Perhaps the most important thing about the Huawei P9 is its design and how compact it is. While there are several other smartphones too that come with compact bodies, most of them compromise on what is inside. The Huawei P9 on the other hand tells a different story.
The Huawei P9 has a 5.2″ display which by itself should mean that you have a relatively compact smartphone. But Huawei have also tried to minimise the footprint even further with smaller bezels that give you a screen to body ratio of 72.9%.
The Huawei P9 has dimensions of 145 x 70.9 x 7 mm and weighs in at 144 grams which feels light thanks to the good weight distribution. As a result, the device is extremely easy to handle and you can’t help but appreciate just how easy it is to use.
However, most smartphones that come in such compact sizes most often sacrifice on the feature set or specs. The P9 doesn’t do any such thing. The display is a 5.2″ 1080p IPS panel with Corning Gorilla Glass that provides great quality and viewing angles.
Inside the device, you have a HiSilicon Kirin 955 octa-core processor that is comprised of 4 Cortex A53 cores at 1.8GHz and 4 Cortex A72 cores at 2.5GHz as well as 3GB of RAM. This guarantees a high performance for your daily tasks as well as complex applications. The phone performs smoothly without any lag and performs multi-tasking with ease as well. There is also a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU to assist you with high-end graphics for all your gaming needs. The processor is also extremely power efficient apart from being powerful.
There is 32GB of internal storage along with a microSD card slot that can be expanded by up to 256GB. In terms of connectivity, you get a USB Type-C port, NFC support, Bluetooth 4.2 as well as Dual Band WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac.
In terms of camera, you get a Dual Leica lens system at the back with two 12 Megapixel sensors with 1.25µm pixel size, f2.2 aperture, 27mm focal length, dual-tone LED flash, OIS and Hybrid AF (Laser+PDAF). One sensor is RGB while the other is a Monochrome one. The monochrome sensor can capture upto 3 times the amount of light that the RGB sensor can. These two sensors work in unison thanks to the intelligent algorithm to improve the dynamic range as well as a better low light performance. You even have a high-resolution 8 Megapixel camera up front that takes 1080p videos.
The efficient processor along with the 3000 mAh battery gives you great battery life and the P9 posted an impressive one charge rating of 16 hours and 3 minutes in our battery test. If it does run out of charge, you can charge it quickly thanks to fast charging which can refill 44% of charge in just 30 minutes.
All these features and more are stuff that you would expect in a high-end flagship smartphone. However, it really is surprising and impressive just how Huawei have managed to fit it all into such a tiny form factor. Truly an engineering marvel!