Huawei Mate 9 Pro review
Introduction
If you remember, the Mate 9 Porsche Design was announced along with the regular Mate 9. It used the same hardware except for the screen, which was AMOLED and
a curved one at that. It was also prohibitively expensive, and it was only going to be sold through Porsche Design exclusive boutiques. It set off a gadget craving that the regular Mate 9 could not fulfill.
Fast forward a couple of months, and we now hold the Mate 9 Pro in our hands - a smartphone identical to the Porsche Design Edition and a cheaper one, too. Sure, the Mate 9 Pro is not as widely available as the Mate 9, but at least it's not a designer product with an obscene price tag attached to it.
Yes, it's finally, here. A phone, which we have been on the lookout for ever since its announcements. Dreams do come true sometimes. The Huawei Mate 9 surely looked gorgeous and delivered on its promises for flagship performance and great camera, but the Mate 9 Pro has the same specs and then some more.
Technically, not everything is the same - the Mate 9 Pro's AMOLED display is smaller but has a higher resolution. As you'll see below, there are hardly any other differences.
Huawei Mate 9 Pro at a glance:
- Body:Aluminum unibody, 2.5D Gorilla Glass 3 front
- Screen: 5.5" curved AMOLED with 1440 x 2,560px resolution (534ppi)
- Camera: Leica co-engineered dual camera: 20MP monochrome/12MP color sensors, f2.2, 27mm equiv. focal length, 4-in-1 hybrid autofocus (phase/laser/contrast/depth sensing); dual-LED, dual-tone flash; 2160p and 1080p @ 30/60fps video capture
- Selfie cam: 8MP f/1.9; 26mm lens; 1080p @ 30fps video capture
- OS: Android 7.0 Nougat with Huawei EMUI 5.0 overlay
- Chipset: Kirin 960 chipset: Octa-core CPU (4xCortex-A73@2.4GHz + 4xCortex-A53@1.8GHz), i6 co-processor, octa-core Mali-G71 GPU
- Memory: 6GB of RAM; 128GB storage
- Battery: 4,000mAh Li-Po (sealed); Fast charging
- Connectivity: Dual-SIM; LTE-A (Cat. 12 600/150Mbps); USB-C; Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac; GPS/GLONASS/Beidou/Galileo; IR port
- Misc: Stereo speakers; Fingerprint reader
Main shortcomings:
- Smaller display in comparison with the Mate 9
- No microSD expansion
- No dust or water resistance
- Non-removable battery
- No FM radio
The reduced screen size is probably the single potential turn off for the aspiring owners. The downsizing was enough to demote the Mate 9 from a phablet to a regular sized smartphone by current standards. On the other hand, it's a change that you may be more than happy with if the Mate 9 was too big for you.
The lack of memory expansion is easily offset by the default 128GB internal storage, while the lack of waterproofing is hardly a surprise as Huawei hasn't introduced it on any of its products.
The spotty availability is probably the worst bit about the Mate 9 Pro, as Huawei hasn't launched the Pro model everywhere where the Mate 9 is available. In fact, the device is currently available in China, India, and apparently in the USA, though the gray import market is seemingly thriving. We guess Huawei either gave some exclusivity rights to the device to Porsche Design in Europe, or they just didn't want it to get in the way of the pending launch of the P10.
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro's hardware checkup begins right after the jump.
Unboxing the Huawei Mate 9 Pro
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro comes in a retail package that leaves no doubt about its premium market position. Aside from the presentation, the contents are pretty lavish, too.
You'll find two additional separate boxes inside and the first one holds the mighty 22.5W charger, a proprietary Type-C cable (more on that in the Battery section), a micro-USB to Type-C adapter, and a headset.
The second one contains the SIM eject tool and a transparent case. The latter snaps tightly onto the Mate and covers the back and the corners.
Huawei Mate 9 Pro 360-degree spin
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro measures 152 x 75 x 7.5mm, which is about right for a 5.5-incher and it's very close to the Galaxy S7 edge's measurements. As expected, the Mate 9 Pro is smaller than the Mate 9 - it's 5mm shorter and 4mm narrower.
The Mate 9 has lost some weight - it's 169 g, 21g down from the Mate 9, but 12g heavier than the Galaxy S7 edge.
