6 cities in Asia put Huawei's P9 to the test (pictures)

I used the Huawei P9 phone, which has two Leica lenses, to photograph this section of The Great Wall, a somewhat bumpy, 2-hour drive from downtown Beijing. Blue skies! The "vivid color" mode punches up the picture.

No special modes here; these scarlet dragonfruit (which were served to me all over China and Thailand) really are this saturated.

Gizmodo writer Aatif Sulleyman has great hair, which I used to play around with selective focus: I meant for the background to be sharp and clear.

I love these guys, just hanging out looking at Shanghai's skyline, for so many reasons. I call this photo a win.

Everyone wants a piece of this view! Back to vivid color mode, these selfie-seekers got a boost on a gray day.

Apple's stairway looks like an moody at its flagship Shanghai store. Check out more of the store, including an atypically green Apple logo.

It took a bunch of photos to get this good one, mostly because night shots are hard (no flash), especially when lights are constantly blinking on and off.

I rarely see these friends, who moved from San Francisco to Shanghai about a year ago. This isn't a great photo, taken with awful indoor lighting, but most other phones wouldn't do much better.

I brought the Huawei P9 full circle to photograph this photogenic statue at Huawei HQ. It passed!

Is everyone seeing the two curly straws in this monstrosity of a "mojito"? Good, it's 'cause I used flash.

Samsung's Galaxy S7 arguably overamplifies low-light scenes, but that'd be better than this void. (It was really dark, though.)

I'd be happy sharing this snapshot of Shanghai's East Nanjing Road thoroughfare with friends on social media.

This is the same as the first photo in this album, but without the vivid color treatment. Even though this is what the day actually looked like, the picture feels lifeless and flat.

The P9 struggled with capturing motion, but nailed the waving flags of Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

I was too hungry for dinner (like lamb spine hot pot and rabbit head) to start with dessert, but I'll be back to Beijing for these shapely popsicles.

I missed the Samsung Galaxy S7's speedy autofocus, which helps capture still images of things in motion. (To be fair, I was riding a "hoverboard" at Xiaomi's headquarters, but I had a bunch of photos like this from other scenes.)

I've had to clean out a lot of unwanted photos like this. Maybe I have an errant shutter-thumb, maybe the P9 is shutter-happy.

Flower and food photos are all about close-ups and details. I was pretty happy with this one, taken at dusk, but it could have been even sharper.

I appreciate decorative detail like this, especially when it comes out, like it did here.

I took an embarrassing amount of food photos on my trip and some of them were unexpectedly blurry. This one, of Korean shave ice in Seoul (bingsu), gets the stomach growling all over again.

Mists off the top of Singapore's climate-controlled cloud forest looks especially cool through the P9's monochrome lens.

I felt compelled to photograph this gorgeous flower cluster. Good decision.

The stranger who took this photo of fellow CNET editor Aloysius Low and me at a hawker stall in Singapore had a lot of bad light to fight. Still, I wish our faces looked less muddied.

Look. At. This. Sky. It hangs above a temple in northern Thailand. When the sun breaks free, the heat will shoot up from 90 degrees Fahrenheit to 106 (or 32C to 41C).

The P9 beautifully captured the ornamentation at this prominent hilltop temple, Doi Suthep.

I experimented with this black-and-white photo on the temple grounds.

The light from Mrs. Pa's smoothie stand in Chiang Mai gave this photo an assist in an otherwise dark night market.

Even though not every picture came out perfectly, I still got a good roundup of my travels in Asia. Be sure to read CNET's full review for more on the Huawei P9 and its two Leica cameras here.