One of the keys to global success is advertising, and Huawei already has a fairly long list of celebrity brand ambassadors, including Justin Long.
The post Huawei recruits ex-star of iconic Apple ads to promote Mate 9 and Matebook (Video) appeared first on Pocketnow.
The Huawei Mate 9 UK launch is happening this week, and there’s no reason to doubt it, as the information comes from the official Twitter account of Three UK. As of January 13 you will be able to grab one from the carrier, though it has been not disclosed yet how much it will set you back.
At the launch even in Munich the company revealed a price tag of €699 for Europe, and the phone has been recently launched in the US going for $599 (though Americans will get the phone bundled with Amazon’s Alexa voice service.
In case you missed our Mate 9 coverage, make sure to check out our full review; disclaimer: the phone scored pretty high.
If, however, you’re waiting for the Porsche Design version, there’s currently no word on when exactly it will be available. However, the official Porsche Design webpage says it will start shipping at the end of the month, but the price tag will immediately filter its target audience (and yes, the Porsche Design Mate 9 is not a phone for the masses).
@heartyparty We will indeed! It’s launching this Friday.
— Three UK (@ThreeUK) January 9, 2017
The post Huawei Mate 9 UK launch happening this Friday on Three appeared first on Pocketnow.
Shortly after the new year begins in the United States, expect a New Year’s Resolution from Chinese manufacturer Huawei, according to the guy behind the reliable @evleaks, Evan Blass.
The Huawei Mate 9 is said to debut on January 6. Blass complements his word with a render of the phone in its glory. The date and time along with the on-screen location mention of Las Vegas strongly suggest that the launch will center around its CES 2017 showcase.
Huawei Mate 9 going on sale in the US on January 6th. pic.twitter.com/V879xArtkP
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) December 10, 2016
If the claim backs up, the Mate 9 will be the first Huawei-branded flagship smartphone that the company will have put for sale in the US. Its sub-brand, Honor, launched its top-tier Honor 8 a few months ago. Huawei and Honor opened the year with mid-ranger releases while the former’s 2015 debut into America was characterized by the release of the P8 lite.
The post Blass: Huawei Mate 9 sales in US to begin January 6 appeared first on Pocketnow.
2016 has proven to be an interesting year for fans of larger phones. Where we used to have numerous big screen experiments to choose from, premium options are becoming scarce. Wrapping up the year, Huawei sent us a beast of a phone, and after using it for a month, we’re encouraged by the direction this company is taking.
There’s no way around it. This phone is big. Huawei has done an admirable job of containing the 5.9” display, but there are only so many bezel shrinking tricks a manufacturer can employ. By comparison though, the Mate 9 is only a 2m taller than a Pixel XL with a 5.5” screen. That’s a praiseworthy achievement, and prevents the Mate from feeling too much like a mini-tablet.
This is familiar design territory for Huawei. An aluminum frame with shiny jewel like facets where edges are chamfered. The rear is gently curved to help fit your hand, though the antenna cutouts remain. They’re far more subtle than on previous Huawei’s, but there is still a visible seam running above the camera and down by the chin. Even for that minimal distraction, the Mate 9 is a premium priced device, and it certainly looks the part.
The hardware configuration helps tremendously in keeping the phone in your hand. Seat the phone in your grip, and the power button located under the volume rocker is easy to reach. The rear mounted fingerprint sensor is positioned almost exactly where an average sized finger would land. One-handed use is still a bit tricky, as most thumbs won’t be able to clear the full width of the screen, but the Mate 9 does an excellent job of feeling smaller than it really is.
As a quick note, we are happy to see the Mate includes an IR blaster to use the phone as a universal remote. This feature has fallen out of favor with most Android manufacturers. It seems not a lot of people use it, but the people who do are passionate fans. As the father of a small child, its invaluable as said small child enjoys hiding our TV remote, but I digress.
At almost six inches on the diagonal, folks are likely to use this phone slightly farther away from their faces, but we still would have preferred moving up to a Quad HD display. 1080p is more than adequate for getting daily tasks done, and this is a nice LCD. As a fan of keeping text as small as possible, there are times puling it close to my face where it’s not quite as sharp as competing devices. Also, if you’re likely to play with some VR, the lower pixel density on the Mate probably wouldn’t be our first choice.
