Huawei nova 9 hands-on review

Brilliant OLED panels

The Huawei nova 9 is equipped with a gorgeous OLED panel. It measures 6.57 inches on the vanilla model, just a smidgen smaller than the 6.72 inches on the Pro. In person, the display on the nova 9 looks super sharp and vibrant.

The panel is also 10-bit, which definitely plays a part in the premium look. The vanilla nova 9 has a 1080 x 2340-pixel resolution, which works out to about 392 ppi of pixel density. It looks incredibly sharp in person. You get a nice and tall, but not overly so 19.5:9 aspect ratio.

The nova 9 gets a 120Hz refresh rate, just like its Pro sibling and 300Hz touch sampling. We still need to put the nova 9 through its paces in a full and proper review to judge just how well it utilizes said high refresh rate, but there is a dynamic option in Display settings, which sounds promising enough. We just have to see how well the dynamic adjustment works and how granular it is. As for just scrolling through lists and web pages at 120Hz - the image looks quite sharp and fluid, as expected.

The nova 9 has HDR10 support, just like its Pro sibling.

Internals

In another great move for consumers, the vanilla Huawei nova 9 basically rocks the exact same internals as its nova 9 Pro sibling. That includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G, but one limited to 4G connectivity like we already mentioned. It is a modern chip with similarly modern connectivity and made on a 6nm TSMC process. We've already seen this chipset perform admirably in terms of both RAW performance and battery endurance in other phones, like the Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE, the Realme GT Master or the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G.

Granted, we've yet to see how this particular 4G-only variant does in battery endurance, but we have decently high expectations. The nova 9 has a decently-sized 4,300 mAh battery, with 66W charging.

Just for reference, we will note some internal differences with the nova 9 Pro, as suggested at the original Chinese announcement event. Apparently, the Pro has a beefier cooling system than the regular nova 9, complete with a vapor chamber and graphene cooling. This could definitely influence performance, particularly sustained performance, and may help deliver the Pro's quicker 100W charging while managing the associated heat. By the way, the Pro has a smaller 4,000 mAh battery.

As far as we managed to gather, the nova 9 will be offered in Europe with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of no-expandable storage. The presentation did not mention the 256GB, though it could arrive on shelves later.

EMUI 12 on top of Android

Huawei's mobile OS situation is a bit complicated at the moment. The company's own HarmonyOS and, as per the last official numbers, has already reached over 120 million devices, mostly as a drop-in replacement for Android. As far as we managed to gather, however, all of the Harmony OS smartphones currently out there are meant for the Chinese market. All the while, international units and models, like the Huawei nova 8, which fairly recently made it to Russia continue to run EMUI on top of Android.

This appears to be the case with the European release of the nova 9, as well. Though Huawei is understandably trying not to focus too much on the underlying details of its software dealings, the nova 9 unit we were handed appears to run Android 11, though with very little mention of that fact anywhere in the UI and EMUI 12.0.1 on top.

To be clear, though, even if Android is running underneath the EMUI skin, there is still no Google Services on the nova 9, just Huawei's HMS and corresponding AppGallery store, among other first-party apps.

EMUI 12 was sort of quietly launched a while back, and overall, its look and features appear to be very similar to HarmonyOS 2.0. The UI employs plenty of rounded corners and gradients, with black, blue and white at the core of the color scheme. There are new and more refined animations, which Huawei says were inspired by the movement of celestial objects.

Some of the more tangible changes in EMUI 12 include the ability to freely adjust the weight of the system font on a slider. Also, separate notification and control panel shades - one accessible by swiping down from the left corner, while the other - by swiping the right one.

Huawei has carried over some of the advanced connectivity and productivity options from HarmonyOS 2.0 as well. Notably, the Device+ section in the quick access panel allows MatePad and MateBook users to pull off advanced multi-screen setups. There is also Huawei Vision casting to a compatible TV and advanced multi-device operations.

If you do happen to own a compatible MateBook, running PC Manager 11.1 or newer, EMUI 12 also supports Huawei's new Distributed File System, which is meant to simplify file access and transfer between your phone and your computer.