Towards the end of the year, all the flagship machines of major manufacturers came on the scene like a blowout, among which Huawei Mate 9 attracted a lot of attention. This opportunity brings us the evaluation of Huawei Mate 9 ceramic white:
This article is based on Huawei Mate 9 (4G+64) ceramic white retail version, for reference only.
Appearance design
The black gift box similar to P9 series is used for packaging, which will have a more upscale feeling than the white paper box.
There are a lot of accessories. In addition to the standard "three piece set" of power adapter, data cable and headset, a frosted protective case is also included. In addition, a Type-C to MicroUSB adapter is also provided in consideration of the fact that the Type-C interface may cause non universal data cables.
The data line is made of sufficient materials, with a large radius, and both interfaces are marked with purple. Mate 9 to achieve high power charging, The adapter and data cable that need to be attached , the mobile phone will be verified with them respectively, and none is dispensable. This data line can pass the high current of 5A, which is much more violent than other products on the market.
The new SuperCharge fast charging adapter supports up to 4.5V 5A perhaps 5V 4.5A This is a low voltage fast charging technology.
The front of Mate 9 is much more low-key than that of Mate 9 Pro and Mate 9 Porsche Design, basically maintaining the same routine as that of Mate 8. The ceramic white we get uses a white front panel.
The front panel uses 2.5D glass, but the radian is not very large. There is a brand logo at the bottom of the front.
Like other colors, the ceramic white Mate 9 also uses an integrated metal body, but this color matching has a thick white layer on the back cover, which looks more integrated and does not divide the back cover into three sections like other colors.
The most eye-catching area on the back cover is the dual camera area. Like the P9, the Mate 9 uses the dual lens jointly designed by Leica, but this time it is upgraded to the second generation. The main improvement lies in the addition of OIS optical anti shake, which users have been waiting for. At the same time, the black and white camera has reached the level of 20 million pixels. Features such as IMX286 main camera and f/2.2 are retained. Due to the optical anti shake, the camera of Mate 9 is also difficult to avoid protrusions.
Ceramic white color matching is not made of ceramic materials, but coated on metal, which has achieved a perfect smooth transition in hand feel. However, careful observation can still see the separation of different materials on the back cover.
The top of the fuselage is 3.5mm interface and infrared sensor. I hope that giants like Huawei will not remove 3.5mm interface in follow-up products
There are eight symmetrical openings on the left and right sides of the bottom, which are microphone and speaker, and a Type-C connector is placed in the middle.
The middle frame adopts conventional CNC highlight trimming, but the ceramic white color matching also adds a white layer on the middle frame, which well hides the antenna partition strip, and is more integrated than other color matching. Of course, you must pay attention when using it. If you accidentally knock off a piece of paint, it will make people more tangled
System experience
Mate 9 comes pre installed EMUI 5.0 , based on Android 7.0 This is also the first mobile phone with a new system pre installed in China. There are not many Android 7.0 phones, but they all have one thing in common: fast. The overall response of the system is excellent. With the powerful CPU performance of Mate 9, it can be said that it is the top player in Android phones in terms of program startup speed.
The system does not have a secondary menu by default, but it can be opened by the user's own choice. This aspect is more user-friendly, but the location of the secondary menu shortcut is not adjustable.
The pull-down bar uses settings close to native Android 7.0. The first pull-down displays five shortcut switches and notifications, and the second displays all shortcut switches. Compared with native Android, it is more convenient to adjust the brightness. You can adjust it by pulling it down for the first time.
EMUI 5.0 redraws a lot of system UI and icons, and the theme market also provides a variety of themes with different styles.
The application of the system itself has also been restructured at multiple functional levels, and the design has also been greatly improved. It can be said that in terms of appearance, EMIUI5.0 has not seen much shadow of the previous generation.
In terms of system security, EMUI 5.0 also has many improvements, such as adding perfect virus detection, payment protection center and other functions. Facing the open platform Android, these security improvements are more necessary for ordinary users.
From the overall experience, the performance of EMUI 5.0 has been very satisfactory. The improved menu logic makes it look more comfortable. Android 7.0, together with Huawei's in-depth underlying optimization, makes the response speed of the whole machine reach a very high level. In terms of functionality, in the face of MIUI, Flyme and other competitors, EMUI can be said to show no weakness, and the high functional richness can satisfy many heavy users. However, the author believes that the official theme and UI style of EMUI are too business oriented, and young and simple users may still feel that there is room for improvement.