Happily, this display is respectably bright, and easily readable in all but direct sunlight reflecting off the front glass. In auto-brightness mode it falls just behind the LG V20, but we did find it easier to get the Hauwei up to its maximum brightness, where LG reserves the last bit of power as more of a temporary screen boost. While shooting in bright Southern California daylight, we had no issues composing shots from the Mate’s display.
Huawei Includes an eye comfort mode that shifts the tone of the screen warmer, removing blue from the display. Late night redditing is easier on the eyes, but we do wish the screen could get dimmer.
We haven’t always been the biggest fans of Huawei’s software skin, but EMUI 5 takes several steps towards fixing some of our issues with this kind of UI customization. Out of the box, the Mate 9 doesn’t show an app drawer, delivering all app shortcuts to the homescreen, but there’s an easy toggle in the settings to replace the more traditional Android organization.
The notification shade has also been redesigned. No longer are apps and shortcuts divided by an awkward side swipe, one slide down from the top lowers the notifications, a second swipe expands on quick actions. This action replicated in hardware. Swiping the fingerprint sensor will also drop your notification shade.
We’re also happy to report that after we shot our video review, Huawei has updated notification icons. Where originally all users could see was a number indicating how many notifications a user had (which topped out at 9), now app icons have returned to the top of your screen.
There’s a lot going on with EMUI, but this year Huawei has focused on optimizing and streamlining. You won’t have to troll through as many settings to find the options you need. The phone seems to rely more on Android 7 for the “fun” features, like improved multi-tasking, richer notifications, and split screening apps. Some design elements still feel half baked, like dialog confirmations which live in sliding panels, but in general, this iteration of EMUI outwardly feels leaner and more responsive.
We’re most curious about the changes under the hood though. The Mate 9 employs on device machine learning to anticipate your behavior and better allocate system resources. Improved storage management should handle garbage and temporary file deletion better. Huawei claims over time the phone should remain a fast performer when other Androids might start to slow down. After a solid month of use, it’s difficult to test those assertions, but the phone has remained a powerful performer through its first major update.
The one area we might poke some fun, during the Mate 9 announcement, the photo gallery was demoed, sliding through thumbnails, almost instantly loading images. After shooting our Real Camera Review, and capturing tens of gigabytes of data, much of that UHD video, the phone isn’t quite as fast at loading thumbnails as what we were shown during the keynote.
All of these software updates and improvements benefit greatly from the powerhouse chipset in this device. The Kirin 960 will be unfamiliar hardware to a lot of Android fans, but it’s proving to be one of the most powerful CPU’s available. In CPU driven benchmarks, the Kirin 960 is handily able of competing with (and often besting) the Qualcomm 821 found in the Pixel and the OnePlus 3T. The weak link for Huawei in the past was graphics performance. The Mali G71 GPU in the Mate 9 is a significant improvement, but benchmarks often fall slightly behind Samsung and Qualcomm chipsets. Regardless, this phone is an absolute screamer.
Navigating the UI, multi-tasking, using productivity services, this phone will be a consistently top tier performer. Even for the slight graphics deficit, it’s still one of the better gaming platforms we’ve reviewed. Demanding titles like Oblivion play fluidly, and the Kirin seems to be better optimized for Marvel Future Fight than the older Qualcomm 820.
WiFi performance is top tier for a metal backed phone. The Mate 9 displayed almost exactly the same reception numbers as the LG V20, falling only slightly behind the glass backed Galaxy S7.
LTE reception was surprisingly good. Around town on AT&T, the Mate shamed our HTC 10, and often outperformed plastic back phones like the Galaxy S7 Active.
We have the full scoop on audio performance in the above Real Audio Review, but as a quick recap, the Mate 9 is something of a mixed bag.
Speaker performance is very good. The phone utilizes a stereo split between the earpiece and the bottom mono speaker. In portrait mode it performs similarly to the HTC 10, higher frequencies from the top, lower frequencies from the bottom. When turned to landscape, the phone shifts to a more traditional stereo left / right arrangement. It’s not as well balanced as an Axon 7, Sony XZ, or Alcatel, but it’s a massive speaker improvement over mono solutions and previous Huaweis. It’s a very good option for watching a little video or playing games.
