It’s now not only LG having a dual lens camera in the local market, with Huawei launching its latest flagship, the P9 (and two others) at an event held at the Sandton Convention Centre last night. There was a lot of attention paid to the P9’s camera capabilities, a feature of the P-series that we’ve been pretty impressed with since the P7 (review).

For those not in the know yet, for the P9 (and future devices) Huawei has teamed up with Leica, to help with the camera setup. Unlike with the LG G5 (review) which has one wide angle and one regular lens, on the P9 the dual setup includes a lens that takes regular 12 MP RGB (basically colour photos) pics, and the other 12 MP monochrome ones. With both images pulled into one photo, the system provides the camera with more information to work with. Hence Huawei’s belief that the P9 can provide “professional quality to your photos in all conditions”.

The P9 includes a HiSilicon Kirin 955 chipset with a quad-core 2.5 GHz Cortex-A72 and another quad-core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A53 processor. A selection of 32 GB or 64 GB of storage space, 3 GB of RAM, an added microSD card slot for up to 128 GB, and a 3000 mAh battery makes this a competitive choice. You also have the new USB Type-C input, a fingerprint scanner, LTE connectivity and NFC. 

The P9 Lite has the same sized screen (5.2”, 1080x1920), but is decidedly more mid-range on the specs side, coming with 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage and the Kirin 650 octa-core (4x 2.0 GHz + 4x 1.7 GHz). Gone is also the dual camera setup, instead offering a 16 MP back and 13 MP front one.

If the Huawei Mate 8’s 6” screen was a tad too much, you can tone it back a notch with the 5.5” on offer with the P9 Plus. It’s basically the same setup as the P9, but with 64 GB of storage, 4 GB RAM and a large 3400 mAh battery. All three these devices run on Android 6.0 and Huawei’s EMUI 4.1 interface.

At the function, TechSmart had the opportunity to play with the new phones, and in our books, amongst the three, the P9 is the one to get. Less unwieldy than P9 Plus and actually smaller and lighter than the P9 Lite, the P9 is walking down the same design path that the P8 started on with its more rounded edges. Focussing seems quick and from the poster-sized prints taken by professional photographers, Ayaad Damouni and Tim Moolman, it would appear that the camera is up to scratch.

The Huawei P9 will come in three colours: Haze Gold, Ceramic White and Titanium Grey. The 32 GB version is set to retail for R12 000, quite a bit up from the P8’s R8 000 debut a year ago. The sans dual-camera-less P9 Lite (16 GB) retails for R6 500 R5 500 and the big one, the P9 Plus (64 GB) is being sold for R13 500.