Tech Tools review: the Huawei P9 smartphone

In the competitive smartphone market, it is tough to stand out. Manufacturers are jostling to be the premium brand everyone wants, the one with the best tech spec, the top-end one with the mid-range price, and so on. They try so hard that they actually all start to blend together in one, long, shiny tech-filled wall of noise.

A picture tells a thousand words, though, and it’s through their cameras that mobile phone makers are trying to make a mark. This means better photographs in low light and for faster-moving objects; it means better selfies for your social media profile.

Huawei is making the most of its partnership with camera company Leica. The P9 is one of the first phones from its portfolio that bears the Leica brand name, and the mobile phone maker is hoping this will give it an edge over the competition.

The P9 has a dual camera built in that is supposed to give it more detailed, higher-quality photos; one deals with monochrome, one with RGB. It has been engineered with Leica to bring added imaging expertise to the 12-megapixel camera, with manual controls for more confident snappers.

A wide-angle lens crams more into the picture, while bigger pixels let more light into the images, which means low light is no longer as much of a problem as it was for other phones. To test it, I took a photo in a darkened room, with nothing but a phone screen to illuminate the subject. The resulting picture was grainy, yes, but it was clearer than anything I have captured in similar circumstances with other phones.

In daylight, the P9 puts in an impressive performance, capturing more detail and clearer images when compared with its rivals. And it does all this without the now ubiquitous camera bump that catches on your pockets as you put the phone away.

The P9 follows the previous P series phones in terms of design, and Huawei is keen to put it up against its Apple and Samsung rivals. Although the screen comes in at 5.2in – bigger than the iPhone 6 – it is still thinner than both the Apple handset and the Samsung Galaxy S7.

Other features have been designed to be more convenient. The fingerprint sensor, for example, is on the rear of the phone, just where your finger would naturally land when you hold the phone one-handed. Aside from unlocking the phone, that sensor can also be used for taking a selfie.

Speaking of selfies, Huawei has put an eight-megapixel camera on the front of the device for this purpose. It also has a “beauty” mode on the front-facing camera, which allows you to smooth out your skin, whiten your teeth, brighten your eyes and even slim down your face. Go too far, though, and you’ll start to resemble an alien. I turned up all the beauty effects to 10 and posted the results on Twitter – they were a little freakish.

The Android handset is powered by Huawei’s own Kirin processor. It does a good enough job that the average consumer won’t even notice it’s not the ubiquitous Snapdragon chip inside.

Huawei’s software – the Emotion UI – is back again. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan, and the P9 features a big irritant: too much preinstalled software. Social media apps are one thing, but there are plenty of games and what Huawei deems “top apps” already lurking on your handset. Ditch the bloatware, please.

The good

Nicely designed with a great camera and a price that won’t completely blow your budget.

The not so good

The headphones bundled with the device. Hard and unyielding, they’re not the most comfortable. The biggest drawback to the P9, though, is the preinstalled apps. It’s bloatware-a-go-go here.

The rest

The phone comes in 32GB and 64GB versions, with the option to bump the capacity up with a microSD card. There’s a single speaker on the bottom of the phone, and the headphone jack has also been shifted there.

The verdict

The P9 lives up to its promises on the camera, but Emotion UI needs to take a long, hard look at itself