Gadgetory

the failure of the galaxy note 7 presented opportunity for rival OEMs but can Huawei take advantage is partnering with porsche design enough for the mate 9 to take the market by storm what's going on guys is narrow and this is our review of the regular and porsche design mate 9 the design of the regular mate 9 may be largely unchanged from last year but it does bring with it further refinement the smaller more compact profile provides a much better in hand experience while the curved union body is finished with a soft feeling aluminium the result is a smartphone that doesn't feel as large as you'd expect considering the 5-point knowledge displayed the mate line is roughly the same size as both the iPhone 7 plus and the Google Nexus 6p which both have smaller displays the button arrangement is familiar as well with power and volume keys on the right a dual SIM tray on the left USB C port and one of the dual speakers at the bottom you'll also find the headphone jack in the IR blaster up top the dual speaker at the bottom is joined by a second speaker in the earpiece and let me tell you these are some really loud speakers on the back both devices have a laker branded dual camera but the similarities stop there as well the regular mate 9 has its fingerprint scanner on the back the porsche design variant moves it to the front beneath the display in its stead comes a posh design logo that is quite frankly a show of opulence porsche design version also trades a soft finish of the mate 9 for a pitch black anodized metal that looks striking and shimmers in the light but it does attract a lot more fingerprints while the designer that mate 9 may not be revolutionary it does represent another year of refinement for huawei the mate 9 is great in the hand and while we're showing that it is possible to make a big phone that is friendly in the hand the regular make 9 has a full HD screen whilst the posh design model has a smaller 5.5 inch qHD AMOLED panel looking at the spec sheet it would be easy to be disappointed in this resolution of the regular make 9 but this doesn't tell the whole picture the display has a high contrast ratio and a brightness of over 608 which helps shield the fact that it's not actually an AMOLED panel by comparison the max brightness of the Porsche design is just 337 mids making it a lot less impressive than its counterpart all last year's mate eight running both phones through our testing lab reveals they both ship with a core display out of the box although it is rather simple two changes in the settings the Porsche design is more accurate than the regular mate nine screen by default and both also come with a blue light filter which works as you might expect the porsche design mate nine aside while we are stuck to its guns about not sacrificing battery life for a higher resolution display and the mate nine is a shining example of why this is actually a wise choice yes it would have been nice to have qhd on a panel this big but this regular mate nine screen is fantastic nonetheless so what happens when you put a full HD display and a four thousand milliamp hour battery inside of the same phone as you might expect you get excellent battery life using our custom Android authority battery testing app we found a mate nine can last for five thousand twelve minutes on a full charge when gaming while the porsche design version lasts for four hours and 34 minutes for video playback the mate nine last for 14 hours and 12 minutes whilst the porsche design taps out at 10 hours and 36 minutes while in our web browsing test that mate nine last for 14 hours and four minutes versus 11 hours and 28 minutes for the porsche design variant in actual use you can expect the regular mate nine to easily last two days with heavy usage which translates to between 5 and hour eight hours of screen on time for those more interested in the porsche design this drops to between four and seven hours on a single charge for the times when it is getting low both devices come with Huawei's new nine volt four-and-a-half amp fast charging solution dub supercharge when using the bundled wall or car supercharger your battery can go from empty to 55% in one hour to charge to full the mate nine takes 89 minutes whilst the porsche design version takes 111 minutes while we also says that thanks to a chip inside the supercharger which constantly communicates with your smartphone the mate nine won't overheat and can run up to twenty-five percent cooler than other smartphones both versions of the mate nine are powered by the new kieran 960 chipset which combines the latest cortex a 73 processors from with the latest GPU from mali the kiran 960 is the first phone to run the new marley g71 mpag pu which is also expected to power the galaxy s 8 next year why waste care and chipsets have always offered excellent performance but have severely struggled in the graphics department but the kiran 960 puts an end to that whether it's in gaming video playback or general use the processing package just flies and we're yet to experience a drop friend or any really noticeable lag with 4 gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes of external storage inside the regular mate nine and six gigs of ram and 256 gigabytes of non expandable storage in the porsche design version there's plenty of gram under hood and both handsets are capable of pretty much handling anything you throw at them yes the 6 gig of ram on the porsche design version does provide a slightly smoother experience but the regular mate 9 is certainly no slouch and has around two-and-a-half gigs of ram free with no applications running the benchmark for month also lives up the real-world experience with the kieran 960 proving to be a very capable processor the improvement in the graphics is particularly noticeable with the Mali GPU living up to while exclaims of an 8 times increase in graphics performance over previous years both devices also come with a lightning-fast fingerprint sensor although the one of the mate 9 is considerably faster than the front mounted sensor on the porsche design other noticeable hardware includes an array of sensors and connectivity options including NFC Bluetooth Wi-Fi and an infrared port the dual SIM card slot on the regular mate 9 allows you to use either two SIM cards or a similar micro SD card slot with emui providing several granular controls over how the two SIM cards work together call quality is fantastic especially as the mate 9 eliminates ambient noise when you raise your phone to your ear during a call both handsets come equipped with the second generation like a branded dual camera which brings some tweaks and enhancements over the ones found in the Huawei p9 and Huawei p9 plus the camera experience is centered around a 12 megapixel RGB sensor with optical image stabilization which captures colors and a secondary 20 mega pixel monochrome sensor that captures additional detail the larger secondary camera means you're able to capture images with an impressive bokeh effect whether closed up or away in the right conditions you're able to take images that top the portrait mode and photosphere effects found on