![Huawei is jumping into the deep end of the phone pool with the Mate 9.](/content/dam/images/g/u/6/f/3/a/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gu5xs1.png/1486384260841.jpg)
One of two things is usually the case when I'm forced to don my special "bat goggles", reading glasses so thick and so magnifying they make me dizzy if I try to wear them for everyday use.
Case one is I'm looking for something that matters a great deal, like the fine print on some mysterious pill bottle I've dug up from the back of my couch, or like the gauge reading on my table saw when I'm trying to not cut off my thumb.
Case two is I'm looking for something that matters not at all, for a difference that's so indistinguishable in day-to-day life that you need a magnifying glass to find it.
And I've been forced to don the bat goggles a fair bit these past few days as I've been reviewing Huawei's new Mate 9 phone, looking at the things that I believe to be its biggest strength and its biggest weakness: its Leica co-branded camera and its 5.9-inch screen, respectively.
![The Mate 9 can have either expandable memory or a dual SIM, but not both.](/content/dam/images/g/u/6/g/f/v/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1486379990923.jpg)
The Mate 9 is Huawei's best and most expensive phone to date, not counting its Google-branded Nexus 6P. Priced at $999 it marks the Chinese phone maker's final push into the deep end of the market, where you'll find phones from Google (the $1419 Pixel XL being Google's nearest equivalent to the Mate 9), Apple (the $1419 iPhone 7 Plus) and Samsung (the $1349 Note7, easily the best and most disastrous phone ever built).
Well, maybe it's Huawei's second-last push into the deep end, because the Mate 9 has skimped on one feature that you usually expect to see at the pointy end: its screen has a resolution of just 1920x1080 pixels, which gives it the lowest pixel density of any of the phones mentioned above.
(Apple's iPhone 7 Plus is only 1920x1080, too, but it's only 5.5-inches large, meaning it's sharper than the Mate 9 due to the Mate 9's larger screen size.)
Different story
There had been rumours that the Mate 9 would support Google's Daydream virtual reality platform, but Huawei officials say that's not the case. In any event a 5.9-inch, 1920x1080 pixel screen ought to look pretty ordinary when fitted into a VR headset and magnified by the headset's lenses, meaning the Mate 9 is never going to be very good for VR even if Daydream support is added somewhere down the track.
![It has a USB C fast charge port, plus a regular headphone jack at the top.](/content/dam/images/g/u/6/g/f/y/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1486379990997.jpg)
I just tried it out in a Zeiss VR One headset, and indeed the Mate 9's screen does look quite ordinary under very high magnification, though not as bad as I was expecting.
Subjected only to the magnification of my bat goggles, however, it's a very different story. In terms of pixelisation, there is no difference between the 5.5-inch, 534 pixels-per-inch display on the Pixel XL and the 373 ppi screen on the Mate 9.
For anything but VR, the Mate 9's screen is going to be just as good as the screens at the deep end of the market, at least in terms of resolution.
And in some ways it's a much better screen. The Mate 9 has quite noticeably the best screen-to-body ratio of the phones mentioned above, apart from the Note7, which we sadly no longer have in our Labs due to the fire hazard.
![Both the lenses appear to have OIS, so it's probably a mere coincidence we saw more camera wobble on the mono lens.](/content/dam/images/g/u/6/g/m/f/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1486379990847.jpg)
For instance, the Mate 9 has almost exactly the same footprint as the iPhone 7 Plus (124.2 square mm versus 123.4 square mm, respectively), and yet its screen is around 7 per cent bigger.
In order to pull that off, Huawei had to move the phone's fingerprint sensor to the back, which is an increasing trend in mobile phones as the screens get bigger relative to the overall size of the device, but a trend we're not altogether happy with.
Fingerprint readers on the front allow you to unlock a phone quickly without picking it up, but on the back you have to pick it up.
As with so many things on size-constrained devices, you have to choose your poison.
![A battery with a smaller capacity than this got Samsung into trouble. Here's hoping the 4000mAh battery on the Mate 7 ...](/content/dam/images/g/u/6/g/q/v/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1486379990764.jpg)
The relatively low resolution screen probably also helps with the battery life on the Mate 9, which we estimate to be around two days of normal usage, though it's much too early for us to say for sure given that reviewing a phone is anything but normal usage.
But even under review conditions, we're getting around 1.5 days out of the battery, which is excellent.
So then there's the camera, which Huawei really needs to nail if it's to swim in the deep end where, not coincidentally, all of the phones have top-notch cameras.
And for the most part, the Mate 9 actually does nail it, too.
Like Huawei's much-cheaper P9, the Mate 9 has a dual-module, Leica-branded camera that shoots 12-megapixel colour photos with one sensor, and 20-megapixel monochrome photos with its other sensor.
It's a very interesting idea. Colour photos are all shot by mono image sensors anyway, just with an RGB filter sitting between the lens and the sensor, and Huawei's idea is that by removing the filter on one of the cameras, you can get much more detailed images that are better in low light, because none of the light is being filtered out.
And to some extent that idea is borne out on the Mate 9.
Camera wobble
Its monochromatic images are terribly nice, but in none of our tests did they show noticeably more detail than the coloured shots, even when its photos are subjected to the extreme scrutiny of the bat goggles. And it may be just a coincidence, but we tended to get more camera wobble with the mono mode, which suggests that either the optical image stabilisation is different on the mono camera (though the specs make no mention of that), or there's something about the mono photos, combined with my bat goggles, that makes my head spin.
Anyway, we rated the Mate 9's camera by taking dozens and dozens of shots with it, and (next to) identical shots with the Samsung Galaxy S7, the Pixel XL, and the iPhone 7 Plus, which have what we consider to have the three best phone cameras on the market, and then ranking the photos shot by shot.
Our tests confirmed our view that Samsung continues to have by far the best camera around, despite the Galaxy S7 being the oldest of all the cameras tested, but it also put the Mate 9 on roughly level pegging with the iPhone 7 Plus and the Pixel XL, which is good news indeed.
It's by far the patchiest performer of the top-tier cameras (it's almost as likely to record the worst skin tones as it is the best skin tones of the bunch), but with some care its capable of first-rate photos, with great colours, excellent detail and accurate exposure.
We rate its shallow-depth-of-field mode as good as that of any phone camera we've seen, and arguably better due to how much more adjustable it is: you can dial back the effect when it looks too fake, meaning it's never worse than its competitors, and often significantly better.
That's an important feature in smartphone cameras, because it helps to minimise the biggest advantage that bigger cameras have over phone cameras: bigger cameras can take gorgeous, shallow-focus shots, but phones have to fake that effect.
That the Huawei fakes shallow photography so well is no small matter. It shows the company is wading out of the shallow end of the pool, and into the deep end. It's going to need goggles soon, too.