The story isn’t quite as positive when listening to headphone performance. The Mate 9 features one of the quieter headphone amps we’ve tested, and the phone’s DAC quality scores fairly low, battling out for last place against the LG G5. This jack gets the job done, but it wouldn’t be a top pick for the audiophiles in our audience.
As mentioned above, this phone recently received a significant update, and a major part of that update focused on camera improvements. We just re-shot our Real Camera Review embedded here.
If you don’t have ten minutes to spare on getting the full camera review experience, we’re happy to report that Huawei’s second venture with Leica on a dual camera shooter is a formidable competitor. This system plays with light unlike any other phone we’ve reviewed. Jpegs are produced with terrific dynamic range, excellent color depth, and Leica’s image processing provides options and controls for users, producing more photographic output.
The Mate 9 produces some of the best still photos we’ve ever seen from a phone.
This is a unique solution for a dual camera phone. Both sensors working together instead of one sensor being used for a zoom. We haven’t seen this since the One M8, and it’s used to much better effect on the Mate. This includes the astounding Wide Aperture Mode, which can blur the background of your photos, making images look like they were captured by a proper DSLR. This the best implementation of software blur we’ve ever seen, and it handily outperforms Apple’s portrait mode on the iPhone 7 Plus.
This year, Huawei has significantly improved video. Now users benefit from hardware image stabilization and max resolution has been increased to 3840 x 2160 (UHD). H.265 compression is employed to keep file sizes in check. The Mate uses about 30% less storage space than the iPhone for similar video quality.
Video is crisp and colorful, but the OIS feels first generation. There’s a “lively” quality to everything shot, even when the user tries to hold still, and when walking, the phone will still shake. We can’t quite replicate the almost Steadicam like quality of Pixel or iPhone video.
Against those two phones though, we’re happy to see (or hear rather) that the Mate captures stereo audio. Settings aren’t as robust as on the V20, but the microphones on the Mate are directional, focusing in on your subject and shifting the stereo sound to follow them. Very well done audio capture, with excellent noise reduction.
The main benefits of this camera, its incredible level of control and manual options, is also the phone’s greatest weakness. This camera is one of the more intimidating we’ve encountered on first impression. It’s not that any one setting is hard to use, more that it takes an investment in time and memorization to get a feel for where every setting lives and which settings you can use in which modes. As one example, the phone has a terrific zoom, but if you’re in manual mode and capturing RAW files, you can’t use any zoom. In manual mode, and only capturing jpegs, magically your zoom returns.
The phone will alert you to what you can and can’t do, but in the moment, when you just need to fire off a photo, it’s these kinds of situations which contribute to someone missing the shot. Anyone who thinks they can discuss the pros and cons of this camera after only a couple days of use is probably wrong on both the benefits and the compromises.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that when you increase battery capacity, a phone’s runtime also improves. The Mate 9 is one of the best Android performers we’ve run through our benchmark. 30 minutes of HD video over WiFi at 190 lux resulted in 4% drain, falling just behind the iPhone 7 Plus as our current champ.
Real world use closely followed that synthetic test, and the Mate 9 easily got us past dinner time with plenty of room to spare under moderate use. This phone should be easy to hypermile, and light use should deliver two full days on single charge.
If you do need to top the battery off though, this phone is now the reigning champ at recharging. 30 minutes on the included charger resulted in a 58% jump. Huawei estimates the phone will completely recharge from dead to 100% in 90 minutes, and our tests would indicate that its even faster than that.
Lastly, we wanted to touch on the experience consumers should expect from a premium priced handset. It’s a small thing, but delivering a high-end phone with accessories in the box was an appreciated touch. Where a Pixel XL is likely to be more expensive in many markets, and might not even include earbuds, the Mate ensures customers can cover the basics.
