After a not-so-long break, Huawei has just come up with a new mid-range smartphone under its Y-series of lineup. The company launched the Huawei Y9s in Pakistan a few days ago and is currently taking pre-orders at its retail stores nationwide as well as online. If you didn’t know, there is still time to book yours and get a free 10,000 mAh power bank.
But you can just hold for a while and check this unboxing session of Huawei Y9s with our first impressions and quick overview. This will help you decide whether you should buy the new Huawei smartphone or not.
Huawei Y9s can be considered as a successor to the company’s Y9 Prime that was launched a few months ago in Pakistan. With a couple of improved features, the Huawei Y9s costs PKR 43,000. For that price, you will get a triple rear camera and a full-view notch-less display with a pop-up selfie camera. It’s a good package with 6GB RAM and 128GB, however, the Kirin 710F processor is a bit old now.
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Unboxing
It was pretty much the same experience with the box as it always has been with Huawei smartphones. The white box comes with a phone’s print on one side and some key features of the phone are printed on the other side.
Once you open the box, you see the device on top wrapped into a plastic bag, which I think Huawei should stop using as it’s too cheap for a device, priced over forty grand.
The device itself carries a sticker on the front with the key features printing — 6.59 FullView display, 48MP triple rear camera, 16MP pop-up front camera, 6GB RAM, 128GB storage, and 4000 mAh battery.
Along with the device, you will get some basic stuff that usually comes with all smartphones. The full list of box contents are listed below.
- The device, Huawei Y9s
- Standard stereo earphones
- A connectivity cable – USB Type-C
- 10-watt wall charger – 5V/2A
- Silicone case
- User manual
- SIM eject tool
The first thing that didn’t attract me was the cheap standard earphones set. Huawei should put a bit better one instead. The second thing is that while the phone has a large 4000 mAh battery, it ships with mere a 10-watt charger.
During the initial use, the phone reported to get fully charged from under 10% battery within around 2.5 hours. However, with moderate usage, the phone seems to be promising with its power management. I can’t say something extraordinary before using it for a couple of days before a complete review.
USB Type-C is indeed impressive though. I hope think brands also should start using USB C connectivity in this price range at least if not under 30k.
The phone itself is pretty nice to handle. Its glass build with metal frame gives a premium feel. The variant I could get here was Midnight Black, however, there is another variant that I think is more attractive — Breathing Crystal. I wish I had that instead of a very common black color.
But black is black and fits in every situation. It’s not like the jet black but has gray shade if you look closely.
Huawei built it with one thing in mind that we have previously seen it with most of its devices including high-end and mid-range ones — the glossy finish. The Midnight Black variant gives shades with the light as you tilt the phone either side. On the other hand, the Breathing Crystal variant, which is a white color, gives tinted shades.
The black one, you can see below with a triple camera setup on one corner stacked vertically with a single LED flash outside the camera module. It’s a full 3D curved glass panel on the back.
We will cover the camera quality in detailed review, however, what I can tell you here is that it’s 48MP main camera which is the key factor. Huawei never discloses the sensor inside, but I believe it’s Sony IMX586 which we have seen in many other mid-range devices.
Another unit is 8MP with a wide-angle lens which is not autofocus, neither it can offer macro capability, unlike many recent devices are offering. That could have been much better as of a successor to existing Huawei Y9 Prime rather than only a resolution shift.
The third one is the most common 2MP depth sensor for portrait shots. Huawei additionally provide an “aperture mode” for the same purpose to shoot subjects other than human. We’ll cover that in review later. Or you can watch the video above to see some quick sample shots during the first impression.
Pop-up front camera remains from the Y9 Prime but with double the resolution. Huawei Y9s offers a 16MP selfie shooter upgraded from 8MP in Y9 Prime.
Mechanical pop-up module, a fancy yet useful feature pioneered by Vivo, is something we now have seen from a lot of other smartphone makers. Useful; not in the sense of being itself a useful feature, but it eventually helped manufacturers provide a real full-view display experience cutting down any bezel or notch.
I always have mentioned that I only liked this pop-up camera due to the fact it could remain out of sight when looking on the screen. Otherwise, it’s a mechanical motor that may fail anytime sooner or later. But in my experience, I haven’t seen any of them being failed. We reached out to Huawei wondering if they mind telling about their lab test with this pop-up module. We’ll update this part as soon as we get an answer.
The screen; this is what I am talking about. An immersive full-view experience is a lot better than any kind of tiny notch.
I had preferred to stick with a full bezel instead of the notch. For that, Huawei had always offered an option to hide the notch with a software-based dark status bar. But with this full-view display, that option has no room in the software as there is nothing to hide now.
6.6-inch (or more specifically the 6.59-inch) display is only for those who like the large screens. Thanks to the thin bezels that even big screens now come handy in compact bodies. Still, they are not good for one-handed use. You will get a full HD+ resolution of 2340×1080 pixels across.
Handling was fine and with 206 grams the phone feels like an average weight as we usually experience devices nowadays. The phone offers dual-SIM connectivity but it comes with a hybrid SIM slot.
So you have two options – either you can use two SIM cards, or you can use one SIM card and one microSD card. You can’t use all three of them simultaneously. It could be a loss for many but should I remind you that the phone itself has a 128GB of internal storage?
Huawei Y9s has all those components that any other standard smartphone usually offers. A loudspeaker, a mouthpiece, a connectivity port (USB Type-C thankfully) is provided on the bottom. While the SIM slot and pop-up camera is provided on top of the phone. There is also a tiny secondary mic for noise cancellation.
The power button and volume buttons are on the right side of the phone. But if you noticed the absence of the fingerprint sensor on the backside of the phone, then you were right. This time Huawei mounted it on the right side of the phone. It’s embedded into the power button – a placement, I hardly liked in Samsung phones.
While this place for fingerprint sensor has a broader reach of fingers than the rear-mounted sensor, this always felt tiny for its job. It does its job indeed; but how efficient it is? we’ll see in the long run.
My first impressions with this phone are actually good. I have switched to this phone as my primary phone these days for the sake of evaluation so I could offer my conclusion about the phone before you buy it.
So just put your question down below; anything you are wondering about the phone. We’ll try to cover it in the complete review.