For years, Korean company Samsung has been the undisputed king of the Android land. But over the last few years, an all-this-while sleeping Chinese giant has woken up. With the Nexus 6P last year, Huawei showed that it can make quality phones. This year, after spending billions of dollars in R&D, the company not only wants to take the throne from Samsung, but also eyes the cutting edge of innovation. Its newest flagship, the P9, is a testament to that new fact. At an event last week, the Chinese company showed off two new phones and a fitness tracker that could well make the year for them!
P9
The iPhone 7, expected to debut in September, is likely to come with a dual camera setup, but Huawei beat it to the game by forging a partnership with the popular camera maker Leica. However, the most striking thing about the P9 is the Applesque fit and finish, which gives the phone a premium, jewel-like feel. Made from an aluminium unibody, it borrows some design aspects from the iPhone, but overall, it exudes a confident design aesthetic at a thickness of just 6.95mm. The screen is a 5.2-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1080p. Inside, there’s Huawei’s own octa-core Kirin 955 processor, powered by 3GB of RAM, which makes it power-packed.
There is a massive 3,000mAh battery, and the bottom of the phone is taken up by a USB-C port. On the back, there’s a fast fingerprint sensor. But the big news here is the dual-lens camera above the fingerprint sensor. The dual lens set up puts two 12-megapixel lenses together, one being a normal camera, while the second is a monochrome module. According to Huawei and its camera partner Lecia, both the cameras work together to improve the contrast in photos by 50 per cent and tripling the light information captured, so the user gets crystal clear photos.
In the front, there is an 8-megapixel shooter, which helps one get super sharp selfies, even in low light conditions. Available in a number of colours like mystic silver, titanium grey, ceramic white and three types of gold (haze gold, rose gold and prestige gold), the phone will come in 32 and 64GB configurations.
P9 Plus
As the name suggests, the P9 Plus is almost similar to P9. It’s just that, it is bigger in size. While it retains the same brushed aluminium body and the 2.5D glass, the biggest difference here is the screen, which is a massive 5.5-inch display, replacing the P9’s IPS technology with Super AMOLED technology. While the dual-camera on the back, the fingerprint sensor beneath it and the USB-C port are all the same, inside the phone is 4GB of RAM and the minimum storage capacity is 64GB, which can go up to 128GB, all powered by a massive 3400mAh battery.
There are three major additions to the P9 Plus that one won’t find in its predecessor.
There is an IR blaster, so one can use the phone as a universal remote control. There is the ‘Press Touch’ technology, which makes the screen sensitive to the pressure being applied on it very much like the ‘3D Touch’ on the iPhone 6S. And there is the stereo speaker technology that makes the earpiece on the top of the phone act as a ‘tweeter’ when the phone is in the vertical mode, and produces stereo sound when in landscape mode. Available in haze gold, quartz grey and ceramic white, the phone is expected to come to India in the next few months.
Talkband b3
On the face of it, B3 looks like a wristband, which shows you time and acts as a fitness tracker. Made from a solid stainless steel frame, it comes in black, white, brown, beige and titanium colours. But the trick is that the screen portion pops out of the band to function as a Bluetooth headset. The lightweight, water-resistant body of the headset, made from high-grade silicone, supposedly offers such a comfortable fit that you can wear it in your ear for hours. Using dual-microphones and some clever noise-reduction algorithms, Huawei claims that the headset will make hands-free calls effortlessly, even in the noisy environments. It has a sensor called the Capsensor, which makes the band intelligent enough to know if it is on your wrist or not. The band can automatically go into any one of the various modes. It will sync with any Android and iOS phones.