Huawei P8 Lite (2017)
A respectable budget phone with a super-bright screen and Android 7, but it faces intense competition
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £154 (£185 inc VAT) from huawei.com
Three months ago, the Huawei P8 Lite 2017 would have seemed amazing value: dual SIM, 5.2in Full HD display, a fingerprint reader, an octa-core processor and Android 7 for less than £200. You can even buy it for £149 with a Vodafone PAYG SIM. Trouble is that the competition at this price is fierce, with handsets such as the slinky Honor 6X (£225), the long-lasting Lenovo P2 (£200) and the all-round excellent Moto G4 2016 (£150) all strong alternatives. Where does that leave the P8 Lite?
Certainly looks are a strong point. The Piano Black option shown here, with its curved edges, is reminiscent of the iPhone 7. Move closer, though, and it’s clear this isn’t a premium Apple product. It’s larger than the iPhone 7 for starters, while the plastic frame around the screen lowers the tone – as does the glass, which picks up fingerprints like crazy.
I was also shocked at how easily the phone was scratched. After a few days of normal use, it had already started to pick up unsightly scuffs and marks. A case appears to be an essential purchase.
More positively, the fingerprint reader is at the back rather than at the front, a design choice I prefer, and it’s accompanied by a 12-megapixel camera and single-LED flash. Around the front there’s an 8-megapixel selfie camera, the display and the Huawei logo. There are no capacitive buttons, though: Huawei has opted for onscreen navigation buttons instead.
It’s also good to see Huawei retaining the 3.5mm headphone socket, here found on the top edge of the phone, with the volume rocker and power buttons on the right-hand side, a dual-SIM slot on the left (SIM slot 2 can also take a 256GB microSD card), and a micro-USB charging port plus single downward-firing speaker on the bottom. That 5.2in Full HD IPS display results in a respectable pixel density of 424ppi. I measured brightness at a searing 700cd/m2, readable in even the sunniest conditions, but don’t expect perfect colour reproduction: 86% sRGB coverage results in images looking dull next to the Lenovo P2’s 99.9% sRGB coverage display. A contrast ratio of 1,553:1 is excellent, though, with deep black and bright whites contributing to dynamic images and video. Just note the phone employs dynamic contrast, which can’t be disabled, boosting its brightness levels when displaying white or light content onscreen. This appeared to hamper its battery life, with a mediocre 10hrs 24mins in our video-playback test. That’s despite a 3,000mAh battery, and left it flailing behind the Lenovo P2, which lasted 28hrs 50mins in the same test. Huawei’s EMUI skin does offer useful power-management tools to extend battery life, at least, and it’s great to see Android 7 Nougat here. Together, this makes the P8 Lite an
“After a few days of normal use, it had already started to pick up unsightly scuffs and marks. A case appears to be an essential purchase”
easy phone to use, and I found no performance bugs getting in the way. That’s helped by the inclusion of an octa-core (four 2.1GHz Cortex-A53, four 1.7GHz Cortex-A53) Kirin 655 processor. It also has 3GB of RAM, which is plenty for multitasking.
The P8 Lite performs well when compared with its budget competitors in Geekbench 4: in the multi-core test, it scored 3,237, mere inches behind the Honor 6X and marginally better than the Lenovo P2 and Moto G4. In the singlecore benchmarks, a score of 780 put it behind the Lenovo P2 (813) and the Honor 6X (784), while beating the Moto G4 (719).
It’s a similar story with the phone’s Mali-T830MP2 GPU. When playing Temple Run 2, the phone coped well and didn’t feel jittery. In GFXBench’s onscreen tests, it returned an average frame rate of 8.4fps in comparison to the Lenovo P2’s 10fps, Honor 6X’s 8.4fps and Moto G4’s 7.7fps.
Its 12-megapixel rear camera is also respectable for a budget phone. It doesn’t have phase-detect autofocus or optical image stabilisation, but delivers images with little noise under low light. There’s also good news if you want to use the flash. Although a single LED, it didn’t add the unwanted blue hue to images that’s so common to budget phones.
Where it loses out is detail, particularly on objects at a distance; this is where the Moto G4 pulls ahead. As with the Moto, note that video capture is limited to Full HD at 30fps.
So, to return to the question: where does that leave theP8 Lite? If you’re after a better camera, there’s the Moto G4. Better battery life: the Lenovo P2. Better looks, particularly longer term: the Honor 6X. While you won’t be disappointed by the Huawei P8 Lite if you did buy it, such tough competition makes it hard to recommend.