The Earpod style buds are certainly not my personal favorite, but a hands-free solution comes with the price of admission, as does a basic cover. An aluminum phone this large can be a slippery proposition, but our Mate 9 has lived almost exclusively in the snap-on plastic cover which came included. Not everyone’s favorite look, but it provides a little more grip when using the phone on the go.
Mid-range manufacturers are playing this game well, some even including VR hardware, and it’s a sales philosophy we appreciate on a premium handset.
Let’s wrap this up. Where’s that leave us with the Huawei Mate 9?
In many markets around the world, this might be one of the only options for a truly large screen premium phone. It handles this responsibility with grace. I’m not personally a fan of big phones, yet this Huawei has been one of my favorite phones to review this year. Phablets used to feel like vanguard products. Thanks to the size, manufacturers could push the limits of the technology on board. The Mate 9 resembles that philosophy a bit more than many 5.5” screen solutions at the high end of the price spectrum.
There are very few compromises to make, and what this phone does well, it does really well. It’s a big, bold offering from a company looking to turn up the heat on the competition.
Mate 9 vs iPhone 7 Plus
Mate 9 vs LG V20
The post Huawei Mate 9 Review: It’s Big. It’s Bold. It’s Good. appeared first on Pocketnow.
Just when we thought we were all wrapped up shooting samples and writing a review script for our Mate 9 camera review, Huawei threw us a curve ball. Days ago publishing an update for this monster phone, and wouldn’t you know it, tackling some of our issues with low light camera performance while also updating the zoom feature. The more we compared samples from before the update to after the update, the more we felt it was appropriate to re-shoot most of this video.
And so we did.
New samples including, photos, RAW, wide aperture mode, color boost mode, HDR, low light, OIS test, and gigabytes of UHD video. It’s all fresh from this phablet for your enjoyment.
Dual camera sensors are hot. They’re a novel way to work around some of the space limitations on our mobile gadgets. Huawei’s approach is unique. Instead of simulating a zoom like Apple and LG, the Mate 9 features the second generation Leica sensor combo. Both cameras have the same field of view, but one captures color and the other captures light and detail in monochrome. Merging the two images together produces photos unlike anything we’ve seen from a phone, and the pair of sensors delivers the best software background blur we’ve ever seen.
Here’s our full Huawei Mate 9 Real Camera Review!
The post Huawei Mate 9 Real Camera Review: Second generation Leica dual camera! appeared first on Pocketnow.
In our second installment of “Big Phones, Dual Cameras” we’re moving to the real showdown.
Android 7 Nougat vs Android 7 Nougat. LG’s software skin vs Huawei EMUI. A large 5.9″ 1080p screen against a big 5.7″ 1440p display. The Qualcomm 820 chipset vs the Kirin 960 octa-core cpu. These two phones pair up well against each other, delivering high end hardware, premium build quality, gobs of custom software, and some incredible photography features.
Huawei has been impressing lately. The Mate 9 is a formidable foe, so it only makes sense to pit it against one of our favorite multimedia smartphones of the year. LG now faces the second generation Leica dual camera system. Will its incredible headphone performance and durable build quality eke out the victory?
It’s time for a showdown! Which phone wins? You decide in our viewer poll!
Watch part one, pitting the Mate 9 against the iPhone 7 Plus
The post Huawei Mate 9 vs LG V20: Big Phones Dual Cameras (pt.2) appeared first on Pocketnow.
Huawei was ready, but then it wasn’t.
The company, as it is prone to do, was about to launch a Lite version of its Mate 9 phone after giving a couple extra punches in the high end with the Mate 9 Pro and Porsche Design edition.
We even had all the specs and a webpage on Huawei’s site laid out, too. A 5.5-inch full HD screen with Android Marshmallow (and EMUI 4.1), a mid-range octa-core Kirin 655, 3GB/4GB of RAM and 32GB/64GB of storage. A USB-C connector, a 3,340mAh battery and a fingerprint reader top off the main body of work.
The front camera is equipped with an 8-megapixel sensor while the rear unit is two sensors. Based on how Huawei has utilized such a setup, we presume that the color unit is 12 megapixels while the monochrome unit is an astounding 2 megapixels.
