Published in Mobiles

Huawei launches new P9 and P9 Plus smartphones

by on07 April 2016


Featuring a Leica-made dual-lens rear camera

Huawei has officially launched its two new flagship smartphones, the Huawei P9 and P9 Plus, both featuring a Leica-made dual-lens 12-megapixel rear camera.

The Huawei P9 is based around a 5.2-inch 1920x1080 resolution IPS LCD screen, which adds up to 423ppi of pixel density, with 96 percent color saturation and 500nits of brightness, which makes it slightly better than a 4.7-inch iPhone 6S, a phone that Huawei decided to compare it to.

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With 145 x 70.9 x 6.95mm dimensions, 144g of weight and featuring 1.7mm thick bezels, the Huawei P9 does not look half bad and the full metal unibody certainly helps with the quality look.

The Huawei P9 is based on an in-house developed HiSilicon Kirin 955 SoC. Made on 16nm FinFET manufacturing process, the Kirin 955 is an octa-core part with four 2.5GHz clocked Cortex-A72 and four 1.8GHz clocked Cortex-A53 cores. The GPU is a Mali-T880 MP4 part which should be quite an improvement compared to Huawei's P8 flagship but won't break any GPU benchmark records.

The Huawei P9 will be available in two versions, with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage and 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage space, both expandable via microSD card slot.

With the 5.5-inch AMOLED 1920x1080 panel, the Huawei P9 Plus is far away from the rumored 6.2-inch P9 Max, which does not mean that P9 Max is not coming. Measuring at 152.3 x 75.3 x 6.98 mm and weighing in at 162g, the Huawei P9 Plus is significantly bigger but the rest of the specifications are nearly identical, with exception of the battery, as the P9 comes with 3,000mAh battery while the P9 Plus has a 3,400mAh one. The Huawei P9 Plus will also be available only with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.

The main feature of both the Huawei P9 and the P9 Plus is the dual-lens Leica-made 12-megapixel rear camera. To be precise, it consists of two 12-megapixel sensors with Leica SUMMARIT lenses, 1.2 micron pixel size and wide f/2.2 aperture. One sensor captures monochrome pictures while other capture RGB color pictures.

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The idea is that such setup should provide up to 300 percent better light capture and contrast, thanks to the monochrome sensor, and in the end provide a better looking picture. The rear camera also comes with a dual-tone LED flash as well as a dedicated laser focusing module. The rear camera also comes with a manual mode, which offers plenty of custom settings, like ISO, exposure, shutter speed, ability to save RAW picture and more.

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For selfie-lovers, Huawei included 8-megapixel standard camera on both smartphones. The rest of the specifications include fingerprint scanner on the back, USB Type-C port, infrared port, stereo speakers and usual LTE, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and NFC connectivity options. Both the Huawei P9 and the P9 Plus are based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS with EMUI 4.1 UI on top of it.

According to Huawei, the P9 will be available as of April 16th and be priced at €599 for the 3GB/32GB version and €649 for the 4GB/64GB version. The Huawei P9 Plus, should be available as of May 20th and adds €100 to the price, ending up at €749 for the 4GB/64GB version which puts it in the range of other flagship smartphones.

 

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