Huawei Mate 9 official with Leica Dual Camera and Kirin 960 SoC

Huawei has unveiled its Mate 9 smartphone in Munich, Germany today in collaboration with Leica Camera. Most of the things are we have already known in speculations but there are still somethings Huawei had to announce today.

Metal built Huawei Mate 9 weighs 190 grams with only 7.5mm thickness. The new phablet has a 5.9″ IPS display with full HD 1080p resolution and a 2.5D curved glass on the screen. Just as the rumors suggested, the Mate 9 is powered by Kirin 960 SoC – the home built processor.

Huawei Kirin 960 chipset is setup with an octa-core processor configuration coupled with four cores of ARM Cortex-A73 clocked at 2.4GHz and four cores of Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.8GHz. Huawei Mate 9 features the flagship GPU by ARM, Mali-G71 MP8. Mali-G71 is built on company’s Bifrost GPU architecture that is majorly marketed for high-end gaming and specially the mobile VR.

In addition the Mate 9 has 4GB of RAM along with 64GB of internal storage (UFS 2.1) which can be expanded via microSD card. There is no other option to choose from memory/storage however there are two variants of the Mate 9 – single SIM or dual SIM. Single SIM model will serve with a dedicated microSD card slot wherein dual SIM variant the second SIM slot will serve for the microSD card in place of a SIM.

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Dual Cameras on smartphones are gaining momentum across various manufacturers in multiple configurations, however Huawei seems to be more serious about it as the the new Mate 9 also features the dual-camera configuration exactly as we know from the speculations. This is the same setup as the Huawei P9 but the Mate 9 comes with upgrades like 20 megapixel camera with monochrome sensor underneath and a 12 megapixel camera with RGB sensor. Both cameras have similar lens with f/2.2 aperture and optical image stabilization. Autofocus is hybrid with phase detection, laser, depth map and contrast detection. Along side a dual-LED flash is also present.

Read more: Huawei Mate 9 has a Premium Variant called Porsche Design

Unlike rumors suggested, Mate 9 doesn’t feature any optical zoom but Huawei calls something as 2x hybrid zoom which sure is supposed to give lossless zoom but we can’t tell about its quality without sample shots or unless we try it our selves.

With the 4K video recording Huawei Mate 9 becomes the first Huawei smartphone for this capability. On the front there is 8 megapixel camera for video calling and selfies, that is also autofocus with f/1.9 aperture lens.

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Huawei Mate 9 include 4000mAh battery which comes with a 5 ampere charger to support Super Charging. Fingerprint, as usual, present on the back side of the phone which is always-on with i6 co-processor.

Last but not the least, Mate 9 runs Android 7 Nougat with the latest EMUI 5.0 flavor from the Chinese phone maker. The major overhaul in EMUI 5.0 is that now users will have option to choose between the traditional EMUI and the new one that supports app drawer. “More than 50 percent of features can now be reached within two clicks while over 90 percent can be reached within three clicks.”

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Huawei Mate 9 Price and Availability

Huawei Mate 9 is going to be available in as much as five colors namely Space Gray, Moonlight Silver, Champagne Gold, Mocha Brown and Ceramic White. Mate 9 will be released first in number of European and Asian markets including China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Thailand, and UAE. More to add into list sooner after.

Huawei Mate 9 is priced at €699 in Europe which is approximately $776 or PKR. 78,000/- Which is really high to be considered, after all Huawei has already joined top manufacturers.