huawei p9 review

Huawei keeps pace with its more reputable competitors by offering storage expandability via microSD card — the slot for it sits on the same tray as the nano-SIM card — and a 3,000mAh battery. Only the Xiaomi Mi 5 can compete with the P9 for the title of being the thinnest and lightest smartphone with a battery of that size. Unfortunately, the P9 differs in one important respect and that’s the actual battery life.

Even with its large battery, this phone consumes a lot of power when connected to LTE and runs out of juice comparatively quickly. On one particularly intensive day out at meetings — where I took notes on Google Keeplike a true Born Mobile millennial — I found myself needing to recharge the P9 by the afternoon. I’m usually an extremist when it comes to power management and not being able to complete a productive day’s use without recharging came as an unhappy surprise. I shot photos, browsed the web, tweeted some wisecracks out into the ether — but I don’t think I did anything that would have tripped up, say, the HTC 10 in quite the same way. The Huawei difference? It uses the Chinese company’s own Kirin 955 processor rather than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 that has quickly become the flagship standard this year.

Like any other smartphone, the Huawei P9 is great at idling and lasts for a good couple of days if only connecting to Wi-Fi, but unlike its 2016 rivals, its efficiency when actually doing things is not impressive. This is one aspect of Huawei’s product design that hasn’t improved: I felt similarly let down by the Kirin chip inside 2014’s P7. One note of optimism for prospective US buyers: if the P9 makes its way to American shores, it’s highly likely that it will do so with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 powering it. In that case, you can probably expect battery life similar to that of the Xiaomi Mi 5, which has the same battery size and display specs.