Huawei Mate 9 Pro Review

Huawei Mate 9 Pro Review: Probably The Best Android Phone Right Now

It is a testament (or perhaps indictment?) to the Wild Wild West nature of the mobile industry that, on December 14, thinking it was close enough to the end of the year, I wrote a piece ranking my favorite smartphones of 2016 -- only for the list to be thrown out of wack a week later when I got my hands on the Huawei Mate 9 Pro.

The Mate 9 Pro is now my favorite go-to phone to use, and since it was technically released in 2016, that means it is indeed my new favorite phone of 2016.

To be honest, this came as a complete surprise. I knew of the existence of this phone when I wrote that original list -- heck, I had even already got my hands on the "normal" Mate 9, which while excellent didn't blow me away -- and I assumed the Pro wouldn't differ enough from other Huawei phones to affect the list. And in many ways the differences between the Mate 9 Pro and Mate 9 aren't drastic, but these little bits add up and the whole package is the most pleasant phone experience I've had so far.

The phone is superbly well-constructed.

I wrote about how the Mate 9, despite its 5.9-inch screen, still felt comfortable in the hand. Well the Pro with a smaller 5.5-inch display, feels even better. I want my phone to be very usable one-hand, but still come with a bigger screen north of 5.2-inches (yes, I know it's me having my cake and eat it too -- such is the nature of tech geeks), and the Mate 9 Pro comes the closest of any phone since the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (still the greatest balance of "screen size"+"small body" ever) to giving me that.

The Mate 9 Pro also ups its screen resolution to quad HD instead of the normal Mate's 1080p. Now if you've read my stuff you know I don't think there's a huge difference between the two resolutions on mobile screens, and that's still true here. But the Mate 9 Pro's screen is noticeably superior to the normal Mate 9's screen because it's AMOLED instead of LCD. I've placed the two phones side by side, and the true blacks on the Mate 9 Pro is much more aesthetically pleasing.

And then there are the curves. The Mate 9 Pro features a dual-curved display (started by Samsung back in 2015, but almost every Chinese phonemaker have since followed suit in 2016, and Apple will too in 2017) but the curves here are very, very subtle, to the point that it doesn't feel or look like a curved-screen phone unless you examine it closely. Such shallow curves mean the phone doesn't have the same cool effect of visuals "spilling off the screen" like on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, Vivo XPlay 6 (I'm reviewing this next), or the Xiaomi Mi Note 2, but it also means the phone has almost none of the erroneous palm touch issues that plague the S7 Edge very badly and to a lesser extent, the Mi Note 2.

So the combination of these little things: superior AMOLED display, subtle curves and even more comfortable in-hand feel pushes the Mate 9 Pro above the normal Mate 9. As for what makes it better than other phones I've used? Well here goes:

• The phone is insanely fast. Huawei's own Kirin 960 chip is in my opinion the fastest Android chip on the market, better than Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 or 821 (and the benchmarks back this up) or Samsung's Exynos 8890.
• Huawei's dual-camera tech with Leica branding takes very fun photos that are no possible on any other phone. I've gone in-depth about this in the Mate 9 and P9 review, but I'll explain more later. In terms of pure photo quality, it's not the best camera of the bunch, but it's the most fun.
• The EMUI software has cleaned up significantly, and the all-black notification/toggle shade is probably the best looking and most intuitive notification shade of any phone I've tried. Little software touches like one-hand mode that's easier to activate than on other phones make using the Mate 9 Pro a joy.
• Huawei builds the fastest fingerprint sensor on the market bar none. That, along with the fact that Huawei doesn't require you to press a button to activate sensor (instead, it goes to work as soon as your finger touches the sensor) means the phone unlocks at an instantaneous rate. Use a Huawei phone for a few days, then go back to a Samsung or iPhone and the unlocking process feels noticeably slower.
• The Mate 9 Pro is a very strong media creating and consuming machine. The phone has dual stereo loud speakers -- which is increasingly rare in today's phones -- and has multi-directional mics for enhanced recording.

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