Today huawei has released various new tech items and one of them is this right here the
nova 9 that they sent out to me to review so this is a 6.57 inch phone it does have
a oled screen with a curve to it 120 hertz it is all powered by the snapdragon 778
g and we've got a 50 megapixel main camera it's a youth focused phone according to huawei it's slim
and it is light so let's check it out in detail included with the phone we get a sim tray tool a
clear tpu case which of course does fit the phone perfectly our type a to type c cable and then the
charger which is huawei's supercharged 66 watts and it takes 38 minutes to fully charge the phone
it's a 6.53 inch phone the weight of it i really do like it's only 175 grams and the thickness very
very slim at only 7.77 millimeters so you can see that here on the right of the phone we've got a
power button volume up and down the frame around the outside is plastic with an inner alloy frame
to it i've seen this before with other phones and the backing material here this is plastic so in
hand yes it doesn't feel as premium as some of the other phones due to the materials used but i
like how light it is it's only 175 grams and then the thickness very very good just 7.77 millimeters
now this is their starry blue color they call it and you can see as i move it there it shifts
between a blue and a purple it has this texture to it which is very nice and it doesn't pick up
any fingerprints at all which is a definite positive and on camera so the main camera in this
one is a 50 megapixel ryyb color array filter sensor now it does not have any optical image
stabilization we have an 8 megapixel ultra wide and then two 2 megapixel cameras once for depth
the other is for macro and our camera here at the top this one's 32 megapixels and it can shoot
4k video which not even a lot of flagships can do it has electronic image stabilization so we've got
a curved glass screen on this one the edge as you can see there curve and wrap around a little bit
but nothing as extreme as what we have with the mate 40 pros you can see that goes right around
the edges so there is a little bit of color shift right on that edge due to the oled there which is
6.57 inches 120 hertz this particular screen and the bezels are about the same as their flagships
but what i do like is we have no more double cut out here with the front facing camera just that
single cut out and then down the bottom we do have a type c port unfortunately no video
out support single loudspeaker on this phone so there is no secondary one in the earpiece
as a single loudspeaker the volume of it's good it does sound reasonably good the quality and
i'll give you a sample of it later on microphone and our sim tray which takes two nano sims and
up the top just a single lonely microphone there's no ir transmitter with this phone
i roll in terms of build i do like it yes it is plastic mostly but of course we do have scratch
resistant glass on the front the weight of it is the best thing about it really for me it's
lightweight especially coming from an iphone 13 pro max which is heavy chunky this feels so slim
and light to me a little bit more on that screen of course so maximum brightness that i have
measured with my meter it does top out at over 900 nits it's oled so blacks look very deep now
as i mentioned before that there's a little bit of color shifting you see right on the curvature to
that screen why have they curved it well i prefer actually just completely flat screens but i must
admit that when you're holding it in hand with the curve it does feel a little better but still
i would prefer myself anyway to have a flat screen now you get your typical options here with display
with android 11 that this is running with emui 12. so we've got dark mode i comfort ebook mode turns
everything black and white you can adjust your scaling there and you have a dynamic resolution
that they do use or refresh rate so i force the refresh rate here on to high 120 hertz now it does
incorporate dc dimming this panel so i don't see any flicker coming through at all with it which is
great and even at lower volumes lower brightnesses should i say no pulse width modulation flicker
so smart resolution you can use that before when i did my battery life test i had forced it onto high
and can you tell the difference between the lower resolution and then high it's actually quite
difficult you need to look at the phone screen very closely and you do notice then that okay yes
it looks quite a bit sharper touch response excellent we have 300 hertz touch sampling
rate with this the screen does support hdr and it's also a 10-bit panel they're using of course
with the oled there so all up this is a flagship level screen and just how am i getting on with
application support with of course app gallery so a lot of the apps that you would want most
of them are there now with a lot more it keeps improving and it's getting better now over the
last year or so that i have been reviewing their phones last year and a half or so i can see this i
can see the improvements more developers coming on board for example here i searched geekbench i want
geekbench but it's not actually in app gallery the good thing is it incorporates pedal search
and that will then find where i can actually get geekbench the apk file here you go over
there to their website and you can install the apk file and away you go so no real problems
so more and more apps are being supported you'll find them in there and what about the performance
of this rom i found it to be excellent it's super smooth it runs at a proper 120 frames per second
