Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)
The next addition to Huawei’s Mate family is here: the Chinese company announced the Mate 9 smartphone today. Huawei’s message with this handset is lifetime efficiency. The company updated the 9’s internals and made improvements to its Emotion UI that should, hopefully, make the handset smarter and more resilient as it ages. No doubt Huawei is hoping to build upon the over 100 million smartphones it sold by the beginning of October this year with the new Mate 9. We know the Mate 9 will come to the US as well as other countries that Huawei typically serves, although we don’t know exactly when yet.
The Mate 9 doesn’t look unique from the outside, but there are small differences that set it apart from the Mate 8 and some of Huawei’s other handsets. Its all-metal unibody is a design we’re used to seeing in flagship smartphones, and its 5.9-inch FHD display is bold, bright, and sharp. The slim sides of the handset only have the power button and volume rocker. On the lower edge is a USB Type-C port for charging, and on the top edge is a headphone jack.
The back of the handset is slightly curved, which makes it more comfortable to hold than geometric smartphones. The Mate 9 may appear to be just another rectangle, but it doesn’t look or feel as blocky as devices like Huawei’s P9 or Honor 8. The fingerprint sensor and the Leica-developed camera are on the top half of the back of the handset. This is the second-generation of Huawei’s camera collaboration with Leica, which features a combo of 12MP RGB and 20MP monochrome sensors, while the front-facing camera is an 8MP shooter.
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Source: Ars Technica – Huawei hopes improved Emotion UI will swing users to new Mate 9