Huawei P9 Lite
The Huawei P9 Lite gets so much right, but battery and camera problems hold it back from greatness
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE mobicity.co.uk
£165 (£198 inc VAT)
Wfrom
ith Huawei’s current P9 range costing between £449 and £549, the P9 Lite is an oddity at £198. It’s almost as if the Chinese company took a look at the low-budget king Moto G4 and decided to dethrone it. And, but for a couple of missteps, it comes tantalisingly close.
At first glance, it’s hard to tell the P9 Lite apart from the P9. Both have 5.2in screens, chamfered edges and clean lines; both feel slim and sleek. The telltale giveaway only becomes obvious if you hold them in your hand: the P9 Lite sacrifices the aluminium back of its sibling for a smooth plastic finish.
The other changes are more subtle. The Leica branding is dropped from the camera as it’s no longer in charge of photography duties. You’ll also find a micro-USB charging port rather than USB Type-C. Otherwise, it’s business as usual, right down to the square fingerprint reader on the back of the handset.
Things improve further with the screen. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover the Huawei P9 Lite uses the same panel as the P9, because the 1,920 x 1,080 screen is excellent. First off, a 1,532:1 contrast is impressive, allowing for sharp, impactful images. The brightness is good, too, at 482cd/m2, and in terms of sRGB coverage it’s up there with far more expensive phones: 98% of the colour space is covered. That’s substantially better than the 90% of the Moto G4.
Nor can you argue with the specifications for the price. A 2GHz octa-core Kirin 650 chip runs the show, backed by 3GB of RAM, and while there’s only 16GB of internal storage it does have a microSD slot. The specs translate into smoothrunning apps, and it proved around 20% faster in benchmarks than the Moto G4: 770 versus 632 in Geekbench 4 single-core, 8.3fps versus 7fps in GFXBench Manhattan 3 onscreen. The best phones are twice as fast, but for less than half the price you shouldn’t expect miracles.
Unfortunately, it’s downhill from here. Huawei makes two mistakes with the P9 Lite and how you use your phone will decide how big a deal this is for you. First, battery life is bad. Really bad. We test every phone using a looped 720p video in airplane mode, with the brightness set to 170cd/m2 , and then measure how many hours the handset lasts. The vast majority of phones comfortably break into double figures, but the P9 Lite died shortly after crossing the nine-hour mark. The Moto G4 lasted 13hrs 39mins in the same test, while the Samsung Galaxy J5 pushed on for 17hrs 50mins before giving up the ghost.
The second problem with the P9 Lite is the camera. Something clearly
“Huawei makes two mistakes with the P9 Lite, and how you use your phone will decide how big a deal this is for you”
has to suffer with the drop in price from the P9 to the P9 Lite, and Huawei’s 13-megapixel choice produced pictures with blurred detail and a lack of vibrancy, with everything taking on a gloomy, underexposed tone. This was with or without the camera’s HDR mode. In lower light indoors, things got even worse. Images proved grainy and lacked detail, and while the flash helped a little, the camera clearly isn’t a selling point for this phone.
If I was to be unkind, I might compare the P9 Lite to someone you meet with amazing, superficial charm, but who has the potential to irritate once you get to know them better. On this occasion, though, the irritation will depend on how you use your phone.
If you don’t take many photographs, then an iffy camera won’t really be a problem. Likewise, if you’re so serious a photographer that you have your own DSLR on you at all times, then this shouldn’t stop you considering the Huawei P9 Lite. The battery is a concern, but as Huawei has stuck with the venerable micro-USB port, you’re not likely to ever be too far away from somewhere where you can top up your phone. And, if you’re happy with those sacrifices, then the Huawei P9 Lite is a good choice. It doesn’t feel like a £198 phone. Performance-wise, it elbows in front of both the Moto G4 and Samsung Galaxy J5 with impressive ease. Where it faces stiffer competition – and one reason the P9 Lite doesn’t win a Recommended award – is in the Honor 6X ( see p58), which is a little ironic as Honor is a Huawei-owned brand. The P9 Lite is marginally cheaper, but it would need to be closer to £150 for us to recommend it. SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2GHz/1.7GHz Kirin 650 processor
3GB RAM Mali-T830 MP2 graphics 5.2in IPS screen 1,920 x 1,080 resolution 16GB storage microSD slot 13MP/8MP rear/ front cameras 802.11n Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.1
NFC micro-USB connector 3,000mAh battery Android 6 72.6 x 7.5 x 147mm (WDH) 147g 1yr warranty