After months of waiting, Huawei has finally unveiled its flagship phablet, the Huawei Mate 9. The device was unveiled at an exclusive event in Germany and is everything we had expected. The company says that the unveiling of the Mate 9 sees the arrival of the “new smartphone era”.
The Huawei Mate 9 comes in two different designs, there is the standard one and a Porsche Design version. As you probably have guessed already, the Porsche version comes with slightly better specs and a higher price tag. This is Huawei’s flagship phablet so the company has gone all out to make sure it stands out on the market especially after the fiasco that was the Galaxy Note 7.
Starting with the display, the standard Huawei Mate 9 comes with a 5.9 inch FHD one with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. The Porsche version on the other hand has a 5.5 inch AMOLED display that is slightly curved around the edges. This is the model that really excites me but given that it is a limited edition one, we might not see it in this part of the world.
More Power to the People!
Huawei Mate 9
The Huawei Mate 9 is powered by the new Kirin 960 chipset. Huawei says that the “Kirin 960 chipset, the world’s highest performing smartphone processor.” This is not the only new thing though, the company went ahead and revealed that, “The Mate 9 series debuts the premium Kirin 960 chipset with Huawei’s Machine Learning Algorithm to deliver a fast and smooth experience.” Quite a bold move Huawei is making here and especially so with a device that targets a very small niche.
Huawei also said that the Kirin 960 is the first chipset to have the ARM Cortex-A73/A53 Octa-core CPU and Mali G71 Octa-core GPU. On top of this, the company said, “The Kirin 960 also takes advantage of the Vulkan graphics standard on Android 7.0, increasing graphics performance by up to 400%.”
Supercharged Battery
As for the battery, Huawei has revealed that the Huawei Mate 9 comes with a 4,000mAh high-density battery which is paired with the SuperCharge technology that delivers a full day’s charge in 20 minutes. The company also added that, “10 minutes of charge provides enough power to watch two full movies.”
Better Camera
Mate 9
The Huawei Mate 9 comes with a second-generation Leica dual-lens camera with 12-megapixel RGB sensor, 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and Hybrid Zoom, featuring a superior 2x magnification. We will have to test this in the real world to see if these are just gimmicks or they make any difference.
Price and Availability
During the first wave, the Mate 9 will be available in select markets and unfortunately Kenya isn’t one of them. The standard version with 4GB of RAM and 64GB ROM will be available for €699 (approximately Ksh 79,000) while the Porsche version with 6GB RAM and 256GB ROM will be available for €1,395 (approximately Ksh 158,000).
Also Read: The Huawei P9 Review