Huawei Mate 9 & Mate 9 Porsche Design: First look

The Mate 9 camera

Update, 4 November: We've recently updated this page with new camera samples from the Mate 9. The new camera samples are found further down this page - here is a direct link.

The Huawei and Leica partnership has brought out the second generation of their joint product. The dual camera now uses a higher resolution monochrome sensor - 20MP, up from 12MP. The color camera stays at 12MP. Between the two and the custom image processor, the phone can do Hybrid Zoom - a 2x digital zoom. The two cameras can be used for depth processing instead to create a bokeh effect.

The Mate 9 uses a 27mm aspheric lens with Summarit branding and an f/2.2 aperture. Aspheric lenses avoid several optical aberrations while being simpler and lighter than spherical lenses - good things when you're working on something as tiny as a smartphone.

The aperture is darker than most leading flagships, but the monochrome sensor gets a good deal more light - or rather it doesn't lose light to the Bayer filter that other cameras use. Pixel binning helps further reduce noise.

Camera interface • Dual camera flanked by flash and Laser AF • A close-up

To the left of the dual camera assembly is the dual LED, dual tone camera flash. To the right is the Laser autofocus system, which is one of one of four AF mechanism - the others being Phase-detection, Contrast plus depth information gathered from the two cameras. You can also see one of the microphones above the camera. The camera assembly itself protrudes from the back, which makes it vulnerable as some LG V20 users have already discovered.

The Huawei Mate 9 camera is powered by a custom chip that can pull of photo tricks. You can go back to photos you took and change their focus and even lighting. The chip also powers face recognition. By the way, the 8MP selfie camera features autofocus - you'd be surprised how many selfie cams on current phones are fixed focus.

Here are some early camera sample - from both the color and the black & white cameras. The lighting conditions are not perfect.

Huawei Mate 9 camera sample: Color • Black & White

Let's try the zoom. Here's how the color camera does it.

Huawei Mate 9 zoom test: color

And now the B&W camera. Notice that you get the full 20MP resolution, even after the zoom. The color camera produces only 12MP shots, with or without zoom.

Huawei Mate 9 zoom test: black & white

The dual cameras can also do bokeh effects. From the interface you can change the virtual aperture, depending on just how soft you want the background. Here are three different levels.

Huawei Mate 9 bokeh test

iPhone 7 vs. Huawei Mate 9 in low-light

Update, 4 November: We've recently updated this page with new camera samples from the Mate 9. They are listed below.

iPhone 7 vs. Huawei Mate 9 (12MP and 20MP) in daylight

Huawei Mate 9 black&white camera daylight: 20MP vs. 12MP

Huawei Mate 9 HDR mode: Off • On

We finally had a chance to test out the zooming capabilities of the dual camera setup (what they call hybrid zoom) in daylight. The interesting thing about the hybrid zoom is that it uses the full 20MP resolution of the B&W camera to render the shapes and details in the photos while the colors of the objects are derived from an upsized version of the 12MP color camera, which is overlayed on top of the sharper B&W image.

Looking from up close, the 3x zoom (or 81mm equivalent) zoom seems to be the sharpest of the three available levels, while the last one - the extended 4x digizoom (108mm equivalent) seems to be the fuzziest.

Hybrid Zoom: Off (27mm) • 2x zoom (52mm) • 3x zoom (81mm) • Extended 4x digizoom (108mm)

The Huawei Mate 9 is perhaps the first Kirin-based Huawei device to have 4K video recording, but unfortunately, we can't upload those videos to YouTube as they are encoded in H.265 and YouTube doesn't support that codec. Instead, here's a 1080p video below.

We still have a 4K video available for direct download (50MB). Even though we did our best, the video footage is far from nicely stabilized. We guess, the on-board optical image stabilization can only do so good on the Mate 9. The 1080p video on YouTube is much better thanks to the digital stabilization, which however is not available in 4K video recording.

