Huawei P9 Plus: Leica-toting flagship gets a big brother

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Performance itself is generally consistent and good; even under load the P9 Plus cranked up the camera and didn’t stutter. Both Samsung and Huawei design their own chips, but Samsung’s lead with power management, graphics performance and battery conservation is evident.

The battery holds up well, with a feature phone low-power mode for when you need to make it stretch. You can downscale the display into a lower resolution (“ROG mode”) of 720x1280 to eke out a few more minutes too. I actually liked how this strong contrast display looked, but it can confuse widgets if you’re running a third party launcher.

Radio performance is typically very good - but then Huawei knows its stuff.

The stereo speakers are striking and loud, and come into play during a phone call when the device is oriented to landscape mode - a nice surprise.

As to the software experience, it’s the usual mixture of handy tools and shortcuts, and consistent nagware. It’s improved a bit over a couple of years, but I got a warning that the Google Play store was consuming power while the app was downloading just one a 30MB app. That’s pretty aggressive and unnecessary. An overhaul of EMUI is on the cards, I suspect it can’t come soon enough. Work also needs to be done on its font management (one is only ever available) and the music player app.

Huawei’s UX isn’t significantly worse than, say, LG’s, but hopefully the next version can keep the best bits (the convenience gestures, say) and drop the heavyhandedness.

Specs: For more info, see Huawei's Manufacturer's Page

Price: The Huawei P9 Plus is £500 on PAYG at Vodafone, £38/m on O2 and from £42/m on Vodafone contract tariffs. ®