“The beauty of the hybrid” is how Huawei’s chief marketing officer Glory Zhang described the high-end, Chinese brand’s latest smartphone tie-in with Porsche Design.
Launched alongside Huawei’s new Mate 9, the Mate 9 Porsche Design is a limited edition handset of which only 20,000 have been made, and Esquire Middle East were on hand to witness the partnership at its most impressive.
‘Impressive’ is perhaps the most apt of terms to describe the surroundings we found ourselves a couple months ago. Overlooking the picturesque Austrian alps where the earliest signs of winter had begun silently creeping its way across the peak tops. We were led off a coach and met an immaculately dressed man bounds towards us with a grin and set of car keys.
Tossing us the keys to our glistening chariot for the day – a Porsche Cayman GTS – we fired up and twisted and turned our way down to the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, down to the quaint Austrian town of Zell Am See, the birthplace of Porsche Design.
Waiting for us on the seat was the reason we were there, the Mate 9 Porsche Design, to use at our leisure – snapping away at the scenery which couldn’t be more different from the sandy dunes and skyscrapers of our home in Dubai.
The tie-in between the brands is a clever one. Combining Huawei’s mobile engineering expertise with Porsche Design’s signature brand aesthetic, gives today’s high-demanding individuals a level of luxury and performance that is inline with the demands of today.
With the importance that smartphone photography plays in our work, the Mate 9 comes with a world-leading 20 megapixel monochrome camera and 12 megapixel colour camera, thanks to the second generation dual lens camera co-engineered with Leica. The picture below was taken from a helicopter with the Mate 9.
Assisted by the faster processing speeds, enhanced power and longer battery life (up to an awesome two-days of life!), the results are photos that match the camera’s seriously slick design. But it is not just the design that is impressive.
Powered by a super fast Kirin 960 processor, the Mate 9 Porsche Design boasts 6GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage, while promising to run at top speed for up to 18 months unlike other models, which start to lag after six.
“We identified a new type of luxury consumer is emerging. One who needs a smartphone that matches the special demands of their successful, global lifestyles,” says Richard Yu, CEO, Huawei Consumer Business Group.
Although this is not the first smartphone that Porsche Design has worked on, it’s the the first time that they’ve worked with a partner using cutting-edge technology. ‘We bring our brand values in terms of design but also in terms of quality and craftsmanship to the table,’ says Roland Heiler, managing director of the Porsche Design Studio, ‘and it’s fascinating to see that Huawei is actually innovating at a speed that is mind blowing. This is what we like about the collaboration.’ And that, is the beauty of hybrid.