The long-awaited Huawei Nova 9 series, the sequel to this year’s Nova 8, made its debut in China yesterday. Featuring the Nova 9 and Nova 9 Pro, the series rounds off the bi-annual release cycle the Chinese phone maker follows. We’ll take a look at both.
Huawei Nova 9
Huawei is switching from Kirin silicon to a Qualcomm chip for the Nova 9 series. And since they’re not allowed to acquire 5G hardware, the new Nova lineup is limited to 4G. The 6nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G LTE is at the heart of Nova 9, powered by a 4300 mAh battery.
It’s charged at 66W over the wire. You get 8GB of RAM and 128GB/256GB of internal storage. HarmonyOS, without Google services, runs on this hardware.
The design only gets a mild refresh. Huawei shakes up the camera layout and offers the Nova 9 in black, blue, green, and violet finishes. The camera array is made of 50MP wide, 8MP ultra-wide, and two low-res cameras.
The screen curves along the edges with slim bezels all around and a hole punched right through its center. The O-hole contains a 32 MP front camera. We’re looking at a 6.57 OLED panel with a 1080P resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a hidden fingerprint scanner. At 175g of weight and 7.8mm of depth, the phone has lightweight dimensions. Its baseline version is priced at CNY 2,699 (~ Rs. 70,400.)
Huawei Nova 9 Pro
The Pro model follows the same design language. Except for the front camera system that lives inside a wide pill-shaped cutout. It features two 32MP lenses — one for portraits and the other for ultra-wide group selfies.
Huawei has trimmed the bezel off even further in the Nova 9 Pro. Plus, the display measures a larger 6.72” and delivers a sharper QHD+ resolution. The screen still refreshes at a smooth 120Hz, but you also get support for HDR10 content.
The engine inside the Nova 9 Pro is also the LTE variant of Snapdragon 778G, hooked up to a 4000 mAh cell. However, the 100W charging brick shipped with the phone offers a 100% top-up in just 20 minutes!
The storage, memory, OS, and rear camera configuration are shared with the standard Nova 9. Huawei has also used the same body for the two phones, available in Black, Blue, Green, Violet shades. Naturally, the build lacks storage expansion and a physical audio jack. But both phones offer cardless payments through NFC. The Nova 9 Pro starts at CNY 3,499 (~ Rs. 91,300.)
