Huawei P9 Lite Review: A Phablet For its Comfy

After thorough testing, here’s our review on the Huawei P9 Lite.

Hardware
The Huawei P9 was the first time the P-series went with a full metal body, the P series before the P8 had a metal frame and a polycarbonate back, just like the P9 Lite does.

PC Tech managed to land on a Gold P9 Lite, but the phone also comes in Black and White colors. On the P9, the White color option was a special Ceramic edition, but this didn’t apply to the P9 Lite, all three color options use the same materials.

The rounded sides don’t quite hide the extra thickness of the P9 Lite, but they do help the bezels appear thinner. The P9 Lite isn’t the narrowest phone with a 5.2″ screen, it’d say it’s about average.

The only buttons on the P9 Lite are the Power button and the Volume rocker which appear at the right side of the phone. They are comfortable enough to use and the Power button has a texture, which makes it easier to locate by touch.

The card tray which appears on the left, has a single tray for two cards, nano SIM, MicroSIM and one microSD (it takes the place of SIM2).

The back of the P9 appeared with a dual camera, unlike the P9 Lite that has one camera and one flash.

Display
The P9 lite has a 5.2 LCD screen of 1080 x 1920 px resolution just like the P9. The screen is just as bright and contrast is just as high as on the flagship P9.

The Auto brightness setting actually moves the brightness slider so you can see it in action. Unfortunately, this also means you can’t use the slider to override the auto mode.

Camera
The Huawei P9 lite has a 13MP rear camera with a fairly bright focus 2.0 lens. The P9 lite has an 8MP selfie camera with a focus of 2.0 which detects your face and puts it in a small square near the camera, meaning that; you’re looking the right way and you can still make sure you have the perfect expression.

On the other side, the Video camera can record 1080p videos at 30 frame per second. There’s no option of the 1080p at 60 frame per second like the flagship P9 has.

A Pro mode for the video camera is available, which allows you to adjust focus, exposure compensation, white balance and metering while recording.

Connectivity
The Huawei P9 lite offers speedy LTE Cat. 6 for up to 300Mbps down and up to 50Mbps up. Locally, it has 2.4GHz Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.1 and the NFC is available on some models, but not all while the wired connectivity is handled by a microUSB of 2.0.

Battery life
The P9 Lite has a 3,000mAh non-removable battery, same as the flagship variant. The Kirin 650 chipset used in the phone is built on a 16nm FinFET process. The Endurance rating is 79 hours with one SIM, 71 hours with two.

Web browsing and video playback times are excellent, 11 hours and more. The talk time is short in comparison, but still quite good.[related-posts]

Performance
The Huawei P9 lite is powered by a HiSilicon chipset, a Kirin 650 and 3GB of RAM. It’s similar to the Kirin 955 in the flagship P9, though with more modest resources.

While the P9 lite can’t match the P9 in performance, it’s very competitive in its price range. It mostly beats the Snapdragon 615 phones and shows an overall performance similar to the Snapdragon 808 ones.

Also the Huawei P9 and P9 lite both use 1080p screens, but the P9 Lite model has only half of the GPU cores. Looking at the results, the difference in clock speed doesn’t have that much of an impact.

Huawei P9 Lite Full Specs

What we liked

1. You can use the fingerprint reader to take a selfie.
2. Battery can go for 79 hours.
3. Its slimmest measuring just 7mm in thickness.
4. The phone has an Ultra Power Saving mode for conserving what is left of the battery when you are running out of power.

What we didn’t like at all

1. The non-removable battery.
2. Only 16GB storage.
3. Does not support quick charging.

The Key features of the phone:

• Aluminum frame.
• 5.2″ 1080p IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 423ppi.
• HiSilicon Kirin 650 chipset: octa-core CPU (4xCortex-A53 @ 2.0GHz + 4xCortex-A53 @ 1.7Hz), Mali-T830 MP2 GPU.
• 2GB or 3GB of RAM; 16GB of built-in storage.
• Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Huawei EMUI v4.1 overlay.
• 13MP camera, f/2.0 aperture, 1/3″ sensor (Sony IMX 214, 1.12µm pixels), manual controls; 1080@30fps video recording.
• 8MP front camera, f/2.0 aperture; 1080p video recording.
• Hybrid DualSIM/microSD card slot (up to 256GB).
• Cat. 6 LTE (300/50Mbps); dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot, Wi-Fi Direct; Bluetooth 4.1 LE; NFC; GPS/GLONASS/Beidou; microUSB 2.0.
• Fingerprint reader.
• Loudspeaker with dedicated amp.
• 3,000mAh Li-Ion battery.