paid off in my opinion. Every time I pick up the P9, I end up wishing for the plain, vanilla installation of Android 6 that I’ve come to love on Google’s recent Nexus handsets.

It’s the little things that irk: the notifications tray that makes it all too easy to dismiss or tap on a notification by mistake, rather than allowing you to quickly toggle Wi-Fi on and off or adjust the screen brightness. Then there are mild annoyances such as camera settings menus that steadfastly refuse to reorientate in landscape mode, and the lack of an apps drawer requires you to adopt the iOS habit of carefully filing and storing apps in folders. It’s small stuff, but it grates nonetheless.

Huawei P9 review: Overall verdict

The P9 costs £449 SIM free and the P9 Plus is £549 inc VAT, which is very reasonable for this calibre of phone. However, you can pick it up for much less if you shop around and buy it in tandem with a PAYG or monthly SIM deal. For instance, pick up a Huawei P9 from O2 along with the PAYG deal of your choice, and the 32GB model is only £370 – that’s £110 cheaper than our current favourite phone, the Huawei-built Nexus 6P, and dramatically cheaper than the other high-end smartphone rivals. 

In fact, given the sheer all-round quality of the P9 it’s a fantastically capable phone for the money. It’s tough to argue with an attractive, capable smartphone that undercuts much of its competition on price, yet still packs in a superb camera, good performance and a whole heap of premium features. This is a huge leap forward for Huawei, and on this evidence the other big-name manufacturers should start to worry – it’s not perfect, but the P9 is a force to be reckoned with. 

Buy the 32GB Huawei P9 from Amazon for £400 or get the 64GB Huawei P9 from Amazon for £549