Huawei Mate 9 Pro review: The Magician
The Magician
Gallery
The Mate 9 Pro 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 Pro'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 Pro 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.
Audio output is solid
Despite sharing most of its other internals with the regular Huawei Mate 9, the Pro seems to have a different DAC as shown by its results in our test. When plugged into an active external amplifier, the Huawei Mate 9 Pro had perfectly accurate audio reproduction just like its sibling, but its loudness was even higher.
Volume remained great even when we plugged in our standard headphones set, but quality degradation was far more pronounced this time. Moderate amounts of both types of distortions crept in, while stereo crosstalk also suffered a bit. It’s still a decent showing, but not as clear as the vanilla Mate 9.
And now here go the results so you can make your comparison.
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| +0.03, -0.03 | -94.1 | 95.4 | 0.0021 | 0.0070 | -94.0 | |
| +0.19, -0.06 | -93.1 | 94.2 | 0.382 | 0.445 | -62.8 | |
| +0.03, -0.01 | -92.2 | 93.0 | 0.0026 | 0.0093 | -93.3 | |
| +0.06, -0.05 | -91.1 | 91.8 | 0.016 | 0.056 | -63.5 | |
| +0.01, -0.03 | -97.8 | 99.1 | 0.0054 | 0.0087 | -97.3 | |
| +0.02, -0.09 | -97.3 | 97.9 | 0.015 | 0.078 | -81.3 | |
| +0.01, -0.03 | -94.0 | 94.0 | 0.0033 | 0.0066 | -92.9 | |
| +0.17, -0.04 | -92.0 | 92.7 | 0.0067 | 0.125 | -62.0 | |
| +0.06, -0.02 | -83.9 | 83.0 | 0.0033 | 0.047 | -84.9 | |
| +0.95, -0.10 | -82.0 | 83.3 | 0.245 | 0.564 | -48.0 | |
| +0.10, -0.04 | -93.1 | 93.1 | 0.0015 | 0.0098 | -80.5 | |
| +0.10, -0.03 | -93.1 | 93.0 | 0.0013 | 0.015 | -76.8 | |
| LG V20 | +0.01, -0.03 | -93.0 | 93.1 | 0.0036 | 0.0075 | -93.7 |
| LG V20 (headphones attached) | +0.04, -0.09 | -92.4 | 92.4 | 0.051 | 0.105 | -57.5 |
You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.
Reader comments
- phi11yphan
- 17 May 2021
- 4cH
agreed. I need my IR blaster. I've been seeking for about a year now, but has been hard to justify yet. could use expandable storage, a better camera, faster CPU, 5g, fresh UI, updated BT, wireless charging, and oh yeah maybe not a vendor on the...
- Anonymous
- 28 Nov 2020
- LdI
huawei mate 9 pro front camera is not so good, does not autofocus and pictures are blurred effect. anyone find it same ? the contrast of pic is pale too, pls give solution guys.
- Grant1080
- 17 Apr 2020
- ii6
Most phones nowadays don't have those things. If you're looking for removable batteries, expandable storage and FM radio, you'll have to go for a feature phone. Phones don't have removable batteries anymore because making them non-removable will make...