--BY SUSHIL PANGENI
From mid-range phones for budget concerned to flagships for high-end seekers, Huawei has been smart enough to encounter the market needs over the years. Careful designing of a handset maintaining the core aesthetics, incorporating latest technologies and features is what Huawei has been doing with its P series. With the latest addition P9, Huawei has emerged as a major flagship threat to its main competitors in terms of feature, design, camera along with other hardware at competitive price points.
Stellar design, stunning look and outstanding grab are three words that came in my mind for design after using this phone. P9 clearly outstands the earlier iterations with the better the build design. With the dimension of 145 x 70.9 x 7 mm (5.71 x 2.79 x 0.28 in), P9 is compact with almost bezel free display (bezel at the top and bottom are slim) and full metal body. The new handset incorporates a aerospace-class aluminum unibody and superior grade 2.5 D glass. It feels premium to hold the phone on hand.
Though compact, P9 manages to enclose a 5.2 inch full-HD screen with the resolution of 1080*1920 and 423 ppi pixel density. You feel closer to the nature with vivid color with 96 percent color saturation and excellent contrast ratio. The new style of notification key that appears on the right bottom of the home screen gives you rid of swiping up and down for the notifications.
Co-engineered with the renowned German optics maker Leica, P9’s much lauded dual-camera comes with a variety of features. Huawei has made use of two sensors with one being the RGB and another monochrome sensor. Wondering how it works? Both the cameras are of 12MP f/2.2. The two cameras take photos and combine the color taken by RGB sensor with the details of monochrome sensor. With this Huawei claims that P9 captures 300 percent more light than other imaging systems. The use of IMAGEsmart 5.0 technology is reasonably fruitful to get professional quality images. Low light pictures are also awesome. P9 comes with an array of camera functions and features, the notable being the night shot, slow-mo, time-lapse and watermark. A number of live filters are also available for the fancier photo takings. Beside these, the light painting mode is a remarkable addition allowing users to capture light trails of various moving objects. Nevertheless, the absence of 4K video recording in P9 feels somewhat disappointing as most flagships now-a-days have gone way up from the full-HD recording.
For selfie lovers, the phone has some of the best offerings. Its 8 Mp front camera and excellent low light selfies will satisfy your thrust. Additionally, the camera has features like 1.25 µm pixel size, geo-tagging, touch focus, face/smile detection, panorama and HDR.
Powered by 4*2.5 GHz Cortex –A72 octa-core processor, the 144 grams Huawei P9 comes with 3 GB RAM and 32 GB internal memory that is expandable up to 256 GB. The amalgamation of sheer processing power, high-end graphics system and system memory makes the dual-SIM handset a computing powerhouse. Be it multitasking or gaming, the phone does not show any sign of snag with hours of use. We played the power hungry Dead Trigger 2 and experienced the zombie shooter in console quality graphics.
Huwaei P9 makes the best use of fingerprint sensor. Very responsive and easy to use users can wake and unlock their phone just by placing the finger over the reader. It can also be used to trigger the shutter while taking photos along with swiping while viewing photos and to answer a call. The Android 6.0 Marshmallow-based EMUI is another noteworthy improvement over the previous versions. Opening and closing of apps are quick, UI animations are smooth and multi-tasking is fluid.
The phone is powered by non-removable 3,000 mAh Li-ion battery. Though there are no specific fast charging methods, the phone charges reasonably fast and the battery lasts for nearly 8 hours on normal use. The latest Huawei flagship that was launched in the Nepali market on July 22 is priced at Rs 59,999.
