hi everyone I'm Matthew Monas and this
is the Huawei P9 plus the bigger brother
to the P9 the plus model comes with a
bigger screen more storage more memory
and better audio now it's not available
here in North America but Huawei was
nice enough to send one out for review
now I've been using this phone for about
a month and have been quite impressed
with its performance in fact this phone
came to North America I truly believe it
would be a top seller if Huawei tweaked
a few things so let's start off with
what I liked and first it's the design
it's an all metal phone like most
flagships but with some nice refinements
for one it's thinner than the iPhone 6s
plus and S7 Edge even though it's made
out of metal it doesn't feel like it
it's so smooth it gives the illusion
like you're holding a piece of
well-crafted glass the volume controls
are metal as well and have a nice click
to them and the power button has a
different texture marked with a red
circle around it Huawei has included an
IR blaster at the top so you can control
your appliances your TV and a super fast
fingerprint scanner on the back in fact
it's probably the fastest or if not one
of the fastest fingerprint scanners I've
used on an Android phone the bottom
holds a USB type-c port audio jack and
one of the two external speakers with
the other acting as an earpiece speaker
combo my unit came with 128 gigabytes of
storage space but for those who need
even more there's a Micro SD card slot
however the main focus of the P9 plus
has to be the interesting camera setup
it's a 12 megapixel dual lens camera
that was crafted in partnership with
Leica it doesn't use different sensor
sizes like the one on the LG G5 but the
second one acts as a monochrome camera
the concept behind it is that both
cameras work in unison to improve the
shot Huawei claims that with the data
collected from the black and white
camera photo brightness can be enhanced
by 200 percent and contrast by 50
compared to a single lens working alone
Tech jargon aside it's supposed to take
amazing photos while my experience
variants it did take good photos and the
monochrome camera alone provides a fun
way to take some black and white images
without having to manipulate them in
post now the thing is the camera quality
wasn't better than the likes of the
Galaxy S7 or HTC 10. it still does a
great job nonetheless and takes good
photos by exaggerating the colors and
makes Reds look redder and while Blues
look Bluer if you don't mind not having
a natural look and prefer saturated
colors then this is what you should
expect with the P9 plus and low light
the monochrome camera works together
with the main sensor to boost low light
performance you can capture some pretty
impressive low light photography like
some of these shots I took at the
aquarium the app itself is easy to use
with a lot of automatic or manual
controls depending on how granular you
want to be the camera also loads very
quickly and includes the option to
double press the volume down button to
take a quick snapshot I found this to be
a very handy feature to capture
important moments the front-facing
camera is 8 megapixels and is fairly
decent but what's not decent is a fact
he can only record in 1080P
unfortunately there's no 4K video
recording available now to view all
these beautiful photos is a 5.5 inch
Super AMOLED display it's a good display
but it's only 1080p now it's not as
crisp as huawei's Nexus 6p but I felt it
was good enough I'd probably rank it
above the OnePlus 3 but below the Nexus
6p in terms of color reproduction it has
deep Inky blacks and vibrant colors and
gets bright enough to view Outdoors but
sticking to 1080p has battery advantages
as well especially when it's combined
with a 3400 milliamp battery I was
easily getting a full day's use with
about 30 left before plugging in at
night now I'm a moderate to heavy user
so I can imagine light users getting two
days of full use with the P9 using the
earpiece as a speaker you end up with
stereo speakers in fact it's the same
idea as the HTC 10. the bottom speaker
focuses more on the low end while the
earpiece produces the highs the audio
sounded great in fact it was louder and
more clear that the speakers on the HTC
10. audio files who value external
speakers on a smartphone will like the
ones on the P9 plus so let's talk about
performance it's not using the typical
Qualcomm chips that we're used to in
other phones like the Galaxy S7 or HTC
10 but huawei's own Karen 955 octa-core
chip this is the first time I've used
their processors so I was a bit
skeptical on how well it would perform
but man was I ever impressed this has to
be one of the snappiest phones I've used
this year in fact it was as smooth as a
Nexus device now single core processing
is slower than the Snapdragon 820 but
the Kirin excels in multi-core
performance however when it comes to GPU
speeds the Kirin is definitely slower
with its Mali t880 GPU needless to say I
never felt the phone performing poorly
loading up apps playing games
transitioning through menus were all
buttery smooth okay so a quick recap of
the good stuff we have a beautiful
design great audio good camera fast
performer a decent display and fantastic
battery life it so far pretty much does
a great job in every category except for
one and that's the software it's running
Android 6.0 which is great but it's
using huawei's theme called emotion UI
it has some nice tricks but for the most
part it's a blatant copy of what iOS
looks like on the iPhone I understand
huawei's main Market is China and the
iPhone has looked as a status symbol but
I feel this is where Huawei could have
differentiated itself from the
competition there's no app drawing if
you swipe to the right you're also
presented with suggestions with the same
visual appearance as the one on iOS
Huawei also has their own version of 3D
touch which they call Press touch it
works exactly like you'd expect one hard
press presents a menu of actions you can
perform as if you're inside the app the
only problem is press touch is limited
to huawei's apps and I can't imagine
there will be any third-party
development iOS copy aside Huawei has
done a good job of optimizing its theme
even with all their apps installed on
the phone it does take some time to
manipulate the settings in order to make
it feel more North American out of the
box it's very permission heavy and a lot
of little things need to be changed
alright so my closing thoughts I was
really impressed with the Huawei P9 Plus
in fact I found myself using it more
than my Galaxy S7 Edge it's just a
beautiful phone to hold Huawei has
managed to nail most of the important
qualities of a great smartphone a good
design a good display a good camera
great external speakers and a fast
performer now the only thing holding it
back is its emotion UI the phone costs
750 us on Amazon I don't recommend
picking one up over other Flagship
phones only because it's not meant for
North America however I do want to say
that if Huawei ever manages start
selling their higher end phones here
companies like Samsung should be worried
Huawei already supplies a lot of the
carriers networks with their
infrastructure here in Canada so I can't
imagine it being too much longer before
we actually see their Flagship phones so
that wraps up my review of the Huawei P9
plus I hope you guys enjoyed this video
I want to hear what you guys think about
it in the comments below thanks everyone
out there for watching this video If you
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as always I will see you in the next
video
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thank you
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