Huawei Mate 9 Pro review: The Magician

Gallery

The Mate 9 Pro comes with a no-frills gallery app. It defaults to a timeline, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. The pinch gesture is available for setting thumbnail size. You can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums, and you can also have hidden albums, though that's more of an organizational tool than a privacy one - they are there when you hit hidden albums.

Gallery views

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you a host of sharing options. The info icon up top gives some pretty detailed information about the image, including a histogram.

Viewing a single image

You can also go into a very capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), levels, filters (more than Instagram and Prisma combined) and beauty enhancements.

The image editor is quite capable

Video player

The Mate 9 Pro's video player is pretty basic, much like the one on the Mate 8 - its sole option is playback speed. What Huawei has added on this model is floating window video playback.

Simplistic video player with few options

Music player

The Mate 9 Pro has quite stylish Music app pre-installed. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your playlists, too. The background of the app changes dynamically to match the album art, which is a nice little touch.

The music player

The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. If you're especially into lyrics, you can have them overlayed on top the homescreen.

Audio output is solid

Despite sharing most of its other internals with the regular Huawei Mate 9, the Pro seems to have a different DAC as shown by its results in our test. When plugged into an active external amplifier, the Huawei Mate 9 Pro had perfectly accurate audio reproduction just like its sibling, but its loudness was even higher.

Volume remained great even when we plugged in our standard headphones set, but quality degradation was far more pronounced this time. Moderate amounts of both types of distortions crept in, while stereo crosstalk also suffered a bit. It’s still a decent showing, but not as clear as the vanilla Mate 9.

And now here go the results so you can make your comparison.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Huawei Mate 9 Pro	+0.03, -0.03	-94.1	95.4	0.0021	0.0070	-94.0
Huawei Mate 9 Pro (headphones attached)	+0.19, -0.06	-93.1	94.2	0.382	0.445	-62.8
Huawei Mate 9	+0.03, -0.01	-92.2	93.0	0.0026	0.0093	-93.3
Huawei Mate 9 (headphones attached)	+0.06, -0.05	-91.1	91.8	0.016	0.056	-63.5
Huawei Mate 8	+0.01, -0.03	-97.8	99.1	0.0054	0.0087	-97.3
Huawei Mate 8 (headphones attached)	+0.02, -0.09	-97.3	97.9	0.015	0.078	-81.3
Google Pixel XL	+0.01, -0.03	-94.0	94.0	0.0033	0.0066	-92.9
Google Pixel XL (headphones attached)	+0.17, -0.04	-92.0	92.7	0.0067	0.125	-62.0
Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus	+0.06, -0.02	-83.9	83.0	0.0033	0.047	-84.9
Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus (headphones attached)	+0.95, -0.10	-82.0	83.3	0.245	0.564	-48.0
Apple iPhone 7 Plus	+0.10, -0.04	-93.1	93.1	0.0015	0.0098	-80.5
Apple iPhone 7 Plus (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.03	-93.1	93.0	0.0013	0.015	-76.8
LG V20	+0.01, -0.03	-93.0	93.1	0.0036	0.0075	-93.7
LG V20 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.09	-92.4	92.4	0.051	0.105	-57.5

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.