Technology

New releases from Huawei and Samsung are hogging the limelight ahead of the much-anticipated 10th anniversary iPhone.

New Huawei and Samsung phones are hogging Apple’s 10th-anniversary limelight.

Aslew of new Android smartphones will hit the market in the coming weeks, stealing the spotlight briefly from Apple, which is likely to debut its 10th anniversary iPhone in September. The rumour mill is running overtime concerning the new features the iPhone 8 may include, from a curved screen and glass back to 3D selfies and augmented reality functions.

For its Android-based rivals, this year is one of iterative change: design tweaks here, slight performance enhancements there.

Huawei’s P10 (below), just released, sees the Chinese phone maker finally deliver design worthy of the top end of the smartphone market, even if it has blatantly mimicked the body shape of the iPhone, with the sharp corners of the old P9 smudged into elegant curves.

The larger P10 Plus I’ve been using has a 5.5-inch screen and is incredibly light in the hand. It has an indented home button on its front that unlocks the phone in a split second when it scans your fingerprint. But dispensing with it entirely, offering instead more screen real estate and a virtual button, or fingerprint scanner on the phone’s rear, would have been a better option.

The screen displays sharp, bright images, although no records are being broken for screen performance. The rear of the phone houses an impressive pair of cameras, with no bump to accommodate the lenses.

Huawei continues the theme of building in two rear cameras – one monochrome, the other colour – and instantly combining the two images for more detailed photos. That’s now a standard trick, but Huawei has partnered with Leica for the lenses, appealing to photo buffs with a surprisingly extensive range of photo settings. There’s also a selfie camera on the P10’s front.

This is very much Huawei consolidating the massive gains it has made; it’s now the third biggest smartphone maker by market share behind Apple and Samsung. Let’s hope the P11 truly breaks new ground.

Price: $999 (P10 Plus $1199)

MAKE OR BREAK

For Samsung, the launch of the Galaxy S8 (above right), on sale from May 5, is a chance to put the debacle over its exploding Note 7 batteries behind it. Despite that costly misstep, there has never been any doubt that Samsung is the leader of the Android pack when it comes to innovation, and the S8 and up-sized S8 Plus certainly put the smartphone maker back on track.

The joy of first experiencing the S7 Edge, with its curved, wrap-around screen, returns with the S8 models, which have incorporated it as a standard feature. The home button is now gone, leaving virtually uninterrupted screen space, bar a small line of trim to accommodate the speaker and front-facing camera.

The screen itself is stunning, bright enough to display videos with high dynamic range – an image-enhancing TV technology that is now coming to smartphones and debuting in a smattering of Netflix and Amazon Prime shows.

The focus with smartphones is usually on the holy trinity of screen display, camera and battery life. The S8’s screen is spectacular, but the camera is much the same as the S7’s and the battery, with Note 7 nightmares still fresh, hasn’t increased in size.

But there are plenty of impressive features – from the facial recognition for phone unlocking to iris scanning, which has improved greatly since first appearing in the Note 7, and wireless and fast charging. Still, the bells and whistles add up – these are Samsung’s most expensive phones yet.

The puzzling inclusion is Bixby, Samsung’s version of Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. Bixby even has its own hot button on the Galaxy’s side. But Bixby is a shadow of Siri and Google Assistant, which is still available on the S8 and a far better option. Bixby will search photos you take and digitise text or perform web searches based on the images it captures. It has promise, but here is clunky, first-generation stuff.

Where the S8 really shines is in its understated, elegant design, its userinterface features such as Apps Edge and People Edge, which appear with a simple swipe from the side, and that fantastic screen. Samsung can bask in its glow for now.

Price: $1299 (S8 Plus $1499)

Bixby is a shadow of Siri and Google Assistant, which is still available on the S8 and a far better option.