This is the most technically advanced smartphone camera ever made

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Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

The Huawei P9 doesn't have the best smartphone camera in the world, but it is very good.

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More importantly, it's the first quality smartphone to include a dual camera — a feature that seems likely to show up on the iPhone 7. And that's allowed the Chinese manufacturer to build powerful depth-sensing software into the device, taking advantage of its binocular vision. (Just like you, a camera needs two eyes to see in 3D.)

That's allowed Huawei to pack the P9 with a number of effects straight out of the futuristic world of computational photography, a technology that uses multiple small cameras to generate higher-quality images in small devices. It's perhaps not surprising that Huawei would use computational photography, given that its phones are made by Foxconn, the manufacturing giant that has partnered with the computational photography pioneers at Light. (Another company with devices made at Foxconn? Apple.)

One of computational photography's best tricks is allowing users to adjust focus after the fact and mimic the look of wide-aperture DSLR lenses with nicely blurred out backgrounds.

(This was also an option on the HTC One M8, a 4-megapixel dual-lens smartphone camera from 2014. But it didn't work that well. Similarly, the latest generation of Nexus phones allow you to sort of wobble their single cameras to achieve a binocular effect, but it's very difficult to do properly and only works on immobile subjects.)

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I'll have a full review of the P9, which unfortunately isn't sold in the US, and its camera coming soon. But first I wanted to give you a look at how this focus feature looks and works.

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When you shoot a picture in wide-aperture mode, it's very easy to modify focus and aperture after-the-fact.

Of course, you aren't literally changing the aperture or focus.

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The phone uses depth information gathered from its two lenses to adjust the image.

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Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

But when it works properly the effect is very convincing.

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Look at this photo.

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Now look at this one.

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It's fairly stunning to see shallow-depth-of-field photos this good-looking coming from a smartphone.

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Of course, ultra-wide-aperture smartphones can pull off a similar effect when their subjects are VERY close.

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But this computational effect works in the middle distance.

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Look at how I fixed the focus in this shot...

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...and then separated my subject from the background

Huawei warns you not to use wide-aperture mode on subjects more than a meter (about three feet) away, and you can see why here.

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And the technology is imperfect even within that range.

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But this is still the smartest, most advanced camera technology we've ever seen on a smartphone. Expect to see it pop up again and again.

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