The Android world is so vast that sometimes choosing the best smartphone is the hardest thing ever.
Today we have a new champion in town and this is the Huawei Mate 9. Prior to this, Samsung Galaxy S7 has been on the receiving end of rave reviews, but this is about to be ended by its Asian counterpart and closest Android competitor – Huawei.
Huawei has made its success courtesy of selling high-end smartphones at very affordable prices. However, this started changing this year with the release of the Huawei P9 and P9 Plus – two phones that carry flagship specs and compete in the same category as Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge in terms of price. Things have taken another angle with the recent release of Huawei Mate 9 Pro – a flagship smartphone that has everything you can dream of in a mobile handset.
Without going in circles, here are the five ways the new Huawei Mate 9 Pro is way ahead of Samsung Galaxy S7, which has so far been the stand out phone in 2016.
Bigger display
The new Huawei Mate 9 Pro comes with a huge 5.5-inch display screen that beats the 5.1-inch used on the Galaxy S7. Both phones get an AMOLED screen with the same QHD resolution, but Huawei Mate 9 has another model that carries an LCD screen with 1080p resolution. Unlike the Mate 9 Pro, this other model has an even bigger display of 5.9 inches.
A better camera
Like with Huawei P9, the new Huawei Mate 9 Pro comes with a dual-lens camera setup on the rear, something that remains a dream for Samsung users. The Mate 9 Pro has a 20MP + 12MP snapper on the back. One lens is meant for color detection while the other takes care of black and white captures. In this way, the phone ends up with images that are super-detailed. On the front you get an 8MP snapper that promises great selfies.
Having been around for more than six months, the Galaxy S7 has had time to prove its capabilities in terms of camera. Even though a single-lens 12MP snapper, it delivers great photography. The single-lens setup is way less powerful than what the dual-lens setup of the Mate 9 Pro promises. As for the front, the Galaxy S7 has a 5MP sensor.
Larger battery unit
The Huawei Mate has always impressed when it comes to battery power. The late Mate 9 Pro doesn’t disappoint either, sporting a decent 4000mAh unit that promises up to two days with normal usage. You get a USB-C port to charge the phone and it supports the company’s SuperCharge technology, which is just another version of fast charging.
On the opposite side of the equation is Samsung Galaxy S7, which has a 3000mAh unit that is supported by Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 technology, but it uses a microUSB port.
Latest software
Huawei Mate 9 Pro came with the latest Android 7.0 Nougat installed out of the box. Like other non-Google devices, the company’s EMUI 5.0 skin runs on top of this Google OS. This is huge for Huawei – something Samsung Galaxy S7 users will have to wait until next month. At this moment, users of the S7 alongside the S7 Edge can access a beta program for testing the new Nougat OS on their phones – but keep in mind that this is not a stable version. The stable version of Android running on Samsung Galaxy S7 is Marshmallow.
Huawei Mate 9 Pro is smarter than Galaxy S7
Huawei believes in using its own hardware and under the hood of the Mate 9 Pro, there is a Kirin 960 SoC. Along with the EMUI 5.0 software, the company has managed to equip the Huawei Mate 9 Pro with a very interesting feature.
Using the power of machine learning, Huawei Mate 9 Pro will be able to learn how you interact with it and in so doing, the phone will be able to effectively allocate resources according to your usage so as to improve performance. In short, the phone will study how you use certain apps on your phone and determine the ones you use most. When you use these favorite apps, the phone will tend to allocate more resources to these apps so that they deliver the best performance. According to Huawei, the more the phone knows you, the more its performance improves.
This is something that Qualcomm and Samsung are yet to achieve with their Snapdragon and Exynos processors for the Galaxy S7, respectively.