Table of Contents
Warranty Etc
I recently got a Huawei Mate 9 phone. My previous phone was a Nexus 6P that died shortly before it’s one year warranty ran out. As there have apparently been many Nexus 6P phones dying there are no stocks of replacements so Kogan (the company I bought the phone from) offered me a choice of 4 phones in the same price range as a replacement.
Previously I had chosen to avoid the extended warranty offerings based on the idea that after more than a year the phone won’t be worth much and therefore getting it replaced under warranty isn’t as much of a benefit. But now that it seems that getting a phone replaced with a newer and more powerful model is a likely outcome it seems that there are benefits in a longer warranty. I chose not to pay for an “extended warranty” on my Nexus 6P because getting a new Nexus 6P now isn’t such a desirable outcome, but when getting a new Mate 9 is a possibility it seems more of a benefit to get the “extended warranty”. OTOH Kogan wasn’t offering more than 2 years of “warranty” recently when buying a phone for a relative, so maybe they lost a lot of money on replacements for the Nexus 6P.
Comparison
I chose the Mate 9 primarily because it has a large screen. It’s 5.9″ display is only slightly larger than the 5.7″ displays in the Nexus 6P and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (my previous phone). But it is large enough to force me to change my phone use habits.
I previously wrote about matching phone size to the user’s hand size [1]. When writing that I had the theory that a Note 2 might be too large for me to use one-handed. But when I owned those phones I found that the Note 2 and Note 3 were both quite usable in one-handed mode. But the Mate 9 is just too big for that. To deal with this I now use the top corners of my phone screen for icons that I don’t tend to use one-handed, such as Facebook. I chose this phone knowing that this would be an issue because I’ve been spending more time reading web pages on my phone and I need to see more text on screen.
Adjusting my phone usage to the unusually large screen hasn’t been a problem for me. But I expect that many people will find this phone too large. I don’t think there are many people who buy jeans to fit a large phone in the pocket [2].
A widely touted feature of the Mate 9 is the Leica lens which apparently gives it really good quality photos. I haven’t noticed problems with my photos on my previous two phones and it seems likely that phone cameras have in most situations exceeded my requirements for photos (I’m not a very demanding user). One thing that I miss is the slow-motion video that the Nexus 6P supports. I guess I’ll have to make sure my wife is around when I need to make slow motion video.
My wife’s Nexus 6P is well out of warranty. Her phone was the original Nexus 6P I had. When her previous phone died I had a problem with my phone that needed a factory reset. It’s easier to duplicate the configuration to a new phone than restore it after a factory reset (as an aside I believe Apple does this better) I copied my configuration to the new phone and then wiped it for my wife to use.
One noteworthy but mostly insignificant feature of the Mate 9 is that it comes with a phone case. The case is hard plastic and cracked when I unsuccessfully tried to remove it, so it seems to effectively be a single-use item. But it is good to have that in the box so that you don’t have to use the phone without a case on the first day, this is something almost every other phone manufacturer misses. But there is the option of ordering a case at the same time as a phone and the case isn’t very good.
I regard my Mate 9 as fairly unattractive. Maybe if I had a choice of color I would have been happier, but it still wouldn’t have looked like EVE from Wall-E (unlike the Nexus 6P).
The Mate 9 has a resolution of 1920*1080, while the Nexus 6P (and many other modern phones) has a resolution of 2560*1440 I don’t think that’s a big deal, the pixels are small enough that I can’t see them. I don’t really need my phone to have the same resolution as the 27″ monitor on my desktop.
The Mate 9 has 4G of RAM and apps seem significantly less likely to be killed than on the Nexus 6P with 3G. I can now switch between memory hungry apps like Pokemon Go and Facebook without having one of them killed by the OS.
Security
The OS support from Huawei isn’t nearly as good as a Nexus device. Mine is running Android 7.0 and has a security patch level of the 5th of June 2017. My wife’s Nexus 6P today got an update from Android 8.0 to 8.1 which I believe has the fixes for KRACK and Blueborne among others.
Kogan is currently selling the Pixel XL with 128G of storage for $829, if I was buying a phone now that’s probably what I would buy. It’s a pity that none of the companies that have manufactured Nexus devices seem to have learned how to support devices sold under their own name as well.
Conclusion
Generally this is a decent phone. As a replacement for a failed Nexus 6P it’s pretty good. But at this time I tend to recommend not buying it as the first generation of Pixel phones are now cheap enough to compete. If the Pixel XL is out of your price range then instead of saving $130 for a less secure phone it would be better to save $400 and choose one of the many cheaper phones on offer.
Remember when Linux users used to mock Windows for poor security? Now it seems that most Android devices are facing the security problems that Windows used to face and the iPhone and Pixel are going to take the role of the secure phone.