Will results produced here suffice for a more budget-friendly Mate 9? We aren’t sure if it’s even affordable to say the least: the page has been taken down from the website (rendering all these specs as eye candy) and no pricing has been mentioned.
The post Huawei Mate 9 Lite gets short-lived feature on company’s site appeared first on Pocketnow.
Typically, adding the word “Pro” to a phone’s name indicates that the device exudes of better performance and expanded purpose beyond what a normal version would take on. In Huawei’s case, it had a couple of words it wanted to use first: “Long Island.”
FYI, I didn’t just make it up ;) pic.twitter.com/WInbcVHzYN
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) November 4, 2016
We were told of this first from leakster Evan Blass and now, it’s finally real and we have no use for allusions to New York anymore. The Huawei Mate 9 Pro, the Mate 9‘s younger, but bolder sibling, is now in China.
Some of the features we get include a 5.5-inch quad HD display (as seen on the Porsche Design version of the Mate 9) and a slightly-tweaked Kirin 960 chipset. What remains is the Leica-approved dual-camera setup — a 12-megapixel color sensor and 20-megapixel monochrome sensor — and a front-mounted fingerprint sensor. Top that off with an 8-megapixel selfie camera, Android Nougat and a decent 4,000mAh battery and we’re talking business.
How much business? According to Huawei, it’s ¥4,699 ($686) for a version with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage and ¥5,299 ($773) for a Mate 9 Pro with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Pre-orders have been turned on for the phone and the Mate 9.
The $1,500 Porsche Design version — or maybe even the “fancy schmancy Mate 9 Pro,” if you look at the specs — doesn’t go up for pre-sales until December 15.
The post Long Island railroaded: Huawei Mate 9 Pro launches in China appeared first on Pocketnow.
Pocketnow’s Real Audio Review gives you the full scoop on what our phones can do with headphone and speaker playback.
We’re digging deep into the performance on Huawei’s Mate 9, one of the few truly big screen phones of 2016. This device packs a big display, a big battery, and some big benchmarking scores. New for this year, Huawei is moving to stereo speakers, which feature the nifty trick of being orientation aware. In portrait mode the earpiece focuses more on highs, and the bottom speaker boosts mids and lows. In landscape, the phone will more evenly distribute audio to create a standard stereo environment. Also, Huawei proudly boasted of keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack.
The Huawei Mate 9 is a BIG phone, but does that mean we get BIG audio? We’ve listened to a variety of musical genres, recorded some samples of headphone and speaker output, and we’ve analyzed playback quality. Tallying up all of those numbers, we’re ready to share our results!
Watch more Real Audio Reviews on our YouTube playlist!
The post Huawei Mate 9 Real Audio Review: BIG phone, small sound? appeared first on Pocketnow.
It’s nighttime in America and it’s Friday to boot. We should be out on the streets painting the town red. But instead, we’re sitting down, cracking a few cans open and talking with our best mates about a new Mate.
As Huawei takes over the scene for the week with a couple of luminescent phones, Evan Blass and Alcatel remind us that Windows can be a fun platform if it tried. Will it try? We may come up with an answer or we may just pass onto the unrelenting carrier wars, flip phones for modernity, Kickstarters, Indiegogos and a kick in the pants for us to go go GO!
It’s the weekend and this is episode 225 of the Pocketnow Weekly.
Watch the live video broadcast from 11:00pm Eastern on November 4th (click here for your local time), or check out the high-quality audio version right here.
For folks watching live, you can comment and ask questions by using the #PNWeekly hashtag on Twitter during the broadcast. For folks watching later, you can shoot your listener emails to podcast [AT] pocketnow [DOT] com for a shot at getting your question read aloud on the air the following week!
November 4, 2016
This week’s episode of the Pocketnow Weekly Podcast is made possible by:
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(00:02:55)
Following on from the Huawei P9, the Mate 9 makes its debut in Munich, Germany. Our Juan Carlos Bagnell was there to handle the Leica-endorsed, dual-camera goods — particularly with that fancy schmancy €1,400 Porsche Design version — while Jaime Rivera and Adam Z. Lein put some light onto the Huawei Fit tracker.