Design
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro was envisioned as a premium product, and you can tell by the involvement of Porsche Design. But even losing the pricey logos, the superior design and appearance are easy to spot.
The curved front glass is an immediate attention grabber. The Galaxy S6 edge originally established the double-edge design, and it was successfully continued as a trend by the Galaxy S7 edge. Huawei's intent to be edgy might have gone a bit too far, though, as the Mate 9 Pro looks are a bit too S7 edge-y, pun intended.
The curved Gorilla Glass 3 keeping the curved 5.5" AMOLED screen safe should do a fine job. But the Mate 9 Plus might come with a screen protector pre-applied in some markets. While we aren't particularly fond of this cheap piece of polyurethane, you at least have a choice to keep it or remove it, depending on your definition of safety. And having a choice is always a good thing, so we give Huawei credit where it's due.
While the Mate 9 Pro and Galaxy S7 edge have a lot on common on their faceplates, the back is where they part ways.
For quite some time we were convinced the Mate 9 Pro's metal back has a lot of similarities to the original Mate 9's. But shortly after the joy of handling a new device wore off, we noticed the backs are completely different, with the two identical bits being the cameras' bed and the choice of material.
The brushed pattern and the polished metal are a nice touch and complement well the luxurious front. The plastic lines are unavoidable in a metal unibody, but we like the way Huawei used the top one to emphasize on the dual camera setup. HTC began using the antenna bands in the same way with the One series (M7, M8, M9) and we can now see a few similarities with the gold One M9 model.
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro may not be unique, but that's true for almost any phone these days. It's the build quality and sturdiness that matter the most and the Mate 9 Pro has got them just right. The curved glass fits perfectly into the metal shell, and there are no gaps whatsoever. Handling the Mate 9 Pro is a premium experience by our book, though all these curves hardly help with the handling.
Huawei Mate 9 Pro • Huawei Mate 9 Pro • Handling the Mate p Pro
While the original Mate 9 phablet follows the footsteps of the previous Mates, the Pro flavor breaks the pattern and goes for the best materials and shapes known to the market. You can tell it's different in an instant, and that was the point all along - to be better looking than the Mate 9. It may not be unique, but it's still nothing short of gorgeous.
Device overview
The 5.5" AMOLED screen is the centerpiece of the Huawei Mate 9 Pro. Above is the earpiece, which also doubles as a second speaker. The ambient light sensor is hidden under the earpiece's grille, which is something we don't see often.
The proximity sensor is responsible for the small black dot left of the earpiece, and there is a tiny RGB LED notification light nearby. The 8MP autofocus selfie is further to the right.
Below the high-res display is a deck with three capacitive keys, all of them - highly customizable. For starters, the Home key is not clickable; it reacts to taps only. It also has an embedded fingerprint scanner, which has the fastest and most accurate sensor we've encountered to date. Huawei has always employed blazing-fast biometric scanners, but this one beats everything else. Oh, and it's always-on so you can wake the phone from standby just by touching it.
The front • the earpiece also acts as a speaker • the Home key is awesome
The Home key surprises continued once we dug into the Settings menu. You can opt to disable the other two cleverly hidden, though backlighted capacitive keys, and make the Home one a multi-functional tool - one tap for Back, long tap for Home, and swipe left or right on its surface for Task Switcher. It's like Meizu's mTouch key, but even better.
The ejectable SIM bed is on the left, while the volume controls and the power/lock key are on the left.
The left side • the dual-SIM bed • what's on the right • the power/lock key
The IR blaster is the only thing of interest at the phone's top. The bottom is pretty crowded, though - there is the USB Type-C port, the primary speaker and mic, and the analog audio jack.
The top side • the IR blaster • the bottom • the USB Type-C port
Finally, the back has the vertically-aligned 12MP color and 20MP monochrome sensors as parts of the second-gen dual camera setup. They are complemented by a two-tone flash and a laser beam to assist the autofocus. The secondary microphone is around, too.
The brushed metal back • the two camera sensors • the Leica setup bulges a bit
There were quite a few people that thought the Mate 9's screen with its 1080p resolution wasn't exactly a good fit for a phablet flagship and hoped for more. And they got more with the Porsche Design Edition, which however came with a ridiculous markup.
