Huawei P9 Lite is coming to the UK soon, but lacks the P9's headline feature

Huawei P9 Lite

The Huawei P9 won't sell in Samsung Galaxy S7 numbers, but we were impressed by its higher-quality design and dual-camera setup.

But for anyone who doesn't want to shell out £449.99 the Huawei P9 Lite has been announced with a UK launch planned for late May - although we're still waiting on a price for that one.

It's a phone with a similarly stylish metal frame, though despite the name it's actually slightly heavier and thicker than the standard P9, at 147g and 7.5mm thick.

The 5.2-inch 1080 x 1920 screen is the same size and spec as the P9 though, as is the 8MP front-facing camera and the 3000mAh battery.

Lite in lots of ways

As you'd expect though, in other ways the Huawei P9 Lite is a downgrade on its full fat sibling. Most significantly there's a drop in spec for the rear camera, which is just a 13MP single-lens offering with a dual-LED flash, rather than the innovative 12MP dual-lens camera of the Huawei P9.

The P9 Lite is less powerful too, with an octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 650 processor, which has four cores clocked at 2.0GHz and four running at 1.7GHz, though that should still be plenty to run Android Marshmallow.

Like other Huawei handsets, the P9 Lite comes with the company's divisive Emotion UI over the top.

4G, 16GB of built in storage, a microSD card slot and a fingerprint scanner round out the features of a phone that, despite the ordinary camera, could stand out as a compelling mid-ranger assuming the price is right.

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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