Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has announced that it will be launching its upcoming flagship – the Mate 9 – with its most powerful chipset onboard – the HiSilicon Kirin 960. The device is expected to be launched in Germany on 3 November.
The flagship phone is expected to come in two variants – the regular Huawei Mate 9 which will have a flat display, and the Huawei Mate 9 Pro which will come with a curved display. While the Mate 9 will come with 5.88-inch display with FullHD resolution, the Mate 9 Pro will sport a 5.5-inch AMOLED curved display. Both devices are expected to be running Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box along with Huawei’s EMUI skin atop it.
The HiSilicon Kirin 960 chipset was announced quite recently and it is built on the 16nm FinFET process. It has an octa-core processor comprising four Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. In terms of graphics, you get ARM’s Mali G71 MP8 GPU – making it the first chipset to be using this GPU.
According to Huawei, Kirin 960 offers 15 percent performance boost over the Kirin 950. It also supports double data speeds as compared to the Kirin 950. The Kirin 960’s Mali G71 MP8 GPU is expected to offer around 180 percent faster performance in gaming says Huawei. It provides Vulkan support. The Kirin 960 offers Cat 12 LTE donwload speeds and Cat 13 LTE upload speeds.
The Huawei Mate 9 and Mate 9 Pro are expected to come with dual rear cameras having 12MP and 20MP sensors. They will be paired with dual tone LED flash unit. You will get 4GB RAM + 64GB ROM storage variants, but some advertising material also hints at a 6GB RAM + 256GB ROM variant as well.
In terms of design, the Mate 9 is expected to be similar to Mate 8. There will be a finger-print scanner at the back.
Evan Blass has tipped the price of the high end Mate 9 Pro to be around $1,300 (approx Rs 87,000). Blass claims that the camera of the Mate 9 Pro will feature 4x optical zoom as well.
We shall find out the truth on 3 November.