Huawei has finally unveiled its latest smartphones: the Huawei Mate 9 and Mate 9 Porsche Design. Aside from the Leica-certified dual-camera system on both of these smartphones, Porsche Design had a hand in designing the – aptly named – Mate 9 Porsche Design as well.
Naturally, Huawei started off with the Mate 9 Porsche Design. As far as first impressions go, this particular variant of the Mate 9 definitely looks familiar; it also has a 5.5-inch 2560 x 1440 curved AMOLED display and a fingerprint sensor on the bottom of the device.
The standard Mate 9, on the other hand, has a bigger 5.9-inch display, but with a lower 1920 x 1080 resolution. Instead of a front fingerprint sensor, this variant has a rear sensor instead. Both variants of the Mate 9 is also powered by Huawei’s new Kirin 960 processor. According to Huawei, it’s the first chipset to be packing a Cortex-A73 CPU and an ARM Mali-G71 GPU.
As expected of 2016 flagship smartphones, the Mate 9 and Mate 9 Porsche Design also come with rather sizeable 4,000mAh batteries, which support the company’s new fast charging technology: SuperCharge. With such a battery capacity, we imagine the Mate 9 phones will be quite long-lasting.
Other specifications of the Mate 9 smartphones include 4GB of RAM (6GB on the Mate 9 Porsche Design), up to 256GB of expandable storage – the standard Mate 9 has 64GB of storage instead – as well as EMUI 5.0 based on Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box. It’s great to see that more manufacturers are shipping their devices with the latest version of Android.
In the camera department, the Leica-certified dual-camera system of the Mate 9 smartphones sounds very promising. Unlike the Huawei P9 and P9 Plus, both variants of the Mate 9’s rear cameras feature optical image stabilisation. On top of that, the two camera sensors are made up of a 20MP monochrome sensor and a 12MP RGB shooter; the front camera, on the other hand, is an 8MP snapper.
All of these hardware and brand collaborations are certainly impressive, which really explain the high asking prices of the Huawei Mate 9 and Mate 9 Porsche Design. The standard Mate 9 is priced at 699 euro (about RM3,240), while the Porsche Design variant goes for a whopping 1,395 euro (approximately RM6,460). As usual, local availability of these Mate 9 smartphones still remains to be seen.
Update: Huawei has confirmed that the Mate 9 will be arriving in Malaysia by the end of November 2016. More information here.
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