both the iPhone 7 plus and the pixel XL respectively overall image quality from the maintenance your camera is impressive in daylight you get images that are crisp and full of detail with colors that are more realistic and less saturated than those captured by the galaxy s7 edge or the pixel excel y ways camera app also makes tweaking pictures easy with pro mode just a tap away allowing you to adjust the exposure ISO and focal point in real-time to take even more stunning photos in default mode it seems to struggle with picking the right focal length as images are often under or overexposed but manually selecting the right focal point quickly overcomes this Huawei is often struggled with low-light photography but the main train can take pictures that are seemingly on par with its rivals however the overall low-light performance is impressive the main tonight does struggle with slight movement with oh is proving less effective done on other devices the while way camera is rather straightforward to use with options for flash wide aperture and filters found in the viewfinder a swipe to the right brings up the settings menu whilst so I think the Left brings up the camera modes here's where you'll find HDR and it can't be activated by default which means remembering to actually activate it HDR doesn't seem to be as effective as on other devices she'll end up activating it a lot less than you might otherwise expect the front camera is an 8 megapixel shooter with F dot 1.9 aperture which can shoot Full HD video at 30 frames per second for the most part selfies come out rich and full of colors in good lighting and in low lighting the camera does a good job of boosting the ISO to let more lighting for the most part the camera on the mate 9 doesn't seem to disappoint and it seems to be on par with most Android flagships it's not perfect no phone is after all but the mate 9 is capable of taking pictures which you'll be proud to share look at past Huawei phones and there's a single trend that come to pretty much define why we've mobile efforts up until now great Hardware not-so-good software until now about is the make 9 is the first phone to run the new EMU i-5 interface which is based on Android 7.0 nougat and the biggest overhaul of WoW is interface that we've ever seen there's a lot of changes but the most important is that yes you can now have an app drawer with this out the way the other changes are both visual and feature based with the odd color scheme of old replaced by a new as your theme with white backgrounds faint gray accents blue highlights and tones if this theme isn't view of course there's other themes in the theme store Android nuga also brings some improvements and tweaks to lend to the overall experience and it's nice to see that Huawei has resisted preview habits of overhauling everything in favour of a more minimalist approach with a few tweaks in select parts of the OS swiping from the top down brings a new darker notification shade that displays more icons than before and can be heavily customized in the settings menu there's an option to toggle between individual notification icons or just the number of unread notifications which can be used to prevent the top from becoming really cluttered moving around emu i5 and it's clear that this is a snappy interface with bloat we're mostly kept to a minimum the launcher is fast full of features and heavily customizable and aside from a slight stuttering going to your home screen when you have the app drawer enabled there's no noticeable lag Mui 5 also comes with Huawei's new machine learning algorithm which aims to learn your habits and allocate more resources to the apps you use most frequently out of the box the mate 9 is a fast phone and while Wei says the handset was designed to remain fast will the algorithm using memory compression smart CPU allocation and optimized ufs 2.10 storage to remain fast even after 16 months of use of course we can't back up these frames but the initial results are positive what makes a Mui five easy to use is that despite a large feature set it has been designed to ensure almost all tasks are only two or three taps away taking the settings menu as an example it's been redesigned with ease of use in mind and nowhere is it more imporant than the battery menu in previous versions it could be found four levels deep in the settings menu but now it's a top-level item battery management has also been improved specifically in the way emui handles and notifies you about power intensive apps rather than the nagging pumps of old emui five now discreetly notifies you in the notification menu and makes it pretty easy to close these apps within the tap or two if you rather close all apps when you turn off the screen this is also possible as is the ability to select individual apps to automatically close a feature that I found particularly useful is Twitter which allows you to run two instances of a single account app on your phone given the dual-sim nature of the mate 9 being able to run what's up on two accounts is particularly useful while if you've got two Facebook accounts this is also possible the curve display on the Porsche design make nine doesn't have any special software benefits like the galaxies and instead the only difference is the way you navigate the phone rather than on-screen keys you have two capacitive keys flanking the home button and when while you can turn these off and use gestures on the sensor to navigate the phone we'd recommend you done as it doesn't work that well we wish there was an option for on-screen navigation but the capacitive keys seem to do the job well enough overall the main line isn't revolutionary upgrade over its predecessor nor is it going to appeal to everyone but it does excel in the areas that while we intended it to battery performance and camera compared to previous phones even as recently as the huawei p9 this year there were several things which deterred people from buying a huawei phone these have now been fixed and an emu i-5 wha we now has an interface that is smooth feature-rich and up there with the very best of them all things considered the main line is probably the best big screen Android smartphone you can buy right now at a cost of 699 euros it's certainly not cheap but it does offer great value for money at 1399 euros however the porsche design does not the post design mate 9 is arguably the flagship the mate 9 should have been and it's actually available at lower price sandless porsche design branding as the mate 9 pro that being said the regular mate 9 is a joy to use if you're after a big smartphone that offers exceptional battery life an intriguing dual camera an incredible performance the make 9 deliver this in spades what do you think of the regular and the posh design while we mate 9 let us know your thoughts in the comments below give us a thumbs up if you liked this video and check out the full written review at Android Authority comm where you'll find an even more comprehensive look at both phones including benchmarks camera performance and battery life don't forget to subscribe and stay tuned as we are your source for all things Android