Sticking with what works
Huawei P10
Cool factor ★★★★
Usability ★★★★★
Value for money ★★★★
Last year’s flagship smartphone for Huawei was the P9, which brought us the dual-lens rear camera, engineered in collaboration with Leica. The phone offered new controls and shooting modes, and garnered a lot of attention for the Chinese manufacturer. The competitive price resulted in record local sales for the brand.
Can the P10 of 2017 (and the
P10 Plus iteration) capitalise or improve on this (relatively) newfound mainstream attention?
After the dual-lens camera, where to next?
Huawei’s answer seems to be: “It’s more of the same.” It is sticking with what works, rather than
offering a radically new device.
The P10 packs in more camera tech as well as solid processing and storage, and it has a premium look and feel. The front lens also now bears the Leica stamp of approval.
The P10 offers a whopping 8 MP, and smart adjustments, such as an auto wide angle for group selfies, in the front camera. The rear camera is still the creative hub, though, with the dual lenses
(12 MP and 20 MP sensors) working in tandem for depth and contrast. The facial-feature tracking portrait mode, light painting setting and hybrid zoom were big crowd-pleasers at the media launch.
But, like the P9, the P10 is not a one-trick pony. It’s an extremely attractive device, with a thin profile of 6.98 mm. It offers a 5.1 inch screen, with 432 pixels/inch (ppi), while the P10 Plus screen measures 5.5 inches, and has 534 ppi. Both devices have dual Sim functionality, Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5, and generous built-in memory: respectively 4 GB of RAM and storage of 64 GB, or 6 GB of RAM and storage of 648 GB-128 GB. Both use Huawei’s Kirin 960 chipset for fierce and fast processing, and run Android 7.0 Nougat.
The fingerprint scanner has been relocated to the front of the device — a solid move. Unfortunately, though, the P10 is not water resistant (unlike the latest Samsung and Apple flagships). A big drawcard is the 3,200 milliamp hour (mah) battery (or 3,750 MAH in the Plus version), and “supercharge” technology that will get you to a full day’s charge in 30 minutes.
The devices will cost R12,999 and R13,999 respectively.