HUAWEI states that it has reinvented smartphone photography with its new P9 Plus and that’s no idle boast as the phone’s camera has been designed in partnership with Leica.
The P9 Plus has similar features and functions to the P9 that Huawei launched at the same time as its new flagship smartphone series but boasts a larger display as well as more memory and storage.
As a smartphone, the P9 Plus is also powerful, made from premium materials and components and installed with a fast octa-core processor. It comes in a light aerospace-class aluminium uni-body, which is only 6.98mm thin and weighs just 162 grammes. It looks sleek too with diamond-cut edges that go in harmony with its 2.5D glass.
The P9 Plus is powered by Huawei Kirin 955 64-bit octa-core processor, which is comprised of four A72 cores running at 2.5 GHz and four A53 cores running at 1.8 GHz. It has four gigabytes of working memory or RAM to ensure smooth multi-tasking and plenty of storage with 64 gigabytes. The P9 Plus runs on the latest Android 6.0 operating system.
The P9 Plus supports LTE 4G network and has dual SIM slots – the first one supports all networks and the second one just the 2G network. I tested it on TrueMove H’s LTE network and the connection was superfast. My snapshots were backed up to my Google Photos cloud space in no time. Using the Ookla speedtest app to measure the connection speed, the P9 Plus achieved a download speed of 66.24 Mbps and an upload speed of 20.54 Mbps.
The P9 Plus has really good performance too. Its touch screen and menus are very responsive and video clips played smoothly. Games also ran with impressive performance. Its 5.5-inch Full HD display with 1920×1080-pixel resolution is great for watching HD videos and viewing high-resolution photos.
The display is enhanced with responsive Press Touch technology that recognises subtle variations of screen pressure then responds accordingly. For example, when you are viewing a photo in the Gallery app, you can press on the photo to zoom into the detail. However, not all apps support the Press Touch function. Clock support does though and a shortcuts menu of “new alarm”, “resume stopwatch” and “start timer” pops up immediately as soon as you press.
With the Pressure sensing option activated, you can hide the navigation bar and then apply pressure on the bottom of the screen to use the hidden navigation bar keys.
You can also assign an app that will be launched when you press the left corner edge or right corner edge on the top of the screen.
As another indicator of its good performance, the P9 Plus plays high-resolution FLAC 24bit/192kHz audio files very smoothly indeed. I tested the hi-res audio playback with Sony’s MDR-1ABT headphones and found that the smartphone played very good quality music.
The speaker-system design lets you share the music too. When used in vertical mode, its earpiece acts as a tweeter and works with the lower to mid-range speakers to produce good quality sounds. In landscape mode, the smartphone presents stereo sounds for both music and video.
Another nice feature of the P9 Plus is that it has an effective touch-type finger print scanner on the back that allows you to unlock and wake the phone up with just one touch of your finger.
But what I love most about the P9 Plus is its dual-camera system for the main camera. The first lens is connected to a 12-megapixel RGB main image sensor and the second lens to a 12-MP monochrome sensor. With help from Leica, the main and second sensors are designed to combine light information to produce excellent image quality – sharp, clean and well-saturated photos even in a low-light environment. Huawei says the design allows the P9 Plus camera to be 100-per cent more light sensitive.
The main camera uses dual Sony IMX286 12 MP sensors with 1.25-micron pixel size and the lenses have 27mm equivalent focal length and f/2.2 aperture. The front camera has 8-MP resolution and f/1.9 lens.
The P9 Plus’ cameras uses IMAGEsmart 5.0 technology and Leica co-engineered Picture Quality Algorithm.
Experienced photographers will like the manual control provided by the P9 Plus’s camera. Actually, the camera app provides a lot of controls, thus allowing you to make most of your shots.
The control menus of the camera can be conveniently accessed by swiping the edges of the screen towards the opposite direction. Swipe from left to right to show menus for various shooting modes and from right to left to configure the camera setting.
To activate the Pro camera mode, you swipe the slider near the bottom upwards. If the slider is moved down, you can return to any shooting mode you have previously selected.
While in the Pro mode, you can adjust the shutter speed, white balance and other camera settings, like the ISO value, exposure compensation, and focus mode. You can also select metering mode from matrix, centre-weighted or spot metering for optimal results.
Several shooting modes are provided, including Beauty, Panorama, Panorama Self-portraits, Night shot, HDR and Light Painting.
The Beauty mode has two options – standard Beauty mode and Perfect Selfie mode. The standard one will make your subject look young with smoother-looking skin. The Perfect Selfie mode will apply beauty settings to your face when you are in a group photo to make you stand out from the crowd.
I was particularly impressed by the Night shot mode. The camera will take several shots and combine them into one sharp and clear photo.
The Light Painting mode enables you to take stunning shots of light trails without the need to manually adjust the aperture and shutter speed. There are four different sub-modes called Tail light trails, Light graffiti, Silky water and Star track. You will need a tripod to use these modes.
For example, you use the Tail light trails mode to capture trails of light made by cars at night. For the Light graffiti, you ask your subject to use a small torch or a glow stick to create a pattern while you are shooting. Silky water is useful for capturing smooth images of waterfalls and rivers while the Star track is, as the name suggests, for capturing the movement of stars in the night sky.
During the test, I found that main camera of P9 Plus captured very good quality photos in most lighting conditions. The photos came out sharp and clean with well-saturated colours. The monochrome mode captured excellent black-and-white photos.
Huawei P9 Plus retails for Bt21,990.
Key Specs
– Networks: 4G LTE: Band1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/12/17/18/19/20/26/28/38/39/40/41; 3G n UMTS: 800/850/900/AWS/1900/2100MHz; 2G GSM: 850/900/1800/1900MHz
– OS: Android 6.0
– CPU: Huawei Kirin 955 (64-bit), Octa-core (4 x 2.5 GHz A72+ 4 x 1.8 GHz A53)
– Memory: 4GB
Storage 64 GB
– Display: 5.5-inch FHD Amoled with 1920×1080 pixel resolution
– Connectivity: Wi-Fi 2.4G/5G,a/b/g/n/ac with Wi-Fi Direct support, BT4.2, support BLE, USB Type C (High Speed USB)
– GPS: GPS/A-GPS/Glonass/BDS
– Sensors: Fingerprint Sensor, G-Sensor, Gyroscope sensor, Compass, Ambient Light Sensor, Proximity sensor, |Hall effect sensor, Barometer sensor, infrared sensor
– Cameras: 12MP f/2.2 main camera, 8MP F/1.9 front camera
– Battery: 3,400 mAh
– Dimensions: 152.3mm x 75.3mm x 6.98mm
– Weight: 162g
This source first appeared on The Nation Life.