Huawei Mate 9 goes official with dual-camera, Kirin 960, eventually coming to the US

Ben Schoon | Nov 3 2016 - 7:17 am PT

This morning Huawei officially unveiled its latest flagship Android smartphone, the Mate 9. The Chinese company’s new Mate 9 one-ups the former Mate 8 with stronger specifications, a new camera system, and of course EMUI 5.0 — the long awaited overhaul of Huawei’s software…

Right up front the Mate 9 is packing a massive 5.9-inch display which is a 1080p IPS panel covered in 2.5D glass. Regarding size, the phone lands at 156.9mm x 78.9mm x 7.9mm, slightly bigger than a Nexus 6P. The aluminum body of the Mate 9 also comes in 5 colors: Space Gray, Moonlight Silver, Champagne Gold, Mocha Brown, and Ceramic White.

As for what powers the phone, Huawei has packed the new built-in-house Kirin 960 octa-core chipset and the Mali-G71 MP8 GPU as well as an i6 co-processor. The Mate 9 also has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 4,000 mAh battery, USB C, and Bluetooth 4.2.

There’s also a dual-camera system on the rear which is composed of a standard 12MP camera with f/2.2 and a 20MP monochrome sensor, similar to the Huawei P9. This dual camera system also features a “Hybrid Zoom” feature which tries to mimic Apple’s use of dual-camera on the iPhone 7 Plus ─ zoom without the loss of quality. The entire system also brings OIS and 4K video capture. The front facing sensor is also an 8MP f/1.9 sensor.

The Mate 9 also packs Android Nougat out of the box with EMUI 5.0 and of course includes a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. At launch, the Mate 9 will be available in China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates. More markets, including the United States, will be coming later. Suggested pricing, at least in Europe, is €699.

Along with that, Huawei also unveiled an interesting Mate 9 variant ─ the Porsche Design Edition. This limited edition model was designed in collaboration with Porsche and is the premium offering in every way (and that’s saying something).

The Porsche Design Mate 9 packs a 5.5-inch QHD AMOLED display with curved edges on either side. The smaller display makes the phone smaller, thinner, and lighter, but while still keeping that 4,000 mAh battery. The same processor package, dual-camera system, and software can be found on this model, but with a couple of differences ─ the Porsche Design Mate 9 brings 6GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Then, of course, there’s the price. This limited edition phone will be sold only in Porsche Design Stores starting this December in Europe for €1,395 ($1,544). Availability will expand worldwide next year, except for the US.