Huawei unveils Mate 9 and Mate 9 Porsche Design smartphones

Huawei has launched its new flagship Android smartphone, the Mate 9, promising better battery life and faster charging than the iPhone 7.

The phone sports a decluttered version of Huawei's Emotion UI (EMUI), now on version 5.0, running atop Android Nougat. It also has a 5.9-inch 1920x1080 display.

Its new octo-core Kirin 960 chipset boasts four 2.4GHz ARM Cortex-A73 CPUs and four low-power 1.8GHz Cortex A53 cores, while graphics are powered by a Mali-G71 MP8 GPU.

In terms of memory and storage, the Mate 9 has 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage and touts UFS 2.1 storage technology, which optimises storage to increase performance. There is also a microSD to expand storage by a further 256GB.

Huawei upped the ante with a premium Porsche-branded curved-screen variant that will instead have a massive 6GB RAM and 256GB storage. This boasts a smaller 5.5-inch Quad HD 2560x1440 AMOLED display and a hardware button. This phone moves the fingerprint scanner from the back to front on the button.

As with Huawei's flagship phone launch last year, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has once again teamed up with Leica to bring the latter's lens tech to the phone; it sports a dual camera system to capture 20-megapixel and 12-megapixel images. The former can capture black and white with the latter capturing colour. At the front, there is an 8-megapixel camera for those all-important selfies.

The camera is also capable of shooting in 4K and alongside this are four microphones that enable noise cancellation and directional audio recording.

As with modern smartphones, the Mate 9 boasts a fingerprint scanner located beneath the camera, allowing easy access with your index or middle finger.

The phone sports a 4,000mAh battery, which is bigger than most of the competition. It also features fast charging, promising charging up to four times faster than the iPhone 7, via the phone's USB-C port located on its bottom. Huawei claimed that its Supercharge feature would get 3.5 hours extra use from just 10 minutes of charging and a full day from just under 30 minutes plugged in.

Huawei said the Mate 9 should retail at 699 and would be available to pre-order from 4 November. The Mate 9 Porsche Design will be available from Porsche Design stores in Europe from December for 1,395.