Hands on with the Huawei P9

Huawei’s latest flagship phone, the P9, will be here in the next couple of weeks. It is a new attempt by the Chinese mobile maker to stake its claim on the western mobile market, with previous P-series phones doing a good job of laying the groundwork for the new release.

This time, the phone maker is talking up its camera. Specifically in this case, it has hooked up with Leica to develop the P9's imaging unit, with two 12-megapixel cameras on the rear of the phone that are aiming to narrow the gap between it and more expensive standalone cameras.

So how does the P9 fare? After 24 hours with the device, here are the initial impressions.

Looks

Huawei has done a good job with the P9's aesthetics. The metal body is drawing inspiration from its predecessors, and it strikes the right balance between thin and light, and feeling flimsy. At 144g, it's

The bezels at the side of the 5.2-inch screen have been trimmed to practically nothing. This allows Huawei to build a bigger screen into a device that isn’t much bigger than Apple’s iPhone 6s. The P9 will fit into your pocket more comfortably than some of the larger phones, although you’re still very aware that it’s there. Basically, it’s slim but not invisible, light but not insubstantial, and you won’t lose it under your credit card.

The camera is set flush with the rear casing, which means no camera bump to snag on pockets. That’s something that Huawei was making a point of in its presentation on Wednesday. The fingerprint scanner is on the back to, just below the camera, so you can easily rest your finger on the sensor when holding it in one hand.

Display

With a 5.2-inch screen, the phone has more screen space than the iPhone 6s, as we’ve already mentioned, but it still fits in the palm of your hand neatly. For many people, it will mean being able to text one-handed again, although I struggled a little to reach the far corners. Still, it’s more comfortable than some of its similarly sized rivals, and while it may still require a bit of two-handed texting here, it looks neat enough.

The P9 is a regular full HD LCD display; it’s the P9 Plus that gets the Super Amoled display.

Inside

The P9 is powered by Huawei’s own Kirin processor. Initial tests showed it to be speedy enough, although we’ll reserve judgment until we’ve thrown everything possible at it. There’s 3GB of RAM in the P9 - the P9 Plus bumps it up to 4GB - and you get a choice of 32GB and 64GB capacity. That can be expanded with a MicroSD card, giving you more space to store your images and video.

The camera

You’ll need that extra space. The P9 can shoot in 4K, with a 12-megapixel rearfacing camera and an 8-megapixel front camera.

The selfie camera has some extra technology, such as a beauty mode that smooths out your skin and lets you slim down your face, brighten your eyes, or make them bigger. Overdo it and you’ll end up with a slight alien appearance. It’s a bit startling.

The camera prowess is the big selling point of the P9. The company has teamed up with Leica to develop what should be an excellent smartphone camera. With a Sony 12-megapixel chip and larger pixels to let in more light, it claims to have more detail and better colour reproduction than its rivals. So far, it’s impressive. Monochrome images have great tone, there’s generally less noise even in low light images, and the manual mode lets you tweak settings to suit your own requirements (and knowledge).

They’ve even put in the Leica shutter click, although that was the first thing to go once the first few pictures were taken.

Battery

At 3000 mAh, the battery in the P9 should get you through a day of heavy use. Once you hit a certain level of low battery, you can switch it into the low power mode that will eke things out a bit further.

It’s USB C though, which although more advanced than the micro USB connection we’re all used to, means you are now destined to carry a charger with you again until more phones have been released with the same connection.

The verdict

So far, so good. The P9 has the looks and the tech spec to make it a decent runner for Android fans.