Huawei P9 review: Great camera, great design, and ghastly software

Specs at a glance: Huawei P9
Screen	5.2-inch, FHD (1920x1080)
OS	Android 6 Marshmallow with Emotion UI 4.1
CPU	Huawei Kirin 955 (64-bit), Octa-core (4x 2.5GHz A72, 4x 1.8 GHz A53)
RAM	3GB/4GB (64GB model)
GPU	Mali-T880 MP4
Storage	32GB or 64GB, plus micro SD expansion
Networking	802.11 Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 & 5 GHz)
Ports	USB Type-C, headphone jack
Camera	2x 12MP Sony IMX286 sensors, Leica Summarit H 1:2.2/27 lenses,  f/2.2, 27mm focal length
Dimensions	145mm x 70.9mm x 6.95mm
Weight	144g
Battery	3000mAh
Network Bands	Bands 13, 25, 29, 30, and 41 are not supported
Other perks	RAW image support
Release date	Available to pre-order now; release date in the UK will be sometime in May
Price	£449/€599 for 32GB model

A few years ago, in a classic ham-fisted fumble involving a pint of beer and a cat video, I dropped my Nexus 5. The colourful 1080p screen that I had spent so much of my free time pawing at was left shattered and unusable. Money was tight at the time, and so rather than get the Nexus fixed or buy an entirely new phone, I called in a favour from a journalist friend. The next day, I was the proud borrower of a Huawei P7, the Chinese company's first real stab at a flagship Android phone.

I'd never used a Huawei phone before, and at first I was pleasantly surprised. The build quality was excellent even if the design was rather nondescript, and it had a bright 1080p IPS screen. My excitement dwindled, however, when I flicked the P7 on and was presented with one of the most outrageously aggressive Android skins I'd ever seen. The icons had been squished, and given an odd iOS-like sheen, while the app drawer I loved from the stock KitKat build on the Nexus had been entirely removed in favour of shoving all the apps onto the home screen.

Indeed, the deeper I dove, the more I found had been changed by Huawei's Emotion UI. Settings weren't where I expected to find them, while various menu designs had been given a visual tweak that didn't match other parts of the OS. In short, the P7 was mess—and it was slow and laggy too. This was a classic case of great hardware being marred by terrible software, and it wasn't long before I bit the bullet and bought a new phone just so I could get back to something that at least vaguely approached a stock Android experience.

Sadly, two years on, little has changed.

Huawei's flagship P9 is a fantastic piece of hardware, with a build quality as good as, if not better than, what's offered by the likes of Apple, Samsung, and HTC. It is astonishingly thin considering it contains a hefty 3000mAh battery, while also being reassuringly weighty; there's a sense that every inch of space between its comfy curves and glossy chamfered edges has been filled with high-end tech. It takes a mean picture too thanks to a pair of 12-megapixel cameras adorned with iconic camera company Leica's branding. It should be a home run.

And yet, thanks to the crumminess of Emotion UI—not to mention a higher-than-expected price tag—I sadly struggle to recommend the P9 to anyone.

All metal, all the time

That's a shame, because the P9 will garner plenty of admiring glances from high street shoppers. At just 6.95mm thick—that's thinner than the 7.1mm iPhone 6S and 7.7mm Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge—it cuts a fine figure compared with its rivals. The "sandblasted" satin finish of its aluminium body is pleasingly understated, if rather prone to scratches, and does a good job of making the phone less slippery; this is a phone you can hold at the sharpest of angles, or place on the glossiest of glass tables, without fear of it sliding off into oblivion. It's comfortable too, sporting a sensibly sized 5.25-inch 1080p display that, thanks to an extremely narrow bezel, makes it just a wee bit wider than an iPhone 6S.

The display is sandwiched by two subtlety pinstriped bezels (think of the original Aqua UI for OS X), with a Huawei logo on the bottom, and a speaker and an eight-megapixel selfie camera up top. On the left there's the now in-vogue combination SIM card and microSD card slot (which sadly doesn't support adoptable storage), and on the right there's a solid volume rocker with a smaller, textured power button underneath. The power button has a slightly lower profile too, which helps avoid any accidental presses when fumbling around with the P9 in a pocket. Up top there's just a single mic, while on the bottom there's a headphone jack, a USB Type-C port, and an expertly chiseled speaker grille.

On the rear of the P9 is a lightning-fast fingerprint scanner. While the the scanner's position won't be to everyone's taste, it's largely comfortable to use and I love not needing to push a button before the scanner activates, unlike the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. Above the fingerprint scanner and the colour-matched antenna lines is the P9's signature feature: two 12-megapixel Sony 12MP IMX286 sensors that are paired with Leica Summarit H 1:2.2/27 lenses sporting an f/2.2 aperture and 27mm focal length. Both sit flush against the phone's body, but sadly lack optical image stabilisation. Using two lenses isn't a new idea—HTC's M8 did the same thing back in 2014, and LG's G5 has two cameras too—but Huawei's implementation is slightly different.

One sensor captures data in full RGB colour, while the other captures just monochrome. Both sensors have the same large 1.25µm pixels, but in theory the monochrome sensor should capture more light, because it ditches the Bayer colour filter that normally splits the light into red, green, and blue elements. More light means less noise, and by combining the monochrome shot with the colour data from the other sensor—a form of computational photography—the P9 should in theory take excellent photos. Plus having two sensors means you can adjust the focal point after taking a photo.

In practice it's tough to tell how much of difference that second sensor makes to pictures without being able to disable it entirely, just as it's difficult to tell exactly how much involvement Leica has had beyond slapping its logo on the back of the phone. Indeed, the camera sensor on the P9 is in fact made by Sunny Optical, a Chinese smartphone camera manufacturer—Leica merely certified the module.

What really matters, though, is the end product, and I'm pleased to say the P9 takes very good pictures indeed.