Later we were glad to hear Huawei had plans to release the Porsche Design Mate 9 without its premium branding. And here it is today - Porsche Design or not, the Mate 9 Pro is ready to win over the people for whom the 1080p screen would not suffice.
To be fair, the Mate 9's 5.9" screen posted flagship-worthy scores across our display tests - brightness, contrast, sunlight legibility. The color accuracy was the only average result, but it didn't ruin the positive impressions we got.
In comparison, the colors provided by the Huawei Mate 9's AMOLED screen are very good, but not as perfect as we'd hoped for. The average DeltaE of 3.8 is excellent, but the colors aren't as consisted - the cyan and red hues are way punchier (DeltaE of 8.1), as are some of the blues, and thus the screen can't be praised for its color calibration. Playing with the color temperature settings didn't help. On the other hand, AMOLED is often imagined as punchy, so we doubt anyone will complain of that. And an average DeltaE of 3.8 is a flagship-worthy score anyway, so even the pixel peepers will have a hard time finding any flaws.
The contrast is as good as an AMOLED screen can offer and the brightness, at 366nits, stays around the average numbers for this type of displays. The AMOLED units aren't known to be very bright, to begin with - the Mate S has a brightness of 372nits, while the P9 Plus hit the 400nits mark.
A definite positive point is that the minimum level of brightness is only 4 nits, which would make for a comfortable reading experience in dark environments.
The black parts of the image do not turn off contrary to what you may have come to expect from AMOLED screens. It's not the first AMOLED display to exhibit this behavior, but we can only guess about the reasons. Some suggest this is to prevent screen burn-in, while others point to backlight leaks - the current passing through the LEDs to sustain the screen refresh rate. Anyway, this shouldn't bother you, but it gives a better explanation of the results below.
| Display test | 100% brightness | ||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | ||
| 0.41 | 665 | 1622 | |
| 0.011 | 366 | 33273 | |
| 0.00 | 372 | ∞ | |
| 0.346 | 471 | 1361 | |
| 0.00 | 392 | ∞ | |
| 0.007 | 450 | 64286 | |
| 0.00 | 428 | ∞ | |
| 0 | 447 | ∞ | |
| 0.00 | 400 | ∞ | |
| 0 | 432 | ∞ | |
The average brightness on an AMOLED screen sometimes leads to not so impressive sunlight contrast ratios, but still above the average as is the case with the Huawei Mate 9 Pro. The screen visibility is great outside, so there is nothing to worry about. We suspect the factory-applied screen protector might have taken its toll on the sunlight score as it does count for the additional reflectivity.
Battery life
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro may be smaller than the Mate 9, but its battery capacity didn't take a hit. It's still a 4,000mAh unit, and it's still one of the most generous offerings in the premium segment.
Huawei Mate 9 posted an excellent score of 82h, but we weren't quite sure what to expect of the new AMOLED screen on the Mate 9 Pro.
With that preface, the Mate 9 Pro posted an excellent battery endurance of 87 hours. It performed admirably across all of our routines - video, call, web, and standby.
The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritties. You can also check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.
There's a few things to be said about Huawei's charging procedures. The phone ships with a beefy charger capable of outputting 5V/4.5A, 4.5V/5A, and 5V/2A, with the 22.5W maximum only exceeded by Oppo with their VOOC chargers (some of them 25W), and Motorola with its 25W TurboCharger, which doesn't seem to be available for purchase.
Now, similarly to Oppo's phones, to achieve these crazy numbers you need to use the Mate 9 Pro's charger together with the Mate 9 Pro's USB cable (and the Mate 9 Pro itself, duh!). You do get nice purple accenting on the connectors to notify they all comply with the same proprietary charging standard.
Swap just the cable with another one and you'll be down to 5V/2A, which is still not the worst-case scenario - some third-party Qualcomm QuickCharge 3.0 chargers we had lying around were rendered nearly worthless as the Mate would only draw 1A at 5V. Then again, most existing 5V/2A chargers (say, the Samsung one from the Galaxy S7) will output exactly that with any decent cable.
Upon closer inspection, we saw that the Huawei-made cable has four extra pins on the Type-C end in addition to the standard Type-C power pins, obviously. It sounds like that Huawei, similar to Oppo, is charging two separate batteries inside the phones.
There is nothing inherently wrong about that, just don't expect to get the same charging speed with third-party chargers.