matching the 120 hertz i have selected i haven't encountered any bugs or issues so far apart from
one thing i've noticed that sometimes the screen seems to dim down by itself even though i don't
have automatic brightness set here now we do have nfc on board with this particular phone too
so it's just really that the brightness thing is a very minor complaint for me that it seems to have
changed on its own because in the settings i have the adaptive brightness auto brightness turned off
and it seems to fluctuate a little bit which might be some sort of battery saving feature i
don't really know now when you take your shiny nice new phone out of the box out of the wrap
and you power it up you're going to have about 107 gigabytes free of storage
but remember there is no expandability does not support micro sd cards or their own format no so
that's it that's all you've got you can get of course a larger capacity if you need more eight
gigabytes of ram with this particular model and that does aid in the performance of this making
the phone very fluid and smooth for me and my experience with it now so we get a few bloatware
applications we see a lot of manufacturers doing this and i really wish they would tone down
so all of these ones here those ones there they're actually just suggested apps for
you to install they're not fully installed it's like a placeholder but still i had to spend about
five or six minutes going through and removing those and the other bloatware apps which is a
little inconvenience there and annoying and i wish they would tone down on that app gallery does also
have ads when you get into it it will occasionally show you a full screen ad for a few seconds which
of course i wish was not there so ufs 3.1 storage a very quick look at these speeds right here so
the random reads and writes look great sequential reads and writes are fast too which is very good
there and that is not going to be holding up this particular phone so here is our antutu score this
is version 9. it actually feels a lot faster than the score the ui performance is so good
and fast i would think it was maybe a flagship top-end chipset but it's not the snapdragon 778
g is a higher end well a mid-range chip there and the performance here it's good i think for
most people this is going to be absolutely fine so still good for games and the general performance
is great it's not going to lag it's not going to slow down on you geekbench 5 score here too
that's fine for this particular chipset it's kind of what you'd expect and this here is a minor con
so we don't have unfortunately widevine level one cert so netflix amazon prime video other
streaming services due to this drm cert here are going to be in just standard definition with such
a nice screen ah that's disappointing so i hope a firmware update can at least give us netflix
support and widevine level one later on i do hope they can address that wireless performance
very good speeds top out at flagship level 988 megabits per second close to my wi-fi
six-spec router so that's wi-fi ax really good and then the lower speeds downstairs still
excellent and no problems with it at all battery life so i set the resolution to the highest okay
and i also set the refresh rate to 120 hertz this result it's okay it's not amazing it's not
bad i'd say it's average so your real world use will be approximately
seven hours to six and a half at 120 hertz now if you use 60 hertz or if you decide
to use the dynamic resolution which lowers the resolution down depending on the content
or the dynamic refresh rate you will be able to squeeze out a few more hours of on-screen time
the charge time for this phone it is 38 minutes officially i normally get about 40 41 minutes
now youtube support you can use a browser and it's one way of accessing and viewing videos on youtube
there is another application um youtube advance which yeah i don't agree with at all because it
blocks out adverts and it just kills youtube creators so don't use it use the browser instead
thank you but let's have a listen to the speakers now on this or should i say speaker there's just
one down here and remember it does not support 3.5 millimeter accessories headphones so you
need to use that the type c to 3.5 adapter this one's not included but it's one i've got it works
so my verdict on the single speaker is that it sounds fine it's okay the loudness is all
right however i would have preferred a secondary loudspeaker up in the earpiece onto our gaming
performance pub g here now if you want the extreme frame rate option which is the best the smoothest
you need to go into the settings right here enable smooth anything above smooth does not give us
this which is extreme so that's what i will be using when i test out the gameplay now
so we do have very good performance i'm just in my second game here i got killed straight away
in the last game i tested out before i could even really hit record one kill already and no
noticeable lag performance is decent very good in fact there's no problem here so this i think
on the extreme setting is that 45 or 60 frames per second i think it is still it seems quite smooth
very playable and is it getting hot well the back of the phone's getting a little bit warm there
oh i've got someone right here is that a team member oh and i've got no rounds that's shocking
there he is and i'm dead as expected i've only got a pistol that's the end of me it has an end screen
fingerprint reader so you simply just need to tap there to wake it and unlock and you can see that
was about a second i will do it again very quick i found it to be accurate now it does support
