Huawei P9 a separate camera just for black and white photos

Huawei's launched not one, but two, new handsets as it seeks to continue its assault on the high-end handset market: the Huawei P9 and Huawei P9 Plus.

The smaller, more palm-friendly P9 offers a 5.2-inch Full HD display and a full-metal design that's 6.95mm thin. Under the hood is the Huawei-produced Kirin 955 chipset - which promises to offer a large amount of grunt - as well as 3GB of RAM.

That same chipset is pushed into the P9 Plus, but it's boosted to 4GB of RAM, a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display and 64GB of storage, compared to the 32GB on the 'normal' P9.

Lens get physical

The main talking point of the phones has to be the new camera set up. While dual cameras is nothing new, there's brand new camera tech with two 'Leica certified' 12MP cameras on the back of the phone. One camera is color, while the other is monochrome and designed solely for black and white pictures.

According to Huawei, the B&W sensor adds 200% more light information and 50% more contrast to the overall image when combined with the color sensor, compared to a photo using just the regular snapper, although both offer laser autofocus too.

Huawei P9

Software-wise there's the expected Android 6 Marshmallow running on the phone with the controversial Emotion UI 4.1 running over the top. Controversial because of is more complex operation, as well as dropping the app drawer completely - although it might not be alone in that in the near future.

On the back of both is a fingerprint scanner – in the same position as on other Huawei phones – and it's the same tech as the scanner in the Mate 8 (which we found to be really fast).

There's USB-C for data transfer and charging as well as a 3000mAh battery (on the P9) and 3400mAh batttery (on the P9 Plus) and up to 128GB microSD support.

In terms of Huawei's P9 release date, we're looking at the P9 coming later this month in Euorope and Asia, and the P9 Plus landing in May for the same territories.