Huawei Mate 9 review: Even with unfinished software, Huawei's best ever phone

Huawei's gigantic new flagship is off to a promising start, even on pre-release software. And it's an update away from being a really great handset.

With the spectacular failure of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 comes an opportunity for everyone else with a big-screened Android phone to sell. A major competitor in the world of "phablets" has been taken out of the game, and China's Huawei stands to benefit handsomely from Samsung's misfortune.

The company's long-running Mate series — itself a reaction to the success of the Note line, back in the day — has carved itself out a niche among consumers who appreciate its metal construction, enormous displays and epic battery life.

The new Mate 9 continues the family line — a slightly slimmer, smarter version of last year's Mate 8, with upgraded internals and a new dual camera setup courtesy of imaging partner Leica. Just as important as any hardware upgrade is the new EMUI 5 software, which is the biggest overhaul to Huawei's UI in years, bringing with it Android 7.0 Nougat.

But there's more than one Mate 9 model this time around. Alongside the vanilla 5.9-inch Mate 9 (with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage), Huawei will release a limited edition Porsche Design Mate 9, with a 5.5-inch curved AMOLED display, and a capacious 6GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

We've had a little over a week to get to know both the sensible and ludicrous Mate 9 models in the form of pre-release devices given to us by Huawei. They're running non-final software with a few bugs, and will be getting a software update before launch. Nevertheless, we've seen enough to come to some early conclusions. So here's what we think so far...

About this initial review

We're writing this initial review after a week with the regular Huawei Mate 9 (dual-SIM, MHA-L29), and four days with the Porsche Design Huawei Mate 9 (dual-SIM, LON-L29). We used both devices on the EE and Vodafone UK networks while in the UK, and on Telekom.de and Vodafone Germany networks while roaming in Germany.

Both phones were running pre-production software (build B109SP02). We're expecting an over-the-air update to both devices in the next couple of weeks to bring them up to retail-quality firmware. We'll finalize this review in the coming weeks once we have final firmware on both Mate 9 devices. For now, we present our first impressions.