Performance
The screen parameters of Mate 9 are "normal". The 5.9-inch FHD negative liquid crystal TFT screen has an average DeltaE of 3.6 in 104 colors, a sRGB color gamut of 99.7%, a maximum brightness of about 550 nits, and a contrast of 1450:1. The screen quality is generally good. The default color temperature is 8000k, with stepless color temperature adjustment.
Mate 9 accidentally used Huawei's latest SoC, Kirin 960, and launched ARM's Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71. The A73 frequency is up to 2.4GHz, and the G71 is eight core 900MHz. Compared with P9, Mate 9's manufacturing process remains at 16nm FinFET+, which is basically the same in terms of frequency. Even the frequency of Mate 9's large core is 100MHz lower, and the frequency of its small core and GPU remains unchanged, but its architecture has changed significantly. The big core has been changed to ARM's new Cortex-A73. If the Cortex-A72 on P9 has evolved step by step through Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A57, then Cortex-A73 is more like a 64 bit enhanced version of Cortex-A17, reaching a performance peak in the core of ARM's public version. In terms of GPU, the style of Kirin series chips with weak GPU performance was finally changed. Eight core GPU was used at one time, and it was the latest Mali-G71 architecture. Compared with Mali-T880, the performance of this architecture was greatly improved. In addition, the noticeable improvement is the memory chip. Mate 9 has upgraded from the previous generation eMMC 5.1 to the most advanced UFS 2.1 in one breath, which has also made the storage performance increase dramatically. To sum up: Although they are all 16 nm eight core processors, today's Kirin has been reborn.
After talking about so many theoretical data, we may also find it a bit boring. First, we will compare the scores of CPU:
From the actual score, Mate 9, the first Kirin 960, is really powerful. It has basically dominated the field of Android in terms of CPU single core performance, and is absolutely ahead of Geekbench 3 and Geekbench 4 in terms of multithreading and RAR single thread. The Geekbench 4 single thread is second only to the iPhone 7 Plus, and the RAR multi thread is second only to the Exynos 8890 S7 edge. This situation is a bit familiar. Last year, Kirin 950, with its Cortex-A72 core, also gained considerable performance advantages over the Cortex-A57 used by Samsung and Qualcomm at that time.
In the past Kirin series SoC, whether 920, 930, 935 or recently 950, 955, GPU has not met the requirements of enthusiasts. The Kirin 960 finally ushered in the explosion after silence, and directly inserted the latest GPU of ARM into the new SoC, which is eight core 900MHz. The official claims that the theoretical performance is 180% of that of the previous generation product, and the performance is improved by 40%. It is really attractive to see this parameter. Although the efficiency has improved, don't forget that this is an eight core GPU. Compared with the previous four cores, the pressure of maintaining high frequency will be great.
From the actual graphics performance score, the GPU performance of Kirin 960 is quite strong. In the scene of GFXBench's OpenGL ES 2.0 test Tyrannosaurus Rex and OpenGL ES 3.0 test Manhattan, it has caught up with or even surpassed the recognized graphics performance leader Snapdragon 821. This performance is expected, or can be said to be unexpected. It is expected that this is a combination of eight Mali-G71 with a high speed of 900MHz, and such achievements are deserved. The unexpected Kirin 960 has been able to compete with the top SoC of Qualcomm, an international giant. Such progress is really impressive.
In the Manhattan 3.1 test of the new OpenGL ES 3.1, Kirin 960 also performed strongly, and the frame number was close to that of Snapdragon 821. However, there are still problems. It may be that the scale of the GPU is too powerful. Despite the 16nm FinFET+blessing, the power consumption of the GPU is still considerable. When we conduct the 3.1 test together with the 3.0 and 2.0 test, we will find that the test frames of the latter two will be much lower than that of the separate test, which proves that after running in Manhattan 3.1, the temperature of the processor will rise too high, GPU performs frequency reduction processing.
In the 3DMark Sling Shot test of OpenGL ES 3.1, although there is still a gap with Snapdragon 821, the performance of Kirin 960 on Mate 9 has greatly exceeded that of Exynos 8890, and the performance is also quite eye-catching.
Mate 9 uses the most advanced UFS2.1 flash memory in Android, which is more advanced for UFS2.0 of other high-end Android computers. In the AndroBench test, the continuous read performance is eye-catching, while the continuous write performance is not particularly strong. This may be related to the 64G version we get. Compared with other 128G and 256G flash memory models, it will suffer.
