This was published 7 years ago
Huawei reveals Mate 9, a powerhouse phone that comes in an even faster 'Porsche' variant
By Rae Johnston
Huawei has finally revealed the Mate 9, alongside a special Porsche edition of the smartphone and the Huawei Fit Fitness tracker. Here's all the details.
The Mate 9 features the new Kirin 960 chipset — hailed as the world's highest performing smartphone processor, EMUI 5.0, and SuperCharge technology that promises a full day's charge in just 20 minutes.
Huawei's new Porsche Design Mate 9, standard Mate 9 and fitness tracker.Credit: Huawei
The camera features a second generation Leica dual-lens with a 12-megapixel F2.2 RGB sensor, 20-megapixel F2.2 monochrome sensor and hybrid zoom with 2x magnification. There's an enhanced image fusion algorithm, optical image stabilisation and what Huawei claims is the industry's first dual-camera pixel binning technology.
Huawei says the Kirin 960 is the world's first chipset to feature an ARM Cortex-A73/A53 Octa-core CPU and Mali G71 Octa-core GPU. The CPU boasts the best multi-core performance among all smartphone SoCs, while reducing power consumption by 15 per cent.
It also claims a 180 per cent performance uplift and a 40 per cent improvement in energy efficiency compared to its predecessor. Graphics get a boost, too, with increased graphics performance by up to 400 per cent.
The 4000 mAh high-density battery plus SuperCharge technology (which is 50 per cent faster than its predecessor) is promising over two days of uninterrupted performance, a 40 per cent increase in CDMA call time and a 20 per cent increase in gaming time.
For those concerned about battery safety, there's also "Super Safe 5-gate protection", which gives real-time voltage, current and temperature monitoring to eliminate safety hazards and safeguard battery life.
As for the difference between the standard Mate 9 and the so-called Mate 9 Porsche Design, the latter comes in a "graphite black" finish and features a 5.5-inch curved AMOLED display with a Quad-HD resolution. The standard Mate 9, which comes in black, space gray, moonlight silver, champagne gold, mocha brown and ceramic white, features a 5.9-inch LCD display with full-HD resolution. The Porsche also packs extra RAM — with 6GB compared to the standard's 4GB — and 256GB built-in storage compared to the standard's 64GB (although the standard Mate 9 has a microSD card slot).
Using Linux to improve the native Android 7 OS, Huawei's EMUI 5.0 not only makes the interface more intuitive, it aims to become more intelligent and efficient over time by understanding your behaviour patterns — making sure high priority apps get preference for resources such as storage and battery.
The Mate 9 will be launching everywhere but Australia at first, it seems. China, Malaysia, France, Poland, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Italy Spain, Japan, Thailand, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates are getting the Mate 9 for €699 ($1010) and the Porsche Mate 9 for €1395 ($2016).
But that's not all — say hello to the the Huawei Fit, a fitness watch featuring heart rate monitoring, automatic step counting, sleep tracking and support for multi-sport activities. It has running programs and offers real-time coaching, and displays VO2 max, recovery time and a training score after a run.
It will come in titanium gray and moonlight silver, retailing at €149 ($215) in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and the United States.
Fingers crossed we will have some Aussie info for all of these products soon.