And speaking of charging speeds, with its adapter and cable the Mate 9 Pro charges ridiculously fast. Mere ten minutes of charging gets you from 2% (that's the lowest point before the device powers off) to 20%. Thirty minutes from the start of the charging and you're looking at 55%. Sixty minutes gets you to 88%, and 95% is achieved in 75min after plugging it in. After the 60% mark charging speed starts tapering off, so you should have that in mind. Finally, flat to full is 90 minutes in total and that's a respectable speed for a 4000mAh battery.
The phone does get warm in the early stages, but only slightly so, and once it's past the fast charging stage, it goes back down to room temperature. Quite an impressive feat overall, but with the caveat that all the bits of the charging system are proprietary.
Connectivity
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro supports LTE-Advanced with 3-carrier aggregation, Cat.12 LTE for theoretical speeds up to 600Mbps down and 150Mbps up, 20 LTE bands, 6 3G bands and the usual quad-band 2G.
There's full-fledged Wi-Fi support - a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, with Wi-Fi Direct and hotspot support. You also get Bluetooth v4.2 for peripherals, A-GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, and Galileo for positioning, and NFC for, well, near field communication, right. We know some of you will also be glad to hear there's also an IR emitter on the Mate 9 Pro.
The Type-C USB port only adheres to the USB 2.0 spec (480Mbps theoretical) and not USB 3.0 or 3.1. It's not your average Type-C port either, as it has two more contacts for the SuperCharge tech, but those don't interfere with using standard-spec Type-C accessories.
There's an old-school 3.5mm headphone jack too. What the Huawei Mate 9 Pro lacks is FM radio support.
Software overview
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro runs on Android 7.0 Nougat. As usual, you get a healthy dose of Huawei customizations behind the Emotion UI name or EMUI. The proprietary overlay is a brand-new version 5.0, which reuses a lot from the previous iterations but also introduces a few changes.
The lockscreen is one of the elements being carried over, but it was already quite functional. The Magazine unlock style greets you with a different wallpaper every time you wake up the device, with new ones being downloaded when you connect to Wi-Fi and an option to delete the ones, which are older than three months.
The lockscreen itself is minimalist at first glance, with just a large clock with a date and a shortcut to the camera. You can also quickly start the camera by a double press of the Volume Down button with the option to take a snap right away, or just go to the app.
Back to the lockscreen, you can pull up an iOS-style menu from the bottom, where you get a ton of functionality. The top row lets you manage the wallpapers - you can remove, favorite, share, or pause on the current one. In addition to that, you get a row of handy shortcuts for basic apps - voice recorder, calculator, flashlight, timer, and QR code reader.
Now, you likely won't be seeing much of the lockscreen, though, as the fingerprint unlock works so fast it makes it redundant.
On top of the multi- and guest user support that comes standard with Android, you can also set up a so-called Private space, which you can access with a different fingerprint. The data accessible there is independently encrypted, Huawei says, and is inaccessible to the other users. Only one Private space can be set up per device.
Fingerprint settings • enrolling a fingerprint • Twin app • A couple of Facebook accounts
In addition to that you can have two app instances for some social apps, so two users can access their accounts from the same phone user profile.
We got a little carried away with the privacy talk, but back to basics now. Beyond the lockscreen, we're treated to a pleasant surprise - on top of the usual all-apps-on-the-homescreens approach Huawei now gives you the option to pick the standard Android two-tiered interface with homescreens for your most-used apps and an app drawer for all of them. Kudos to Huawei for letting the user choose.
No app drawer by default • but you can opt for one • app drawer shortcut • app drawer
The app drawer is a vertically scrollable list of all your apps, 4 in a row, with a search field on top.
Themes are available as well. A theme will change your homescreen wallpaper, lockscreen style, system and app icons, system font, system color and the sound profile. You can also adjust things like homescreen transition effects.
Themes
The notification area is a 50/50 mix between stock Nougat and Emotion 5.0. Huawei has tweaked the look of the quick toggles and added the auto-brightness switch, which Google so stubbornly refuses to keep in plain sight. The notifications themselves look just like on a Pixel.
The task switcher is rather straightforward, but again with added functionality over Google's own - apps in the rolodex can be locked by tapping on the padlock icon, so killing all apps will spare the locked ones. The kill all button is readily available too, not up in the right corner as Google does it.
