9 reasons why the Mate 9 has the goods

The latest flagship from Huawei comes in the form of a super-sized Mate 9. Here are nine reasons why we think the Huawei Mate 9 is a great all-around phone:

1) Great build quality. With its all-metal build, the Mate 9 looks beautiful and elegant. The fine features and attention to detail are evident.

2) Large screen real estate. The large 5.9-inch screen has a full HD (1080p) IPS display. This offers better viewing experience that’s best for mobile gaming and watching videos.

3) Solid hardware. The Mate 9 comes with a plethora of hardware features – fingerprint sensor, IR blaster, 4G/LTE, WiFi/Bluetooth/NFC. Under the hood is 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage with expandable storage.

4) Impressive performance. Using the latest Kirin 960 chip, the Mate 9 exhibited impressive performance with general tasks and graphics-intensive games. It’s also paired with a generous 4GB of RAM. The Mate 9 scored as good as most Snapdragon 820 chips and Exynos 8890 used by Samsung.

5) Leica-certified dual-camera. The Mate 9 uses a second-generation Leica-certified dual rear camera. The main camera is a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and a secondary 8-megapixel RGB camera. The two images combine to produce great images with finer details and balanced color saturation. A manual mode allows for long exposure of up to 30 seconds so you can get creative night shots.

6) Fast charging. Huawei included a SuperCharge technology on the Mate 9 which is similar to Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0. It comes with special SuperCharge charger with a rating of 4.5V/5A that juices up the phone from zero to 100 percent in about 55 minutes. That’s quite fast considering that it comes with a large 4,000mAh battery capacity.

7) Long battery life. The Mate 9 has a large 4,000mAh non-removable battery. Our standard battery tests showed very good battery life with a little over 16 hours running a full HD video in a loop.

8) Dual SIM feature. Huawei supports a hybrid dual-SIM feature with the first tray carrying a nano-SIM and the second tray that can handle a microSD card or another nano-SIM. This gives the user the flexibility of using two active SIM cards or expand the 64GB internal storage via a microSD card.

9) Android Nougat out-of-the-box. The Mate 9 comes pre-installed with the latest Android 7.0 Nougat. The custom EMUI 5 adds a unique look and user-interface to the operating system. There are also quite a number of dedicated features that add practical functionalities to the phone.

With a suggested retail price of P31,900, the Huawei Mate 9 is among the top phones in its category. It’s a great all-around phone, powerful as it is beautiful, and that dual rear camera in collaboration with Leica certainly takes the cake.