photos: Alejandro Arretureta
Last week I had the pleasure to go on a little trip to beautiful Munich to join the press conference of Huawei who launched their brand new smartphone, the Mate 9. Much to my surprise the event that gathered journalists from all over Europe started with the reveal of a quite prestigious collaboration of the Chinese smartphone giant: They teamed up with none other than German car manufacturer Porsche to create a special edition of the Mate 9 that is as beautiful and fast as the famous car itself.
I was quite impressed with this because Porsche is one of the most respected and most beloved luxury cars in the world and to make a phone in collaboration with them is pretty awesome. Most new phones that come out don’t have anything special to offer other than that they are superior to previous phones which is pretty much a given I think. Even the new iPhone didn’t have anything revolutionary going for it except that it is better than its predecessor. So are collaborations with other iconic brands the way to go from now on? It does make sense and in the case of Huawei and Porsche it certainly looks like a clever move.
We had the chance to play around with the new Mate 9 a bit and we thought what could be a better test object than an actual Porsche. So we took the phone to one of our favorite places for amazing cars in Berlin: The Classic Remise in Moabit. This depot for luxury classic cars is a mecca for car lovers and of course it’s full of Porsches (amongst other prestigious brands of course).
Of all the bigger, faster, stronger features of the brand new smart phone there are actually two particular ones that stand out: First of all is the double camera made in collaboration with Leica. This is already the second Huawei model that has this camera (the P9 being the first one earlier this year, and yes: way before the iPhone 7) that brings mobile photography a big step further in terms of picture quality. It does so by separating color and contrast into two individual camera lenses and sensors, the monochrome one with a much higher resolution that almost has the standard of a DSLR camera, and combining the two photos into one in the process creating superior results to tradition cameras. This offers a lot of possibilities in terms of zoom, aperture and sharpness.
The second feature that stood out to me concerns something that normally annoys the heck out of me with any smartphone I ever had before: They get slower over time. This has multiple technical reasons, but the main issue is that no manufacturer has ever tried to prevent this. They mostly prefer to let the user get so annoyed with the slowness of the phone that they will get a new one after one or two years. But the Mate 9 apparently has a different way of handling the issue: It monitors app usage and constantly optimizes storage and RAM use so the phone actually gets quicker and stays fast even after 18 months of using it.
It wouldn’t have occurred to me that a smartphone could have anything in common with an exquisite car such as Porsche. But a phone that is so powerful and fast and even stays fast over time definitely fits the bill.
Thanks for the support by Huawei
