Huawei have been making quite the progress on the mobile market, and many people have a strong respect for the Chinese company at this point. The recent release of the P9 was met with a strong acceptance by most tech fans, and it looks like we’re about to see a revival of interest in camera phones if the current trend continues. Huawei in particular have released a phone with amazing shooting capabilities, after teaming up with Leica.
And while there were some negative remarks about the build quality of the phone, particularly about its physical comfort, the overall package is a great deal that should work very well for those who want a solid smartphone experience with a more than adequate camera.
Despite the phone feeling a bit uncomfortable in the user’s hand, it still manages to strike with its beautiful design, and it’s obvious that Huawei have put a lot of focus on that aspect. The entire body follows a sleek form factor and it can give companies like Apple and Samsung a run for their money. There has been a strong push to make phones more attractive as fashion accessories lately, and while this is mostly limited to some premium companies, it’s good to see that manufacturers like Huawei are also jumping on the trend.
Other than the great camera, the phone also lives up to the expectations one would have from a flagship in the rest of the hardware department. It can run its build of Android smoothly and without any UI issues, and it handles pretty much all core apps without a hitch. That shouldn’t be too surprising given its recent Qualcomm Snapdragon model, as well as the 3 GB of RAM under the hood, and the phone definitely does correspond to its price tag, all things considered.
Some have been a bit skeptical about the physical dimensions, as the device is a bit smaller than the common trend of today. But looking at Apple’s recent iPhone SE, it looks like the industry is making a shift towards smaller, more compact phones instead of the phablets that were gaining so much popularity lately. Some markets still prefer larger screens, and we expect that the P9 will be met with a more critical response there, but it just goes to show that a manufacturer can never please everyone, no matter what they do.
Huawei have also done some work on their own flavor of Android, improving it from previous iterations. The only complaint some users have in this regard is about the number of default apps, but at least that’s an easy to resolve issue. The company is not as restrictive as Samsung, for example, when it comes to preventing their users from cleaning up bloatware, and for the most part, Huawei’s Android is quite respected among fans of the operating system. It also runs smoothly and presents everything in an intuitive manner, even though it might look a little too close to iOS in some regards.
Hopefully this won’t prevent Huawei from keeping the device up to date with the newest releases of Android, as this has been a problem for manufacturers in the past. We don’t really have any precedents of the company delaying the rollout of more important OS updates though, so we have every reason to believe that they will manage to keep their users up to date, at least with regards to the more important patches.