Huawei pulls out all the stops for its new flagship — with refreshed, Nougat-based software, a gigantic battery and a sharp new dual camera setup.
Huawei phones have shown slow, steady signs of improvement over the past six months. You only need to compare the generally decent P9 Plus to the utter mess that was the P8 to see important progress being made across the board. And yet one asterisk has remained next to every Huawei review here on Android Central: The software, in general, has been pretty gross. Early on in 2015, some features were straight up broken. Even in recent products like the P9, key Android features like the notification area were implemented in way that looked bad and broke compatibility with a bunch of apps.
As good as the hardware was, the company's EMUI software has been the biggest reason for folks in the West to not buy a Huawei phone — a constant for as long as we've been reviewing them.
For a long time, software was the biggest reason not to buy a Huawei phone — but that's about to change.
For over a year we've been hearing on the grapevine that big software changes are coming, and now they're finally here. The new EMUI version 5 — based on Android 7.0 Nougat — ships on Huawei's latest flagship phone, the Mate 9. It's an enormously important upgrade that walks back some of EMUI's more egregious customizations, bringing it closer to Google's vision of Android, while setting a fresh design direction for the company. At the same time, Huawei promises under-the-hood optimizations to improve battery life and stop the phone getting slower over time.
But the Mate 9 is about way more than software alone. It's the launch platform for the company's speedy new Kirin 960 processor. It's got a new, improved dual-camera setup developed in co-operation with Leica. And as a big-screened phone, it packs a proportionately massive battery, allowing it to take on the mantle of previous Mates as a champion of longevity.
And all of that adds up to a phone that's kind of a big deal.
If you've been following Huawei's design story for the past year, the outside of the Mate 9 will be immediately recognizable, with plenty of Mate 8 and Mate S DNA to be seen. For the uninitiated, it's this design that many other Chinese phone makers are riffing on these days, including OnePlus and, more recently, LeEco.
So you can check off the following: Slightly curved metal unibody. Chamfers front and back. Tapered "2.5D" glass. Gracefully hidden antenna lines. Fingerprint sensor. Slight camera hump.
The worst thing you could say about the Mate 9's design is that it's safe and just a little bit generic. There's nothing here that looks drastically different to the last couple of Mate phones. Instead, Huawei has worked on slimming down the phone in all directions, giving you a 5.9-inch display in a phone with the footprint of many 5.7-inchers. (In fact, the overall size is barely any bigger than the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus.)
This is a big phone, but not as big as you might be expecting.
This is still a big phone. (A big Big Phone. Capital B, captial P.) But it's nowhere near as comically oversized as a 5.9-inch handset could've been. Nor is using it one-handed a total impossibility, though you'll need some manual dexterity to juggle it around. And while it may lack the head-turning quality of a Galaxy S7 edge, it's an attractive phone that feels good in the hand, with just enough heft to not feel insubstantial.
The display itself is a 1080p IPS LCD, which is fine, but perhaps the biggest hardware compromise in this device. After three years of Full HD Mate phones, it's surely time to take the plunge and go 2K — yet the main Mate 9 model sticks with this tried and true resolution. Nevertheless, there are surely battery and performance benefits involved with sticking to a lower screen res, and it's not like 373 pixels per inch looks horrible. In fact, the Mate 9's display excels in other metrics like brightness and color vibrancy.
Huawei's already using the GPU rumored to be coming to the Galaxy S8.
One area that certainly isn't standing still is the processor. The Mate 9 runs Huawei's brand new Kirin 960 CPU, which boasts a few important breakthroughs. It's the first smartphone to use ARM's Cortex-A73 cores, an improvement upon the earlier A72 design in terms of both performance and efficiency. Kirin 960 pairs four of these A73s with four energy-efficient Cortex-A53 cores for less demanding tasks. Also a big deal: The new ARM Mali-G71 8-core GPU, offering up to 180% improved graphics performance compared to the GPU used in the Kirin 950. Throw into the mix Vulkan graphics support for improved gaming performance (and fewer pixels to push on a 1080p panel) and you're looking at a serious amount of graphical potential. (In fact, the Mali-G71 is the GPU rumored to appear in the Galaxy S8 next year.)
That's coupled with a base 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM.
The Mate 9 will also support Google's Daydream VR platform, though the specifics of how that'll work aren't clear at the moment. The phone is running Android 7.0, not 7.1 at launch, and at just 373 pixels per inch, the phone's screen won't offer a spectacular VR experience. We should learn more in the weeks leading up to the Mate 9's retail launch.
