Huawei Mate 9 review: Mighty Mate

Simple gallery

The Mate 9 comes with a no-frills gallery app. It defaults to a timeline, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. The pinch gesture is available for setting thumbnail size. You can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums, and you can also have hidden albums, though that's more of an organizational tool than a privacy one - they are there when you hit hidden albums.

Gallery views

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you a host of sharing options. The info icon up top gives some pretty detailed information about the image, including a histogram.

Viewing a single image

You can also go into a very capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), levels, filters (more than Instagram and Prisma combined) and beauty enhancements.

The image editor is quite capable

Video player

The Mate 9's video player is pretty basic, much like the one on the Mate 8 - its sole option is playback speed. What Huawei has added on this model is floating window video playback.

Simplistic video player with few options

Music player

The Mate 9 has quite stylish Music app pre-installed. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your playlists, too. The background of the app changes dynamically to match the album art, which is a nice little touch.

The music player

The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. If you're especially into lyrics, you can have them overlayed on top the homescreen.

Now playing • subtitles • subtitles on the lockscreen • ...and on the homescreen, too • player in notification shade

Audio output is solid

When plugged into an active external amplifier, the Huawei Mate 9 posted excellent scores top to bottom, hinting at perfectly accurate audio reproduction. Its loudness was just above average so no real reasons for complaining here.

Headphones only cause a small drop in volume so it’s only average and a contained hike in stereo crosstalk. Overall the output remains very clear and while it’s not quite the best performer out there the Mate 9 certainly won’t let you down in any significant way.

And now here go the results so you can make your comparison.

Huawei Mate 9 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.