Huawei P9 review: Ascension

Telephony

The Huawei P9 handles voice calls with ease and sound quality doesn't disappoint.

Smart dialing • recent calls • in-call interface

The P9's stock dialer app is a trinity of tabs bundled together - these include the Dialer, Contacts, and Favorites. The phonebook offers all the usual sorting and display options, it supports multiple accounts, and there are lots of fields available for each contact.

The Huawei P9 scored a Good mark in our standardized loudspeaker test. Our impressions from the speaker's sound quality are mostly positive - it produces deep and rich sound, but the default ringtones are rather quiet and you may miss some calls. Perhaps you can load a ringtone of your choosing.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overall score
Apple iPhone 6s	66.5	64.6	65.8	Below Average
Huawei Mate 8	67.8	65.8	66.6	Below Average
Huawei Ascend P7	63.9	66.1	70.9	Below Average
Huawei P8	66.7	66.0	68.5	Average
Apple iPhone SE	66.6	65.5	69.8	Average
OnePlus X	65.9	66.3	70.7	Average
Huawei Ascend P6	64.3	66.3	75.7	Average
Xiaomi Mi 5	66.9	67.2	74.0	Good
Huawei P9	72.1	66.6	75.6	Good
Xiaomi Mi 4s	73.7	68.6	82.9	Very Good
OnePlus 2	75.7	73.5	80.7	Excellent

App package

The P9 ships with WPS office, which can be used for some basic document editing on the go. It can handle text documents, spreadsheets and presentations as well as PDF files. It can also export to PDF.

WPS office

Phone Manager is Huawei's do-it-all app for keeping control over your phone. It lets you control all sorts of features from call/message privacy and Do Not Disturb settings, to phone optimization and app permissions, to network and battery usage.

The app features a one-touch optimization feature that frees up memory space and gives you settings recommendations for maximum battery performance. It's a hell of a slick feature that few manufacturers offer.

Phone manager

Battery Manager is part of Phone Manager and includes a selection of three power plans with varying degrees of feature limitations. From here you can also control which apps can remain active after you send the phone to sleep.

Battery manager

Huawei has bundled the P9 with its Health app, which tracks steps and calculates calories burnt, but can also supposedly count the number of floors you've climbed. A file manager is also present, and it supports batch actions.

Health app homescreen • week view • file manager • file manager • more tools