Huawei P9 was today announced in India. The latest phone from the Chinese giant comes with a 5.2 inch full HD display and an octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 955 processor. It also comes with 3 GB RAM and 32 GB internal storage, with support for microSD cards. The Huawei P9 will be available in India starting August 17, exclusively on Flipkart. We got to play with the device and here are our unboxing and initial impressions.
Huawei P9 Specifications
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Huawei P9 India Review, Pros, Cons, Should You Buy
Huawei P9 Box Contents
- Handset
- Charger
- USB Cable
- Startup Guide
- Earphones
- SIM ejector tool
Photo Gallery
Physical Overview
The Huawei P9 is a solidly built smartphone. Huawei has upped its design game with the P9 and the hype around the phone is fairly justified due to multiple reasons – design being one of them. We received the Ceramic White edition and it looked really good. Check out the photo gallery above for a quick glance.
The Huawei P9 comes with a 5.2 inch full HD display. The phone’s dimensions are 145 x 70.9 x 7 mm and it weighs 144 grams.
The front of the phone features the display with the Huawei logo just below it. Near the top, you will find the ear piece and the front camera, along with the ambient light sensor.
The bottom of the phone is devoid of any features save for the Huawei logo. The phone comes with on-screen navigation buttons.
The most interesting features of the phone exist on the back side. Near the top, you will find the 12 MP dual camera sensors. These sensors have been co-developed with Leica, a premier camera optics manufacturer from Germany.
Next to the dual cameras, you will find a dual LED flash. While one of the lenses captures regular color photos, the second one captures Black and White photos to give you a Leica camera experience – on a smartphone!
To the left side of the device, you will find the SIM card slot.
On the right side, you will find the power button and the volume rocker.
The top of the phone is bare except for the secondary ear piece for noise cancellation.
The bottom of the phone has a bunch of things. To the left, you will find the 3.5 mm audiojack. In the middle, there’s the USB Type C port. On the right side, there’s the loudspeaker.
Display
The Huawei P9 comes with a 5.2 inch IPS-NEO LCD display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels. It comes with a pixel density of ~423 ppi. The display on this device is good in terms of color reproduction, sharpness and brightness.
While a 1080p display in 2016 may be a little outdated, especially for a smartphone, the Huawei P9’s display density is quite good for it to compete in this segment. The P9 comes with a different IPS Neo LCD display, a panel developed by JDI. Overall, this is a very good display but things could have been better, especially given the hype behind this flagship smartphone.
Camera Overview
The Huawei P9 features a 12 MP dual-lens Leica camera setup. It comes with f/2.2 aperture, 1.25 µm pixel size, phase detection autofocus, 27 mm lens and dual LED flash. It can record videos up to 1080p@60fps.
On the front, the Huawei P9 comes with an 8 MP secondary camera with f/2.4 aperture. The secondary camera can record videos up to 1080p.
Camera Samples
Gaming Performance
The Huawei P9 comes with a Kirin 955 octa-core processor and a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. To test regular day-to-day gaming performance, we played a bunch of games on the phone – both simple as well as complex games like Clash of Clans, Candy Crush to complex games like Asphalt 8. In our testing, we noticed that the phone played all these games effortlessly – without any noticeable lags whatsoever.
As is common with every smartphone out there, the Huawei P9 showed signs of heating up after playing Asphalt 8 for 25 minutes. We witnessed a battery drop of 15% with the device temperature rising to 42C.
Benchmark Scores
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Conclusion
The Huawei P9 shows that Huawei is ready to take on the other Tier 1 companies head on. It comes with a great design, a competitive set of features and an innovative approach to cameras. While it does come with an average display, other specs like the Kirin 955 octa-core processor, Android 6.0 Marshmallow, 3 GB RAM, the dual 12 MP cameras developed with Leica and dual SIM support work in favour of the Huawei P9. But at Rs. 39,999 it may fall out of the favorite list of many Indian consumers, as Huawei has been absent from the market from quite some time now.