Random read-write performance is also not ideal. Maybe we should expect the 256G UFS 2.1 of Mate 9 Porsche Design to shine in these tests.
photograph
The second generation Leica dual lens used by Mate 9, compared with P9, is mainly improved in terms of optical anti shake and pixels of black and white cameras. This configuration is considered luxurious in current dual camera phones. Also because the black and white camera has been upgraded to 20 million pixels, we can shoot high pixels when we open the "black and white mode", and even we can use 20 million pixels to take photos in the normal mode. We know that its main camera hardware is 12 million pixels, and this 20 million pixels is estimated to be a "black technology" synthesized by software algorithms. However, since we are comparing P9 here, for fairness, 12 million pixels are used for comparison.
Scenario 1
Mate 9 Standard Mode
P9 Standard mode
Scenario 1 Details Comparison
Scenario 2
Mate 9 Soft Mode
P9 Soft Mode
Scene 2 Details Comparison
Scenario 3
Mate 9 Vivid Mode
P9 Brightness mode
In terms of daylight imaging quality, Mate 9 does not have a big gap with P9. It is basically at the same level, and there will be no great difference in details when zooming in. However, in terms of color orientation, P9 will be more intense, which will be more eye-catching for some users.
Scenario 4
Mate 9 standard mode (with automatic dimming)
P9 Standard mode (with automatic dimming)
Mate 9 standard mode (with automatic dimming)
P9 Standard mode (with automatic dimming)
Scenario 4 Details Comparison
In dim light imaging, Mate 9 is better at noise control, and the overall picture brightness is also significantly higher. For night scene shooting, the premise is of course to get it first, and then talk about whether it is good or not. Therefore, we can say that Mate 9 has made great progress compared with P9 when the light is insufficient.
Scenario 5
Mate 9 large aperture mode
P9 Large aperture mode
When it comes to the big aperture mode, which is the master skill of dual cameras, both of them have very obvious background blurring effects. However, Mate 9 will obviously have better picture quality in the focus, better noise control, and more natural transition between the theme and background blurring. These are the areas where Mate 9 has improved greatly.
Charging and endurance
Mate 9 is equipped with a new SuperCharge super fast charge, which uses the low voltage and high current scheme that has been popular in recent half a year. However, since Super Charge (SCP) uses Huawei's own scheme, it has requirements for power adapter and data cable. After the mobile phone is connected to the power adapter, it will check the model and impedance of the wire together with the adapter, and determine whether the maximum charging current is 5A, 3A or 2A according to the actual situation. At the same time, Mate 9 also supports the old Huawei 9V 2A (FCP) standard, and also supports USB PD fast charging, which is relatively complete in terms of charging support.
In terms of measurement, the first is the new SCP, which basically reaches the nominal value of 5V 4.5A, and the maximum power exceeds 22W , performed very well. When using SCP charging, Mate 9 will pair with adapter and data cable first, and gradually increase the power to the highest level after successful pairing. This feature is rare in the past. SCP fast charging Filling time 130 minutes 。
FCP standard, reached 9.18V ， 1.86A , power exceeds 17W， The nominal value is basically reached. In the actual measurement, we found that the filling time in this way is basically the same as that in SCP 130 minutes about. However, FCP charging also requires Huawei's own fast charging head, but there is no high requirement for the data cable, and the threshold is relatively low.
With the PD charger, the instrument detects that the total power of the adapter is 20.5W. At this time, the power directly to the mobile phone is lost, so the power of Mate 9 is about 16W~17W 。
In the power consumption test, we conducted a three hour medium and high intensity test (half an hour of games, half an hour of WiFi Internet access, one hour of music, half an hour of 4G Internet access, and half an hour of video). The remaining power of Mate 9 is 78%, which is significantly improved compared with the previous generation Mate 8, but there is still a gap compared with the super large battery mobile phone like the Glory Note 8. According to the analysis of the whole test process, Mate 9 will consume more power when testing the game, which is consistent with the problem of frequency reduction when we run the graphics test.
summary
It is easy to see from this evaluation that Mate 9's performance in all aspects is worthy of the flagship positioning. What impresses the author is its powerful comprehensive performance in SoC. There is no doubt that the CPU performance is the best in Android. What is surprising is that the GPU performance is also very powerful. In many tests, it directly tied with the flagship Snapdragon 821 from Qualcomm. This graphics performance is really a big surprise. In terms of photographing performance, compared with Huawei's previous flagship P9, the image quality has also been significantly improved due to the changes in optical anti shake and 20 million pixels of the black and white camera. Leica certification has also introduced very pleasing photographic colors. Of course, Mate 9 is not impeccable. Due to its target audience, Mate 9 may not be so pleasing to some young users in terms of appearance. However, Huawei has already prepared a more extreme Mate 9 Pro for them.
More data and analysis on Mate 9 and Kirin 960 will be revealed in the subsequent evaluation. Please pay attention.
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