Huawei has doubled down on storage performance too, moving to UFS2.1 flash memory for the 64 gigabytes of inbuilt storage. That means on paper it should be able to match or beat the latest phones from Samsung in terms of storage speeds.
Between all these hardware enhancements, you're looking at an exceptionally speedy device, and that's been reflected in our brief time with the Mate 9 thus far. This phone is fast. But then, all phones are fast when you first get them. And so Huawei's focus on speed goes beyond hardware and out-of-box responsiveness, instead doubling down on maintaining performance over time through software smarts.
Huawei's latest CPU and fastest flash storage is backed up by machine learning to make your favorite apps run faster than ever.
In fact, Huawei says it's implemented machine learning in the way its CPU, storage and memory management works, allowing it to work out which apps you're likely to use and when — as well as which apps need the most CPU horsepower, and which can get by without firing up the processor all the way. The company also claims it's optimized the way data is written to and read from flash memory to improve throughput.
Stuff like this, Huawei says, can help a phone maintain performance over 18 months of use — something it's tested using its own "artificial aging tools" while developing the Mate 9. Sure, you could just factory reset your phone every six-to-twelve months, but the fact is most people don't. Nor, in an ideal world, should you have to.
At a briefing in Shanghai, China, ahead of the Mate 9's announcement, Huawei VP of Global Product Marketing, Clement Wong, described the new approach as the best of both worlds between Android and iOS — "fluid performance, but in an open platform." With the new enhancements in the Mate 9, Wong says, Huawei can address two of the main pain points of smartphone users — slow performance that degrades over time, and poor battery life. Huawei doesn't have the vertical integration and total ecosystem control of Apple, but supposedly it can take advantage of its homegrown CPU and firmware tuning to make up the difference.
In addition to boasting an enormous 4,000mAh battery, Huawei is also raising the bar when it comes to charging speeds, with a new "SuperCharge" standard capable of not just the run-of-the-mill 9V/2A speeds, but also 5V/4.5A charging for even quicker refills. All of this is managed safely through constant communication between the phone and charger, much like Qualcomm QuickCharge.
The result, the manufacturer says, is that a 10-minute charge can get you 3.5 hours of video playback, all while charging more quickly in use than rivals, and generating less heat in the process. We'll have to test Huawei's assertions in our full review, but we've already seen the benefits of charging at higher amperages with OnePlus's Dash Charge feature.
Mate 9 owners can also look forward to a SuperCharger wall plug and car charger included in the box. So: big battery, fast charging, and multiple charging options out of the box, which is great to see. Smartphone battery tech still has plenty of room for improvement, and Huawei appears to be leading the charge.
There's a new, optically stabilized dual camera setup, but the jury's out on image quality.
The same goes for photography, and in this important area Huawei has built on the solid, if unspectacular track record of the P9 series, once again with Leica co-branding. As before, there are two camera modules around the back — an optically stabilized 12-megapixel RGB color sensor, paired with a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor, both behind f/2.2 lenses. (And backed up by dual LED flash and laser autofocus.) Like the P9, the two cameras work in tandem to produce clearer shots than each would've been capable of individually, while Huawei's dual ISP (image signal processor) can process both image streams simultaneously, and create simulated aperture effects in real time through the viewfinder. That's a neat upgrade from the P9, which could only apply these effects after shooting.
Only the color sensor has OIS (six-axis stabilization, in fact), so it's not entirely clear how low-light performance will shake out. What we do know is that the P9 managed to produce some respectable, often surprisingly good photos with twin (unstabilized) 12MP shooters, so we're hoping Huawei is able to raise the bar some with its latest camera setup.
It's way too early to reach any firm conclusions on Mate 9 photo quality — we'll need to use the phone out in the real world to see whether Huawei's lofty claims hold true. And although it has some unique photographic tricks to its name, the Mate 9 will face tough challenges from Apple and Google, both of which have fantastic cameras in their latest handsets.
Which brings us to the software — EMUI 5.0, based upon Android 7.0 Nougat. It's one of the most significant upgrades in the Mate 9, given Huawei's historical weakness in this area. And on the face of it, there are lots of similarities between the old EMUI and the new release. By default, there's still no app drawer, though this can be enabled in the settings. Huawei's home screen still draws some pretty heavy inspiration from Apple's iOS. The style of icons remains similar, and everything is still skinnable.
But important visual tweaks are evident throughout EMUI 5. There's a new font, drawing on the typography of the camera partner Leica. Apps like Dialer, Messenger and Settings get a new, brighter UI. Icons are altogether less dull, looking more like they belong on a modern smartphone, and less like a throwback to a 90's desktop OS.
