Gear Friday: Huawei Mate 9

Huawei Mate 9.

This year, smartphone vendors started to see double with their cameras.

Well, some vendors added a second camera then, to overcome the natural limitations of having a small, slim device, a tiny lens and a fairly minuscule sensor to digitise the light into pictures.

Huawei was one of the first with its P9, which sports one 12 megapixel colour and one black-and-white camera at the back co-developed with German photography legend Leica.

The Chinese tech giant's new flagship Mate 9 continues that same theme, but the black-and-white imager now has 20Mp resolution although the lenses are the same Leica-branded f/2.2 aperture Summarit H aspherical ones as on the P9.

As an aside, there's a Pro version of the Mate 9 with high-resolution 2560 by 1440 pixel 5.5-inch screen and front-mounted fingerprint sensor, both of which go into the pricy Mate 9 Porsche Design variant which also has 256 gigabyte storage instead of 64GB.

I got the "normal" Mate 9 to review, with 64GB of storage, 4GB of RAM and a Huawei-developed HiSilicon Kirin 960 processor with eight cores.

Four of these run at 2.4GHz max, the other four at 1.8GHz, which is oddly enough a tiny bit slower than the P9 Plus.

It's a fast device though: there was no hesitation or stutter when using the Mate 9, on the contrary, it's one of the fastest Android devices out there.

Looking at the specifications list, it's again bit odd of Huawei to have a bigger 5.9-inch IPS screen on the Mate 9 which has only full HD (1920 by 1080) resolution when the smaller AMOLED 5.5-inch Pro has far more pixels to play with.

Compared to the P9 Plus, the Mate 9 battery has been upgraded to a massive, non-replaceable 4,000 mAh unit which easily lasted two days between charges with normal use. Big phone, big battery. The SuperCharge feature tops up a depleted battery very quickly over a USB-C connector, and without heating up the phone.

Before anyone asks, yes, the Mate 9 can take two SIMs. You can also increase the onboard storage with a micro-SD memory card, there are stereo speakers and fast, LTE-A Cat 12 broadband that in theory goes can hit 600 Mbps downloads and 150 Mbps uploads, in 21 frequency bands.

Huawei's EMUI 5.0 software is based on Google's Android 7.0 "Nougat" operating system, and I was quite happy with how it didn't get in the way of using the Mate 9. The look and feel is muted rather than flashy, and all the functions and features you need are easy to find.

Autofocus is mostly good, accurate and quick to lock onto subjects, and there's a tracking mode as well that lets you follow moving targets.

It's the cameras though that's the main, err, focus of the Mate 9. Apart from the higher resolution, the Leica-branded cameras are now on top of each other when the Mate 9 is held vertically - the P9 has the side-by-side.

When you flip the phone into landscape mode, the lenses are next to each other instead with a dual-tone double LED flash on top, and have phase-detection and laser autofocus.

Long story short: the Mate 9 camera system is pretty good. You get plenty of detail in the pictures, which are vibrant with good colour (but see below) in daylight. Huawei says the 20Mpixel black-and-white sensor helps with low light performance, and that was mostly true as Mate 9 pictures weren't as grainy and blotchy as other smartphone cameras after dark.

With a monochrome camera, there's no need to use a black-and-white filter of course. In practice, this didn't turn out to make that much of a difference in terms of image quality compared to say, pictures from the iPhone 7 Plus with a b&w filter applied.

Autofocus is mostly good, accurate and quick to lock onto subjects, and there's a tracking mode as well that lets you follow moving targets.

Huawei's camera app has lots of features and settings, including a Pro mode for controlling exposure parameters. They're easy to access by swiping the screen either side, or at the bottom - when you're holding the phone upright. Holding the Mate 9 in landscape mode which is what you do when taking pics made it difficult to access the settings screen.

The Mate 9 is an excellent Android phone that shows Huawei is serious about producing quality gear.

There's room for improvement in the image quality. A yellow-greenish cast appeared on both colour and monochrome pictures as well as video recordings, that isn't in the P9 Plus (or the Apple iPhone 7 Plus for that matter). Judging by the P9 Plus, this can probably be fixed with a firmware update but for now you have to manually adjust images to fix the colour.

Smartphone videographers note: the Mate 9 does 4K video for added detail, unlike the P9 which only went to 1080p at 60 frames per second.

In practice however, the 4K and 60fps 1080p video modes are less useful for day to day shooting than the 30fps 1080p on the Mate 9, which provides features such as image stabiliser and object tracking that the former two lack.

Which is the best dual camera setup for smartphones - Apple or Huawei? Leaving aside the Android vs iOS consideration, Apple took a very different tack with the iPhone 7 Plus dual camera.

The iPhone 7 Plus has a wide-angle and a short telephoto lens which, when you can use it in good light, provides its own set of advantages like an optical zoom, and those almost-bokeh blurred backgrounds for instance.

Huawei's approach uses two cameras with the same 27mm (35mm format) focal length so there's no optical zoom. As you get 20Mp files (RAW and JPEG) out of the Mate 9, you can crop in quite a bit to get closer to subjects and Huawei's "hybrid zoom" isn't too bad.

Price-wise, the Mate 9 isn't cheap at $1,100 for the 64GB model, but an iPhone 7 Plus is even more, starting at $1,429 for 32GB, and $1,629 for 128GB. As the P9 Plus retails for $1,100 as well, the Mate 9 with better specs seems like the best deal of the dual camera smartphones. Worth noting is Huawei's one-year screen replacement guarantee in case of accidents.

The Mate 9 faces tough competition from Google's Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S7 and the Sony Xperia XZ which might not have the elaborate dual-camera system of Huawei's device, but nevertheless take great pictures too.

Overall, the Mate 9 is an excellent Android phone that shows Huawei is serious about producing quality gear. I'd probably aim for the Pro model with its higher resolution screen, and hope Huawei fixes the niggly colour cast issue on images soon.