Huawei Y9 prime review
Huawei Y9 prime review
You can get a really decent phone for a couple hundred dollars these days. The Huawei Y9 Prime has a motorized front facing camera, notch-free screen, 4000mAh battery, triple-cameras including an ultrawide lens, a headphone jack and an octa-core processor inside – you could be led to believe you’re getting a zero-compromise phone for a fraction of the price of a flagship. While the Y9 Prime is a perfectly fine device on its own merits, its feature list belies a collection of weird choices and compromises that were made to hit this mid-tier price.
The first thing you’ll notice about the Y9 Prime is the size of the lad, it’s an absolute unit. Coming from an iPhone X, the Y9 felt positively gargantuan in comparison. This is to house it’s huge screen – a 6.59-inch IPS LCD display that curves around the corners and covers almost the entire front of the phone. There’s minimal bezel around the edges, a fairly small chin, and no notch to house a front-facing camera (we’ll touch on that later).
The screen is nice enough. It’s no OLED so you won’t be getting perfectly inky blacks, but after adjusting to the ‘Normal’ colour profile in settings it’s nice enough to look at. The resolution is totally fine at 1080p, plenty sharp enough for images and text at any reasonable distance, but the biggest issue I had with the screen was that it just doesn’t get very bright. For indoor use it’s perfectly adequate, but I struggled to see the screen while outside taking photos on a sunny day. It is nice to have a screen entirely uninterrupted by notches or hole punches, but the front facing camera has to fit somewhere, which leads to one of the weirdest compromises in the Y9.
It’s all about the camera(s)
The Y9 has a motorized front-facing camera. While you’re normally using the phone it sits hidden inside the top edge of the phone, ready to pop out when you open a camera app. It comes out pretty quickly, and is supposed to pretty strong according to Huawei’s marketing materials (the company says you can hang 15kg off of it, if that’s something you ever feel like doing) but I’m not sure I’d encourage testing that.
It’s supposed to be reliable for 100,000 cycles in and out, but introducing a moving part to a phone will inevitably make it less reliable. As nice as an uninterrupted screen might be, I don’t think it’s worth the compromise of a motorized camera that introduces an extra potential point of failure.