At a meeting ahead of the public EMUI 5 unveiling, Huawei CMF designer Agnes Larnicol told us this is reflective of Huawei's efforts to change its overall brand image and become lighter and more approachable through brighter colors. Similar changes, Larnicol says, were introduced to the company's Mobile World Congress booth earlier this year. In contrast to the previous year, Huawei's MWC 2016 booth was full of bright, white, illuminated open areas.
That's now being reflected in the firm's software. Which is why the new EMUI 5 introduces cleaner, more "sober" blue and white hues to Huawei's phone UI, according to Dr. Wang Genglu, Huawei's device software president.
The changes are more than skin deep, too. In addition to under-the-hood optimizations, Huawei has worked to reduce the number of taps it takes to reach the vast majority of features. Dr. Wang told us the vast majority of system functions — 91% — can now be accessed with three taps or less. EMUI 5's refined animations should also give the perception of a faster UI, he adds.
But crucially for Android fans, key Android OS features like the notification shade, lock screen notifications, and recent apps menu, now work more or less exactly as they do on a Nexus or Pixel, though with slightly different fonts and colors. There's no more weird customization for the sake of it. No more broken notifications. EMUI is now differentiated without shoving unnecessary, app-breaking changes down your throat.
What's more, there are some genuinely intriguing new features, like the ability to use multiple accounts in social apps like WhatsApp and Facebook, and the ability to designate a biometrically-secured "privacy space."
These are all big changes, particularly for an organization as large as Huawei — a company whose software designs have mostly catered to the Chinese market until recently.
At a briefing in Shanghai, Huawei PR Director Ada Xu told us that the company's design efforts are divided between groups in six major cities around the world, with a team in San Francisco taking the lead on user experience. Other teams focused on different areas are based out of Paris, London, Moscow and Japan. Thus, there's now a more global approach to design.
Bottom line: EMUI looks and works a lot better now. There's a lot less visually unpleasant, weird stuff going on, and the move away from a highly customized notification and app-switching setup is appreciated. These changes are long overdue, but welcome all the same.
The Huawei Mate 9 is a curious mix of minor tweaks and groundbreaking changes. Some really important software improvements have been made, but this still feels like a Huawei phone. However it has that familiar feeling without the general grossness that accompanied it back in the EMUI 3 and 4 days. Stuff just works. Nothing is overtly broken. Notifications look nice. Task-switching works in the normal way! And EMUI now keeps its paws off your app icons.
A mix of groundbreaking changes and subtle, meaningful tweaks.
And along with all that stuff you get fantastic performance, a proper big-screened phone (while few other manufacturers are pushing past 5.5 inches), a promising camera setup and a ridiculously huge battery with super-fast charging. Between all these features, the Huawei Mate 9 is shaping up to be a very promising handset.
There are hints of disappointment though — for instance, the decision to remain at 1080p resolution in an age where 2K flagships are the norm. And the Mate 9 also lacks water resistance, a feature which comes as standard from Apple and Samsung.
We'll need to spend some more time with the phone to tell whether it fulfills its potential, or whether Huawei still has some work to do on UX, camera, performance, or all three. That said, our early impressions of the phone are positive, and we're looking forward to getting to know it properly.
A quick side note — there's also a "Porsche Design" Mate 9 variant — a 5.5-inch, curved screen model that ups the storage to 256GB, the RAM to 6GB and opts for an altogether more Samsung-like aesthetic. Huawei confirmed the existence of this model in our briefings, but didn't show the device, nor go into much detail about it. Given the track record of Huawei when it comes to wacky special editions of its phones, we'd expect this curvy Mate 9 to play second fiddle to the main device. Nevertheless, it's there, and the company is surely hoping some of the Porsche prestige will rub off on the regular Mate 9.
We don't have any firm information on when the Huawei Mate 9 will hit the U.S. market and in what form. Instead, Huawei's initial push for the phone is likely to focus on Western Europe and Asia, including its home market of China. Pricing, too, remains up in the air, but expect to pay flagship-level money for what's very much a flagship-quality phone.
In Europe in particular, where nobody — not Samsung, not LG — has a big-screened Android flagship on sale, Huawei has a golden opportunity. It has a great phone to sell, with basically no competition in the 5.7-inch-and-up category.
However well the Mate 9 fares in the market, it's clear this phone represents an important milestone for Huawei on just about every level — particularly software and user experience. And if this is a sign of things to come, 2017 could be a very interesting year indeed.
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