Notification shade, step 1 • • expanding notifications • step 2 with more toggles • task switcher
For certain scenarios, like in-car use, you can enable a Simple homescreen mode, which features large tiles for easy tapping. It's not particularly consistent, though, offering simple version of some menus, but not others - the dialer is the same size as in regular mode (in all fairness it's fairly oversized to begin with).
Simple homescreen with a tiled interface
A system-wide scale setting is available from within the display options, the Medium option enabled by default. We'd go with Small as the interface could be quite wasteful otherwise, but if you have trouble seeing tiny menu elements, do go for Large, the option is there. Additionally, you can independently set the font size (you'd be surprised to find out that the default is "Normal").
Scale and font size settings
Throughout the interface, you get contextual menus with relevant options right at the bottom of the screen above the navigation bar - hugely convenient for single-handed operation. The universal drawer that pulls out from the left side of Google apps is a lot better suited for left-hand use than right-hand, and even for lefties some of the higher-placed options are still too far away.
Contextual menus
The Mate 9 Pro features granular notifications control - Huawei had that even before it was a part of vanilla Android. You can control which apps can send you the three types of available notifications - the shade notifications, the lockscreen notifications and the banner style notifications.
This level of control is also employed when it comes to the app access to network data. The user can control the rights of each application to access either WiFi or mobile data. This can save a lot of traffic and help you optimize your data plan and consumption in an easy and convenient way.
Notification permissions • data permissions
While these are options accessible from the settings menu, they are also featured inside the Phone Manager app. In there you'll also find a one-touch optimization button (which may make you feel better, but we see no reason not to let Android do it for you). A virus scanner, powered by Avast is on board as well.
Battery saving modes are available from the Power manager, two of them. There's Power saving, which imposes some minor limitations on hardware and software, and then there's Ultra power saving, which condenses your entire Mate 9 Pro's functions to a single black homescreen with six shortcuts. You can choose all of those, and you can pick from any app on the phone, so it's very much a psychological constraint than anything else.
By Huawei's estimates, that should triple your battery life, so apparently, there's more going on under the hood. Ah, there's no task switcher in this mode, you only get one app at a time, though judging by the loading times, they have to be in the RAM. Screenshots are disabled.
Power manager
The Huawei Mate 9 Pro comes with dedicated capacitive control deck below the screen, so it lacks on-screen Android keys. You can swap the functions of the Back and Tasks keys. You can also opt to make the Home key a multi-functional tool by disabling the Back and Task Switcher buttons. This way you can use one tap for Back, long tap for Home, and a left or a right swipe on its surface for Task Switcher. It's like Meizu's mTouch key, but better.
You can enable the so-called Floating dock - it's a virtual key you can move anywhere on the screen, allowing you to expand it to the primary Android keys - Back, Home, Task Switcher, Lock and Close all running apps. It will help you control your phone with just one hand.
Smart assistance • navigation key options • mini screen view • floating dock • floating dock in action
Motion control also plays a significant role on the Huawei Mate 9 Pro as it did on previous Huawei models. There are flip gestures, as well as picking up, tilting and even things like knuckle detection and drawing. All of those are extensively customizable to your liking as well.
You can start recording a video of your interaction with the UI by the intuitive double knock with two knuckles while drawing an S with a single knuckle launches the scrolling screenshot. Thank goodness that latter is available from the regular Power/Volume down shortcut.
Motion and knuckle gestures
The Mate 9 Pro's multi-window feature has been expanded since its basic Mate 8 days. While you're in one app, holding down the task switcher key will send it in the top half of the screen with recent apps taking up the bottom half for you to select which one to view. You'll get the same effect by one-knuckle-swiping left or right.
You can resize the windows swap the two, but you need to have both apps already open in the task switcher to be able to take advantage - you can't launch a new app once you're in multi-window.
Multi window works
Voice control lets you operate the Mate 9 Pro entirely hands-free. The functionality boils down to the ability to trigger a voice command even when the phone is locked and its screen is off.
Huawei does this by always listening for a "trigger word", which by default is... "Okay, Emy." Once triggered, the phone wakes up and awaits further voice instructions, like placing a call. Speech awareness is also customizable. The wake-up phrase can be changed, and you can also train the device to recognize better your voice.
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