Huawei P9 Plus review: Slightly better specs come with a MUCH higher price

Performance

Sadly, the P9 Plus doesn’t improve on its little brother’s performance issues. Just like the regular P9, Huawei’s equipped with the Plus with one of its proprietary Kirin 955 chips, which has four cores running at 2.5GHz and another four running at 1.8GHz. It does have the benefit of an extra 1GB of RAM, taking the total to 4GB, but even this didn’t make a huge difference to our benchmark scores.

In Geekbench 3, for instance, its single core score reached just 1,857, which is around 300 points slower than the S7 and 500 points behind the G5 and OnePlus 3. Admittedly, it picked up the slack in the multicore test, scoring an impressive 6,656 overall. This actually surpasses the S7 by around 200 points and is one of the fastest multicore results I’ve ever recorded. Indeed, general navigation and web browsing speed felt very responsive in day to day use, and it even handled complex media pages, such as the Guardian’s interactive Olympics coverage, with ease.

It’s just a shame the Huawei P9 Plus can’t replicate that speed for equally good graphics performance, as the Kirin 955’s GPU once again produced some of the worst scores I’ve seen from a flagship smartphone. Managing an average framerate of 15fps in the offscreen Manhattan 3.0 test in GFXBench GL, the P9 Plus’s gaming capabilities pale in comparison to the competition. The S7, for instance, rattled through the same test with a smooth average of 38fps, and the LG G5 and OnePlus 3 trumped that with a result of 47fps.

In reality, though, real world games such as Threes are astonishingly smooth and slick, and even more complex titles like Hearthstone are playable bar a few jerky animations. However, when other phones give you so much more for the same price, the P9 Plus inevitably feels a little lacking by comparison.

Battery life

The P9 Plus does, at least, have a bit more stamina than some of its rivals. It lasted a respectable 12h 31m in our video playback test with the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2. This is over an hour longer than the G5 and beats the regular P9 by an impressive two hours. However, it’s still got a long way to go before it matches the S7 and OnePlus 3, which lasted 17h 48m and 16h 56m respectively.

IT’s these issues that make the P9 Plus fall short of its rivals, and I suspect that not everyone will warm to Emotion UI’s lack of an app drawer, either. It’s good to see that Huawei’s fixed the appearance of third-party apps in its latest software update – it’s now brought them more inline with their stock Android counterparts – but the update has done little to alleviate my other major bugbears with Emotion UI.

Verdict

The P9 Plus isn’t a resounding success, but there are certainly things to like. It has marginally better battery life, more storage and a slightly bigger screen than the regular P9, but at £550 it’s in a bit of a pricing No Man’s land. It’s more expensive than most budget phones, and it’s only slightly cheaper than significantly better handsets like the Samsing Galaxy S7 or LG G5. The Leica branding and monochrome camera may be a big selling point for some people, but even if that is the case, you’re still better off with the standard P9.

However, while the S7 and G5 are both excellent smartphones, it’s OnePlus that delivers the killer blow. The OnePlus 3 doesn’t just deliver infinitely superior battery life, better all-round performance and a much more reliable camera – it does all that for only £329. With that kind of rivalry on its hands, the P9 Plus simply can’t compete.