26:26 | This Windows phone is more than just a concept
32:09 | The Alcatel Idol 4s with Windows 10: where it’s at and where it won’t be
35:37 | Where’s Microsoft at with Windows 10 Mobile?
42:44 | Lenovo Phab 2 Pro finally makes it to the dance floor
51:52 | ZTE flips a phone here, Samsung flips a phone there
57:59 | Apple dongles dangle for a discount as a jungle protests
1:05:37 | Blood on the water between T-Mo and Verizon
1:14:39 | We completely speculate that Foxconn and Sharp are moving to the US
1:19:07 | Maybe Xiaomi is coming here, too?
1:23:08 | Crowdfunding Corner: 360° video-recording glasses and an eye-tracking VR headset
1:33:35 | Mobile beats desktop internet usage for first time ever
Yep. That’s a Southwest Airlines attendant. Dressed as a Galaxy Note 7.
The post Hot Takes on the Huawei Mate 9 and more… after dark | #PNWeekly 225 appeared first on Pocketnow.
It’s starting to feel like Huawei has been sitting in third place in the global smartphone vendor ranks for quite some time, but what people tend to forget is the 1987-founded networking and telecommunications equipment specialist barely tapped into the consumer device market a few years back.
Richard Yu, the always outspoken CEO of the Huawei Technologies Consumer Business Group, didn’t omit to remind members of the media present in Munich, Germany for yesterday’s announcement of the Mate 9 and Mate 9 Porsche Design that “people told us we were crazy when we announced that we wanted to sell phones.”
They also “told us we were crazy when we said we wanted to sell 100 million phones”, which has now happened for two consecutive years, so you’ll probably understand Huawei’s disregard of the general skepticism concerning the company’s next big goal.
Once again, Yu sets his sights on Apple, the current number two in smartphone sales hierarchies, claiming it could take as little as two years to beat the Cupertino-based giant “step-by-step, and innovation-by-innovation.”
“At every curve or turn, there is an opportunity to overtake the competition”, and while the Mate 9 is certainly not going to outsell the iPhone 7, the latest high-end Android phablet should further win “the trust and loyalty of customers” worldwide, especially in key European markets like Germany, France and Great Britain. What’s so far-fetched about that?
The post You can call Huawei crazy, but its two-year plan is to surpass Apple in smartphone sales appeared first on Pocketnow.
Can you still keep a secret in this day and age leading up to a highly anticipated mobile product announcement? Not when it comes to big things, like device images, camera sensors, screen size or resolution, and processor details.
But, and we absolutely hate to admit it, Huawei did manage to catch us off guard today with the name and snazzy look of the Mate 9’s “limited edition” sibling. Forget Mate 9 Pro, and get ready to check out the race car-inspired Huawei Mate 9 Porsche Design in the flesh. A beautiful curved edged, graphite-finished, dark black-colored flesh, aiming to create an “equilibrium of aesthetics and function.”
The only downside to potentially owning an arguably luxurious, yet not overly showy 5.5-inch Android Nougat phone with Quad HD display resolution, 6GB RAM and 256GB internal storage space in tow? You may have to sell a kidney to afford this bad boy, priced at the equivalent of more than $1,500 for a late December European release.
Thinking of saving up or working overtime but perhaps not convinced “one of the most finely crafted premium devices available to consumers” is worth that small fortune? Not interested but still curious to see it manhandled for a few minutes? Here it is, our first encounter with the Porsche-designed Huawei Mate 9:
The post Huawei Mate 9 Porsche Design first look: Sexy curves (Video) appeared first on Pocketnow.
Is this what the Pixel XL could have been? Probably, but instead of taking a backseat to “made by Google” marketing, Huawei boldly chose to do its own thing, and basically kill two birds with one stone, following both the self-branded Mate 8 and Big G-endorsed Nexus 6P… in a way.
Granted, the highly anticipated, just-unveiled Mate 9 shares a family resemblance with its actual predecessor first and foremost, also borrowing and improving the Leica-powered dual rear camera arrangement of the P9 and P9 Plus.
This time, you get a 12MP color and impressive-sounding 20MP monochrome sensor on the back of a 5.9-inch Android giant, focused on enhancing hybrid zoom, depth perception and wide aperture bokeh mode.