Huawei Mate 9 performance

The Huawei Mate 9 is the first recipient of the Kirin 960 chipset. That makes it the first phone to bring ARM's Cortex-A73 processor core and Mali-G71 graphics core to market. Both are optimized for power and space efficiency (smaller chips = cheaper chips).

Also, both types of core are aware of each other and can balance power use and thermals between the two to guarantee optimal performance. In fact, that one of the key advancements in Cortex-A73 - sustained performance.

The new chipset addresses a weakness in its predecessors. The Mali-G71 GPU is given 8 cores while previous Kirin chipsets only used 4 cores (with an older core design to boot). That lead to the embarrassing situation where a mid-range phone with Snapdragon 650 would match the flagship Huawei P9 in graphics performance.

The Kirin 960 should be much faster in that respect and the G71 GPU is designed with Vulkan and VR in mind. According to Huawei, Vulkan offers a 400% increase in graphics performance, making it essential for VR. Speaking of, we asked about comparability with Google's Daydream VR and Huawei representatives said "The goal is to have Daydream enabled." So, not right off the bat, but perhaps soon.

This is our first encounter with the Cortex-A73 core. Alone, they beat the Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus and its Kryo cores in the updated Snapdragon 821 chipset (and that's the 2.35GHz version too). For the slower 2.1GHz version of the same core (still Snapdragon 821 chipset), look at the Pixel XL, it's lagging quite a bit.

Note: the unit we tested is not running final software, so keep that in mind before continuing.

GeekBench 4 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
  3473
• Huawei Mate 9
  1932
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  1815
• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  1696
• LG V20
  1590
• Google Pixel XL
  1507

Apple's approach with two big cores gives it great single-core performance but the A10 chipset is a benchmark for multi-core performance too. It used to be anyway, the Kirin 960 managed to outpace it with a healthy margin. It's well ahead of the Snapdragon 821, its closest competition in the Android world.

GeekBench 4 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  6106
• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
  5664
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  4333
• Google Pixel XL
  4152
• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  4128
• LG V20
  3890

The Mate 9 didn't do so hot with AnTuTu 6. It scored least of the bunch, we even ran the test twice to make sure it wasn't a glitch or something. Because AnTuTu tests many aspects of the phone, the score depends on a number of things: CPU, GPU, storage speeds, and RAM performance. So we can't expect to see the same results as the raw CPU benchmarks like GeekBench.

AnTuTu 6

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
  173110
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  155185
• Google Pixel XL
  141186
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  132849
• Huawei Mate 9
  129984

GFX is a test for all-around graphic intensive loads. The Mate 9 didn't do well, despite Huawei's efforts in improving the GPU performance. Since some other phones have a higher resolutions, we want to look at the "offscreen" result to compare oranges to oranges. Remember this could change once the final software OTA is released for review units.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
  39
• Google Pixel XL
  32
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  32
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  30
• Huawei Mate 9
  27

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
  42
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  32
• Huawei Mate 9
  28
• Google Pixel XL
  17
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  16

GFX 3.1 Car scene (offscreen)

Higher is better

• Google Pixel XL
  19
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  18
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  18
• Huawei Mate 9
  13

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  19
• Huawei Mate 9
  14
• Google Pixel XL
  11
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  10

The Mate 9 slayed the other competitiors in the Basemark X test. As this is also a graphics test, and we just saw the Mate 9 not do well in the GFX comparisons, it shows us that not all benchmarks are created equally.

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  37716
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  36062
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  32160
• Google Pixel XL
  30861

In the Basemark OS 2.0 test, the Mate 9 was able to beat the Snapdragon 820 and 821. However, the iPhone 7 Plus' Fusion 10 chip is still ahead here.

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
  3796
• Huawei Mate 9
  2805
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  2434
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  2352
• Google Pixel XL
  2281

Much like the previous test, the Basemark ES 3.1 test fared similarly, the other devices behind the Huawei Mate 9, but the iPhone still beating all others. We will put the Mate 9's Kirin 960 through more tests once the final update is released.

Basemark ES 3.1 / Metal

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
  1517
• Huawei Mate 9
  885
• Google Pixel XL
  626
• Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  624
• Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus
  538