HUAWEI quietly removes mention of UFS 2.1 on Mate 9 product page

Following HUAWEI’s admission that there are multiple different memory configurations in use on the P10, the company has quietly removed mention of UFS 2.1 from the Mate 9’s product page. In yesterday’s statement, HUAWEI noted that in all of its P10 marketing material “there has been no commitment to the use of only one specific flash memory”. But HUAWEI did make such a claim for the Mate 9.

On previous versions of the official Mate 9 product page (which, coincidentally, uses the same Kirin 960 SoC as the P10), there was clear mention of both LPDDR4 and UFS 2.1, which you can see in the topmost image below. However, the section pertaining to UFS 2.1 has now been removed from several of HUAWEI’s global sites (I still see it on the US site, for example, but it’s gone on the UK site and several others).

While we’re not necessarily saying HUAWEI is up to anything nefarious – this missing detail could be due to any number of reasons – we do have something potentially relevant to mention. Following yesterday’s events, we ran the same Androbench test used on the P10 on three of our Mate 9 review units. Like the P10 units tested in China, our results varied widely. From around 250 MB/s on one device to 550 MB/s on another with a third hitting 830 MB/s. All tests were run multiple times.

As HUAWEI noted in its statement yesterday, “these scores are not applicable in actual use scenarios” and there are multiple factors at play that can affect the read speeds of a device’s flash memory. But if you have a Mate 9 we encourage you to run your own tests and see what kind of sequential read speed your device is getting. We’ve reached out to HUAWEI again for an explanation on the removal of UFS 2.1 from the Mate 9 product page and will update this post with any new information we receive.

– Thanks to Martijn for the tip!