But as recently teased in a number of official promo videos, the Huawei Mate 9 is so much more than a proficient cameraphone. It’s a general powerhouse too, 4GB RAM and homebrewed octa-core Kirin 960 processor included, with a high-end gaming-centric Mali G71 GPU in tow.
Then you have a massive 4,000 mAh battery, somehow purportedly capable of fully charging in less than 90 minutes. Quad microphones with directional recording and stereo speakers join hands for a premium audio experience, while the familiar-looking rear-positioned fingerprint scanner now supports gestures.
We’ll admit, the Full HD screen resolution doesn’t feel up to late 2016 flagship phablet standards, and the Huawei Mate 9 could have also used a 6GB RAM configuration.
But that’s where the Mate 9 Porsche Design comes in, curved 5.5-inch Quad HD display, 6GB RAM, 256GB internal storage (up from 64 on the regular version) and all. It’s what we expected to be called Mate 9 Pro, just with a more luxurious look, the fingerprint reader moved to the front, and identical Mate 9 specs besides the aforementioned.
“Combining Porsche Design’s signature brand aesthetic with Huawei’s mobile engineering expertise”, this is but a “limited edition” smartphone inspired by fancy race cars, and will retail in Europe for an outlandish €1395 starting late December.
For what it’s worth, both Mate 9 editions are to run a very lightly skinned version of Android 7.0 Nougat out the box, with the less extravagant config priced at €699 for the old continent.
The post Huawei Mate 9 and Mate 9 Porsche Design make their joint official debut appeared first on Pocketnow.
Was it smart of Huawei to wait until this close to the holiday season for the announcement of its iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 7 “killer”? Well, since the Note 7 basically committed suicide, chances are things will work out just fine for the increasingly ambitious world’s number three smartphone vendor.
It obviously helps that the Huawei Mate 9 makes quite an impression straight off the bat, despite a mostly recognizable look for people familiar with some of the company’s previous premium designs.
Thanks to a 5.9-inch 1080p display, this is an unapologetically big device, although it manages to slot nicely between the 5.5-inch Pixel XL and 5.7-inch LG V20 in terms of overall size perception. Smoothly crafted from prime aluminum, the Huawei Mate 9 doesn’t follow the questionable headphone jack-annihilating trend, niftily integrating dual stereo speakers, as well as an improved rear-fitted fingerprint reader, and above all, a second-gen dual 12 + 20 MP camera setup.
Powered by Leica once again, this aims to take depth perception and bokeh effects to the next level, which we’ll explore more of in an extensive review coming soon. For the time being, you’ll have to settle for a quick but greatly encouraging exclusive hands-on preview:
The post Huawei Mate 9 Hands on: Big phone, BIG expectations (Video) appeared first on Pocketnow.
It looks like Huawei doesn’t want anything to distract us from the headliner of today’s Munich hardware announcement event, voluntarily letting a few images of the Fit wearable slip yesterday, and now fully unveiling (minimal fanfare and all) the “international” Honor Watch S1 counterpart.
As always, US tech consumers will be asked to pay a small premium compared to folks over in China, with the Huawei Fit slated to roll out across retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg in a matter of hours at $129.99, up from the $104-equivalent 700 Yuan.
That’s still considerably cheaper than the Huawei Watch we’re left waiting to be upgraded, and the main difference is build quality. Don’t get us wrong, this watch-styled circular fitness tracker is by no means ugly… for a low-cost tracker, but it arguably leans closer to a Pebble Time Round rival than an Apple Watch “killer.”
Expect a relatively low-res screen to be confirmed and further detailed at Mate 9’s introduction, which will however do wonders for battery life, estimated at around six days. Since there’s no built-in GPS or cellular support in tow, the key selling points of the Huawei Fit include (allegedly) accurate heart rate monitoring from your wrist, step counting, multi-sport mode capabilities, and sleep analysis.
All in all, not bad for an affordable basic wearable with (some) smartwatch functionality. But the best from Huawei is yet to come.
The post Stylish Huawei Fit activity tracker monitors your heart rate for $130 appeared first on Pocketnow.