Huawei P9 with Leica-branded Dual-lens

Update: It’s now priced at RM2,099 This for me is quite an affordable price for an excellent high-end, flagship level smartphone. 

After impressing the tech world with the camera quality of the Nexus 6P, Huawei has started to receive due global recognition as a smartphone producer.  Following on to that, Huawei has released an update to their main smartphone line, presenting the Huawei P9. What’s special about this smartphone? Well apparently it has two cameras. Not interesting enough? Well get this, it’s certified by Leica.

Before dwelling deeper into the cameras let’s get rid of the other “non-interesting” features about this phone. The smartphone measures 145 x 70.9 x 6.9 mm making it quite thin. Another plus for it is for the fact that it doesn’t have any eye-disturbing camera bumps. The cameras at the back are enclosed in a black rectangle, similar to the Nexus 6P. Below that you’ll find a fingerprint scanner. Following other flagship smartphones, it has an aluminium unibody which makes it look even nicer. The device is quite light as well, weighing in at only 144 grams.

The screen is a standard 5.2-inch Full HD IPS Display which outputs a maximum of 500 nits of brightness and 96% colour saturation. This Full HD display can be said as a good choice as it saves more battery. Though don’t look down on it as it gives out an impressive 423 ppi. Something worth mentioning is the fact that the bezels are very,very thin exhibiting an almost bezel less feel.

What sets Huawei smartphones from the rest is that they usually put in their own in-house processors. Some being able to beat other top processors in the market. This time the Huawei P9 comes with an octa-core Kirin 955 (which has a 16nm FinFET built), a boosted version of the Kirin 950. The power will be provided by a big 3,000 mAh battery and like the standard nowadays supports fast charging. Charging it is done through a USB Type-C port.

It runs the latest Android Marshmallow with Huawei Emotion UI 4.1 skin. Some previous Android users might be surprised when using this as it does not have an app drawer. Gestures such as knock to open, switching the placement of the on-screen buttons is also possible.


Now moving to the most anticipated aspect of all, the Leica certified dual cameras. Both are f/2.2 12MP sensors but the difference is that one of them is a monochrome sensor. Basically how they work is that one is dedicated for colour reproduction while the other is for capturing black and white details. Both lenses uses 1.25-micron Sony IMX286 sensors. A combination of this is touted to give an increase of 200% light sensitivity and 50% bump in contrast. Other than that, it has a full manual mode which includes the standard controls with the addition of control over ISO, shutter speed and exposure. The only things that I could complain on is the lack of 4K recording and OIS
The front meanwhile has a quite big 8MP camera with the standard beautification mode found on Huawei devices.






Variants available are the 3GB RAM with 32GB of storage or 4GB RAM with 64GB. It is said that there is also a dual-sim tray that can also double up as a microSD slot. You also get the latest Wifi standard AC, Bluetooth, GPS and NFC

 Source: Android Authority, Lowyat.net, Huawei,