Huawei P9 Review: Design, Performance and Dual Cameras

Huawei P9 is a phone which had a lot of bells and whistles during launch for its partnership with Leica. This is the review of the phone itself. I’ve done the Camera review separately, and you can check it out here. Huawei P9 is one of the unique phones I’ve used in a very long time. For starters, it is pretty!

Huawei has been into making smartphones for a long time now, and in fact, they are one of the biggest manufacturers in the world. Up until 2015, they were relatively unknown outside of China. But they made their mark in late 2015 with Google’s Nexus device. That too, it was the premium one, Nexus 6p. The 6p was one hack of a device which made everyone look into Huawei. Ever since, they’ve been making some amazing devices and the P9 is one such.

In 2016, it is very hard to stand out as a Manufacturer and Huawei decided to partner with the iconic brand, Leica for just that. How much difference does Leica make to the camera? Read our Huawei P9 Camera Review for that.

The P9 has a 5.2 inch 1080p IPS LCD screen on the front with a 2.5D Curved Glass. The phone has a really small footprint and is just 6.95mm slim! It feels great to hold the phone in one hand and use.

On the right, there’s the volume rocker and power button. In the bottom, you have the 3.5mm headphone jack to the left, speaker grill to the right and the USB-C port between them. On the top, you just have the noise-cancelling microphone. To the left, you have the SIM Tray which supports one nano SIM and a Micro SD Card up to 128GB.

On the back, the Huawei P9 is made of metal with curved edges. The back of the phone has a small patch of glass on the top. This glass piece houses the two cameras, dual-tone flash and the laser focus. Below that is the square fingerprint reader which works very well.

On the inside, the phone runs on 64 Bit Kirin 955 Octa-Core processor in which 4 cores are A72, clocked at 2.5Ghz and the remaining 4 cores are A53 clocked at 1.8GHz. The Huawei P9 has 3GB RAM and 32GB ROM which is expandable up to 128GB via Micro-SD.

The two cameras on the back are 12MP each, and the front camera is 8MP.

The phone comes with a large 3,000mAh battery, but unfortunately, it does not last that long. It did stand up to a whole day with a light level of usage. But with heavy usage, I ran out of juice by evening. The silver lining though, is that the phone has USB-C and supports fast charging for  which the charger is included in the box.

Oh the software side of Huawei P9, it runs on Android 6.0 with Huawei’s skin EMUI 4.1. I’m not a huge fan of manufacturers having their skin, but EMUI has gotten a lot better and has way less bloatware. You won’t be missing Stock UI by a long way.

The Huawei P9 costs Rs. 39,999 and you can buy from Flipkart right now. It comes in Titanium Grey, Mystic Silver and Prestige Gold. I’m not sure if it is worth the price tag, but it is a terrific phone with an amazing design which gets everything right along with a very good camera.