Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based voice assistant, is becoming the preferred voice interface for most smart home devices.
As a result, we're seeing a number of products that integrate Alexa, including smart TVs, refrigerators, and even an app that can control Ford vehicles.
Smartphones have not been spared of the Alexa phenomenon, with the Huawei Mate 9 being the first one to have Amazon's wildly successful product pre-installed.
The Huawei Mate 9 was launched late last year in Munich, Germany. Huawei announced at CES 2017 that the U.S. version of the phone is now available for $599, while the Alexa service will become available next month. Now that the phone has been officially launched stateside, experts are beginning to weigh in on the device:
TK Bay - XDA
TK Bay, a YouTube reviewer, thinks that the Mate 9 is an overall solid phone, with its camera as its most outstanding feature.
"The main benefit that we're getting with this device are the dual cameras. We have an 8-megapixel camera on the front and on the back, as I have mentioned, the dual camera sensors."
The reviewer was able to take photos of the camera using the bokeh effect and noted that one can change the focus of the image post-shoot simply by tapping a certain part of the foreground or background.
Alexander Maxham - Android Headlines
Alexander Maxham, tech reviewer for Android Headlines, was also impressed with the phone's specs such as its 5.9-inch 1080p resolution display, Kirin 960 processor, 4 GB RAM, and 64 GB storage (which can be extended to 256 GB with the help of its microSD card slot).
Maxham also sings praises about the phone's dual camera:
"There is a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and then a 12-megapixel RGB sensor, which are fused together to create some pretty incredible images."
Matthew Miller - ZDNet
For Matthew Miller of ZDNet, Huawei's flagship offering brings out the best of the Mate 8 and P9 in one nifty package.
"The Mate 9 brings together the big screen and battery of the Mate 8 and the awesome dual-lens Leica camera from the P9 to create the absolute best of Huawei in a single device. These hardware features are then powered by the latest Android 7.0 Nougat and EMUI 5.0 so that this single device has everything an enterprise user could want in a single Android smartphone."
To conclude his review, Miller says that "the Apple iPhone 7 Plus is also a worthy competitor to the Huawei Mate 9, but I prefer the larger display and smaller bezels of the Mate 9."
