Amazon's cloud-based voice interface, Alexa, is increasingly becoming the preferred voice assistant for smart home devices. A lot of products integrate Alexa including smart TVs, refrigerators, and more. Even an app which controls Ford vehicles has integrated Alexa as well. Now, the Huawei Mate 9 is the first smartphone to have the voice assistant pre-installed. It was unveiled at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017.
The Huawei Mate 9 was revealed late in 2016 in Munich, Germany, and the U.S. version will be available for $599 USD. The Alexa service will be available in February.
Huawei has confirmed that the new Mate 9 phablet will feature the latest Kirin 960 chipset. The Kirin 960 chipset is built on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process with new parts. The octa-core processor comes with four Cortex-A73 cores which form a powerful half, balanced by another four Cortex-A53 cores. Kirin 960 is said to offer a 15 percent boost in performance and supports double the data speeds of its predecessor. The chipset is most useful when the phone's carrier uses LTE network.
The Huawei Mate 9 looks a lot like the Mate 8. It sports a fingerprint scanner and dual-lens camera at the rear of the device. The camera is the same as the one in Huawei P9 which was released early in 2016.
"There is a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and then a 12-megapixel RGB sensor, which are fused together to create some pretty incredible images," Internet Do reported.
The Mate 9 also features a 5.9-inch QHD 1080p resolution display, up to 256 GB of internal storage and 4 GB of RAM.