Huawei P9 Plus review: Size up

The gallery has Press Touch support

The Huawei P9 Plus gallery app offers a Timeline view, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. Alternatively, you can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums.

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you some basic sharing options (including streaming it over DLNA). While you are at it, you can force press anywhere on the picture and a magnifying glass will show you a piece of it zoomed in or out depending on the level of pressure you are applying.

Press Touch zooming with light pressure • more pressure • maximum pressure zooms at 200%

The info icon up top gives some pretty detailed information about the image, including a histogram. Pulling down from anywhere on the screen lets you take a quick photo without leaving the gallery.

Album view • chronological view • viewing an image • detailed info • camera quick access

You can also go into a more capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), filters and beauty enhancements. You can adjust levels and add individual watermarks for time, location, weather, food and mood.

The image editor is quite capable

Video player

When it comes to playing videos, the Huawei P9 Plus default player is pretty basic. The only available user-configurable option is playback speed. There is DTS enhancement if you are a fan, too.

Simplistic video player with few options

Music player

The Huawei P9 Plus comes with Huawei's custom music player app. 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 Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. There are no equalizers to speak off, but the app does have a few extra features. It would try to pull album art, song info and lyrics automatically for you.

The music player

The P9 Plus has the advantage of stereo speakers on the front over its smaller counterpart. When you hold the phone horizontally, the speakers work as expected - producing a stereo effect (even if it's a bit over the top thanks to some silly stereo enhancement they must have in place).

In portrait mode, the top speaker switches to treble while the bottom one plays bass (essentially a two-way speaker). You can check the loudspeaker results for more details.

The Huawei P9 lacks FM radio.

Audio output is very clean, but not loud enough

The Huawei P9 Plus delivered excellently clean output when used with an active external amplifier, getting top marks across the board. Unfortunately, its output loudness was below average so it didn’t get full marks here.

Degradation caused by headphones is minimal with a contained hike in stereo crosstalk and intermodulation distortion plus a slight slip in volume levels. It’s hardly the loudest handset out there, much less in the flagship league, but the P9 Plus fares pretty well in terms of clarity.

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

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Huawei P9 Plus	+0.04, -0.01	-97.4	98.9	0.0040	0.010	-96.9
Huawei P9 Plus (headphones)	+0.03, -0.38	-95.8	95.9	0.0055	0.190	-63.7
Sony Xperia X Performance	+0.01, -0.04	-95.2	90.0	0.0038	0.011	-95.1
Sony Xperia X Performance (headphones)	+0.23, -0.17	-93.2	89.3	0.0078	0.174	-64.9
LG G5	+0.01, -0.04	-92.6	92.6	0.0051	0.0096	-93.3
LG G5 (headphones)	+0.05, -0.01	-92.2	92.3	0.0029	0.037	-50.7
Xiaomi Mi 5	+0.01, -0.03	-95.3	95.1	0.0034	0.0065	-95.1
Xiaomi Mi 5 (headphones)	+0.01, -0.03	-95.2	95.1	0.0027	0.013	-71.5
Samsung Galaxy S7	+0.01, -0.04	-92.5	92.6	0.0027	0.0078	-92.7
Samsung Galaxy S7 (headphones)	+0.05, -0.05	-91.9	92.1	0.0044	0.063	-73.4
Apple iPhone 6s	+0.03, -0.04	-93.5	93.5	0.0016	0.0075	-73.2
Apple iPhone 6s (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.06	-93.8	93.9	0.0030	0.101	-68.2

Huawei P9 Plus frequency response

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