face unlocking so all you need to do then is just tap the button and get it to see your face and it
unlocks and you can see that was very quick now you probably notice that right here i've got um
antutu now you can run certain apps that support it in windowed modes this is a way to multitask
you can switch between them and then when you minimize that you'll see it just goes over here
and you can kill them off so i won't go into all the software features because this video would
simply just drag on and become far too long it's long enough as it is and over to the performance
of our cameras now that we have with the nova 9 so the front-facing camera this one can shoot
4k which i'm currently shooting in which is really great to see a lot of flagships don't even have 4k
it does have quite an aggressive crop this is my arm fully extended out basically now and you
see that is quite close there that's because of the electronic image stabilization that it does
have of course as i step ahead it's relatively smooth here removing a lot of that jolts and
jutters that you get from walking speaking of jada when i do move it around a little bit i have
noticed that just like the rear cameras you often see a bit of jada come through with the electronic
image stabilization and 4k main rear camera now the 50 megapixel one so you can shoot 4k 30 frames
per second with quite a aggressive crop here electronic image stabilization seems to be good
the footage quality itself to me likes a little bit of detail and sharpness it really looks like
something like 1440p being upscaled to 4k to my eyes at least looking at this on a 4k monitor
audio bitrate is 96 kilobits per second and if you move around quickly you do get quite a bit
of that annoying electronic image stabilization java that comes through as you see as i pan now
now this is very common and i see it on literally every single phone out there including the ultra
wide on an iphone 13 pro max and another sample here from the ultrawide camera so
this is the weakest of the cameras it's only eight megapixels ideally i would have liked to have seen
at least 13 megapixels what is good however is we do have electronic image stabilization with
this which does work very well as i walk ahead you can see just how smooth this is
so it brings me on to my conclusion now with the nova 9 here so what do i like about it well the
screen very nice it's bright 120 hertz 300 hertz response rate megahertz response rate there to
touch means that it's almost instantaneous there and it's 120 hertz so very smooth and fluid and
it maintains a very stable frame rate in the rom the wrong performance optimization i think
is excellent it's very good this doesn't really feel like a snapdragon 778g it feels something
more like a snapdragon 865 to me or even like a triple eight phone the way the ui does perform
until you get into yes synthetic benchmarks and gaming so with app gallery we're getting better
app support there and i can see that every time i come back to reviewing a huawei phone and start
using them again it's getting a lot better i used to run into a lot of problems with certain apps
or games that just wouldn't work wouldn't load now it seems to be well it's only about maybe
two out of ten apps that i'm after might not be there but then i can find them or they might not
work just one or two there so it's not 100 perfect yet but trust me it's so much better now so
battery life it will go for about seven hours of screen on time if you use the adapter resolution
and adaptive refresh rate you can then extend that further a little bit more and it takes only
40 minutes to charge well just under which is not bad at all so it's running android 11 e m ui 12
with this and i have not encountered any bugs and of course it is a phone and the voice call quality
i don't have any problems with it sounds good it does have active noise cancellation just a single
loudspeaker however i wish it had a secondary one in the earpiece onto those cameras now so the main
camera as i showed you from my samples it takes an excellent photo very good there the ultra wide
yeah it's not brilliant and then we've got those two two megapixel cameras now i really wish
they'd put the cost of those two two megapixel cameras and i say this about other manufacturers
phones too that are doing this by the way into a better ultra wide camera and then our main camera
selfies on this i think they're pretty good but they tend to be a little bit
warm okay leaning onto the warm side and we do have the 4k front video with this which not even
a lot of flagships have so that's definitely another thing there so build quality overall
it's good yes the back is plastic yes the frame is plastic around the outside but in hand this
phone feels great it's very lightweight and it's slim i do like that especially coming from my
iphone 13 pro max which is chunky it's heavy phone very solid this thing this thing here
the nova 9 feels very good so all up there are a few things that they can improve with software
definitely like the wide vine level 3 cert like the audio bit rate with videos only 96 kilobits
per second yeah they do need to increase that it should be at least 250 or 192. it's more common
now to see 320 used by a lot of manufacturers so i hope they can change that fix the widevine cert so
we can have netflix at least in full definition with this because it does have a qualcomm chip
which sadly is missing the 5g of course being one that's used here for huawei so there we go
that there is the nova 9 from huawei thank you so much for watching my review and i should soon
have a review up and coming of the new watch gt3 that they also announced with this nova 9.