Huawei P9 and P9 Plus with Leica’s Dual Camera Setup Are Now Official

Huawei’s P9 duo of flagship smartphones have been in the rumor mill for a long time and their phone specifications have leaked on several occasions as well. Today, the Chinese tech giant has put the rumors to rest by announcing its flagship duo dubbed P9 and P9 Plus, both of which were unveiled at the launch ceremony held in London, UK.

Huawei P9

Huawei P9, as the lack of a suffix suggests, is a normal-sized flagship. The P9 comes with an IPS LCD screen of 5.2-inches that’s backlit by 20 LEDs. Since Huawei has made it clear that 2K and higher resolutions are of no use in normal sized phones, the resolution still stands at 1080p on the P9. The company was keen to point out that its flagship has the pretty much the same dimensions as an iPhone 6s but still has a higher-res and bigger screen.

The flagship is built using a high quality aluminum alloy and resembles the looks of the recent Huawei-made Nexus 6P. The dark camera strip on the back is another reminder of the Nexus phablet. A fingerprint sensor has also been placed on the back of the device. This time it offers improved speeds and doubles as a multi-purpose button.

Huawei’s P9 is powered by its own Kirin 955 chipset, an upgraded version of the Kirin 950. The processing chip utilises 8 cores with four Cortex-A72 ones clocked at 2.5GHz while the power saving Cortex-A53 cores are clocked at 1.8GHz. There will be two versions of the device, one will come with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage while the other one will make use of 4GB RAM and 64GB on-board storage. SD storage is handled by a hybrid card slot that also uses the second SIM slot.

We finally come down to the killer feature of the P9 series, a dual camera developed in collaboration with German Optics specialist Leica. The P9’s rear consists of two 12MP cameras, one capturing colour while the other one only sees black and white. While working in unison, they give far more detailed shots in good light while helping reduce noise during low light scenes. While the aperture sits at f/2.2, autofocus is handled by a combination of laser, contrast and depth calculation algorithms. There is a dual-LED flash like the predecessor, but the Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) is no more, possibly because a dual-camera setup can’t utilize identical OIS mechanisms.

Finally, the device boasts a battery pack of 3,000mAh. It’s charged using a USB Type-C connector. The phone will come with Android Marshmallow 6.0 based EM UI 4.1 out of the box. Global sales start from April 16.