Review Huawei P10

The P10 is the successor to Huawei’s P9 flagship, which in my mind was the firm’s finest handset to date.

It continues the company’s push to dominate the camera market and features a refined version of the “designed by Leica” dual-camera setup seen on its predecessor. This, plus a few subtle but important design and hardware improvements, makes the P10 look like it could be a valid rival to Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8 and the excellent LG G6.

With its retail price set at £550 in the UK, however, the P10 is one of the most expensive phones ever made by Huawei. Couple this with the fact that for only €50 more it's possible to pick up the better-specced "Plus" variant of the P10 (UK pricing yet to be confirmed), and the P10's overall appeal is hampered, making it a good as opposed to perfect choice for premium buyers.

Related: Galaxy S8 hands-on

HUAWEI P10 – DESIGN

Design-wise, the P10 looks more like an iPhone 7 than a Huawei phone. Some of the coloured variants, such as the blue version, differentiate themselves by sporting a textured finish. Overall, though, were it not for the appearance of a USB Type-C – not Lightning – port at the bottom of the handset and the Leica and Huawei branding on its rear, you could easily mistake the P10 for an Apple phone.

Some will bemoan the lack of originality; for me, this isn't too much of an issue since the P10 ticks all the right boxes when it comes to functionality.

The metal exterior feels suitably solid, and the use of Gorilla Glass 5 on the front screen should offer reasonable scratch-resistance – although I'd still refrain from dropping it in a pocket with your keys.

Related: Galaxy S8+ hands-on

The P10’s 7mm thickness and 142g weight make it super-comfortable to hold, even for folk with small hands. I’m also pleased to see the phone has a microSD card slot, which will enable users to add a further 256GB of space to the basic 64GB built-in storage.

My only slight quibble is that Huawei has opted to position the fingerprint scanner on the P10’s front, as I’ve always found a rear placement more intuitive in use. The scanner on the P9 was a particularly fine example, with placement exactly where my index finger naturally fell when holding it.

Huawei has partially made up for this by adding some advanced control options to the P10’s scanner. A short press acts as the standard Back button, while a long press brings you back to the homescreen. Swiping left or right will bring up the apps Overview screen.

The company claims the button will be easier to use than Android’s on-screen inputs, thanks to the addition of a custom Ultra Response feature. The feature reportedly tracks your usage habits so it can intelligently predict where your finger will go next, reacting preemptively and thus reducing latency.

Such functionality sounds useful, and on first receiving the P10 I did use the features out of novelty. But following a week with the handset, I didn’t notice a huge difference in response times and reverted to using Android’s on-screen commands – which is what I imagine most people will do.

Related: Best Smartphones

HUAWEI P10 – DISPLAY

Huawei has loaded the P10 with a 5.1-inch, 1080p resolution display. On paper, this is a marked step down from the P10 Plus, which comes with a 5.5-inch with a 2K resolution display. However, in real-world use I didn’t encounter any issues with the P10’s display.

Many flagships, such as the Galaxy S7, may have made the jump to Quad-HD, but the truth is, most people won’t notice the difference in pixel count. The P10’s 432ppi (pixels per inch) mean that it’s all but impossible to discern individual pixels and icons, and text looks universally sharp.

The use of an IPS-NEO panel results in blacks that are better than those on regular IPS screens – and improved viewing angles – although they're not as deep and inky as they are on phones with AMOLED screens. In addition, whites are clean and colours are neither overcooked nor too cool. Maximum brightness levels are excessively high, to the point I generally found myself having to set the phone to between 30-40% brightness to use it comfortably.

All in all, the P10’s screen is pretty good – although at this price, I wouldn’t expect anything less.

HUAWEI P10 – SOFTWARE

The P10 comes loaded with Android 7.0 Nougat overlaid with Huawei’s Emotion UI 5.1. While I’m happy to see Nougat, which is by far the best iteration of Android to date, I’m less enamoured with Huawei’s Emotion software.

Android skins made sense back in the day, when the OS was young and missing key features. But since Android Lollipop, which was a turning point for the OS, I’ve felt they’re generally detrimental to the user experience for a couple of reasons.

First, because most of the additions are either superfluous, or duplicate services to ones already included on Android. This issue remains true on the P10, whose menu system has been completely rejigged and comes with numerous duplicate services for items such as music, photos and calendar.

I wish more companies would follow Moto’s example and put a clean install of Android on their phones, or at the very least do what HTC has with its One series and stop adding duplicate apps.

The second issue is that the skin’s code always delays how quickly handsets can be upgraded to new versions of Android. The appearance of Emotion is likely to be a key reason the P10 isn’t running on the latest Android 7.1 version of Nougat.

Being fair to Huawei, the version of Emotion on the P10 is the best I’ve tested. The company has made some changes that show it's listening to customer feedback. These include small tweaks, like the ability to re-add Android’s app tray to the UI and unistall some of the unwanted apps; in terms of usability, they make a huge difference.

Huawei’ has also done some interesting work to improve the OS under the hood, using Ultra Memory. Ultra Memory is a background feature designed to let the phone run more smoothly by recycling memory faster.

Related: Best Android Smartphones

HUAWEI P10 – PERFORMANCE

The P10 uses the same Kirin 960 chipset as the Huawei Mate 9 phablet, and it's paired with a Mali G71 MP8 GPU and 4GB of RAM. The specs are a step up on the P9, which used an older Kirin 955 CPU and, on paper, put the device on a par with competing flagships. Both remain slightly behind the Plus version, however, which comes with 6GB of memory – although, to be perfectly honest, this amount of memory on a smartphone is complete overkill.

With regular use I didn’t have any serious problems with the P10’s performance. Apps opened in milliseconds and the phone dealt with multiple tab web browsing without any signs of stuttering. The only time I noticed any performance disparity between it and competing flagships was when gaming.

Playing demanding titles such as Riptide GP2, Star Cindy and Banner Saga 2, the phone took a fraction of a second longer to load than phones such as the Google Pixel. The games did run smoothly once up, but the P10 became noticeably hotter than rival phones during prolonged play sessions – although not to the point I was worrying about CPU throttling.

The P10’s performance during TrustedReviews’ standard suite of synthetic benchmarks mirrored my real-world findings. In the CPU-focused Geekbench 4 test, the P10 ran in with impressive 1,933 single-core and 6,145 multi-core scores. ThePixel finished with lower 1,562 single-core and 4,072 multi-core scores, by comparison.

The P10 performed less well in the GPU-focused 3DMark: Slingshot test. Here it scored 2,604, placing it well below the Pixel and its 3,463 score.

Call quality is also solid. The speakers and microphone are more than good enough to make and take calls, even on busy London streets. The speakers are also powerful enough to take calls on loudspeaker in non-noisy environments, though I really wouldn’t recommend using them to listen to music

Share this post