Huawei P8 Lite review - the balanced performer

Huawei continues its ascent in the sales charts for mobile devices, having only last year surpassed Microsoft's Lumia division. Undoubtedly, the aggressive pricing of its devices is the main reason for reaching third place in the sales chart, and while even top Huawei devices like the P8 do not yet possess the level of software and aesthetic refinement seen in phones from more established manufacturers, they are slowly and surely making up ground. Today we are going to take a closer look at the little brother of the Huawei flagship, the Huawei P8 Lite. Unlike its sibling, the P8 Lite has an amazingly low price tag starting from $175 and, at least on paper, has all the right specs for a mid-range smartphone. Read this review and see how it performs in our tests:

Packaging, design and build quality of the Huawei P8 Lite

The phone comes in a simple, white box, which has only the name imprinted on it and a large sticker with the specs on one side. The phone is neatly sandwiched between two smaller boxes containing the charger and headset, as well as the manual and the warranty card. No surprises as far as package contents go. Be advised that one of the boxes includes, fixed on one of its walls, the tool for ejecting the SIM trays. All the accessories are white. The 1A rated charger is small, while the supplied headset bears a striking resemblance to the current iPhone earphones. The Quick Start Guide contains all the needed documents to get you going. The Huawei P8 Lite comes in two colors, white and black. The design is elegant and, although the Chinese manufacturer has chosen a plastic finish instead of the metal used for its big brother, the "premium" feel is still there, thanks to the textures and colors used. The phone is 5.62 inches (143 mm) in height, 2.78 inches (70.6 mm) in width and 0.3 inches (7.7) mm thick. When you combine it with a weight of 4.62 ounces (131 grams), it makes sense for people who want to go against the "bigger is better" trend of the last few years. The front of the smartphone is simple, with no separate capacitive buttons or speaker grilles. Thanks to the small bezels, the manufacturer has managed to fit a 5 inch screen on the device. Above the screen you will find the earpiece, the 5 megapixel front facing camera and the proximity and light sensors. There is also a status led which is visible only when it's lit up. A headphone jack and the secondary microphone (for noise cancelling) are the only things present on top of the phone, while the bottom houses the micro-USB charging port, the speaker and the microphone. Stereo speakers would have been a nice addition, but despite the symmetric design of the grilles, only one speaker is present. The left side of the device is perfectly clean, with no controls. The right side houses the two sim trays, the power button and the volume rocker. The SIM trays (with the upper one alternately accepting a microSD card) are perfectly flush with the body and can only be ejected using the provided tool. The back of the smartphone has a nice brushed finish, with a slim glass band on the upper part. The main camera and the LED flash are placed in a corner, with no other features present. The standard package contents are no surprise, but the elegant design of the boxes and of the smartphone itself make a very good first impression on the user. The materials and textures are carefully chosen to give a premium look and feel. The device is small and reasonably light, making it very easy to handle.

Hardware specifications of the Huawei P8 Lite

The Huawei P8 Lite comes in two different versions, one for the US markets (codename ALE-04) and one for the rest of the world, codenamed ALE-21, which is the unit we will review today. The US version is based on the Snapdragon 615 chipset coupled with an Adreno 405 graphics system, while the tested unit is based on the HiSilicon Kirin 620 chipset coupled with a Mali-450MP4 GPU. The rest of the specifications are nearly identical and although in theory the Snapdragon 615 outperforms the Kirin chipset, the differences are very small. While the chipset may offer decent performance, the Mali graphics chip is an aging one and it might not be on the of level the 1.2 GHz Octa-core processor. We will of course put that to the test later in our review. The unit has 2 GB of memory, which is just about average (top-end products have 3 GB) and the internal storage capacity is 16GB. The storage space can be extended with a microSD card of up to 128 GB but be advised, the dual-SIM capability of the smartphone is available only without an SD card installed, since it will occupy one of the SIM trays. The screen is a 5 inch IPS LCD panel with a 720p resolution (720 x 1280 pixels) and thus it has roughly 294 pixels per inch. It has good viewing angles and average brightness. The pixel density is not great, but the screen looks sharp and considering the low price of the Huawei P8 Lite, there's not much more we could ask. The camera has a 13 Megapixel BSI sensor (backside illumination, which helps in low-light conditions) aided by a dual-LED flash, but with no optical image stabilisation. It's a step down from the Huawei P8 but it's still a capable unit, able to record 1080p videos at 30 frames per second. The lens has an aperture of f/2.0 and a focal length of 27 mm. The secondary camera has 5 Megapixels and is able to record 720p videos. The device is LTE (4G) capable and has a 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter. There is no 802.11 ac available, but other than that, the regular connectivity options are there: Bluetooth 4.0 is also available, as is GPS. The Huawei P8 Lite ALE-21 has NFC, a feature not present in the US version of the smartphone. Charging and PC connections are done via the usual USB 2.0 port. The Huawei P8 Lite has a 2200 mAh battery, which is rather small in capacity. The battery is non-removable and has no quick-charging capability. We will test the performance of the device in benchmarks and real-life tests, but first, let's see what the Huawei P8 Lite software has to offer.

The s oftware and the user interface of the Huawei P8 Lite

The tested version of the Huawei P8 Lite came with the Android 5.0.1 (Lollipop) operating system, on top of which the Chinese manufacturer put its own customized user interface, the EMUI 3.1. While there are numerous aesthetic customizations available, you can also choose not to stray too far from the "vanilla" Android 5.0 look. The lack of separate, capacitive buttons for Back, Home and Task Manager has its pros and cons: by moving the buttons on the screen, the user can customize the appearance and order of the buttons, but on the other hand, most of the time, the buttons occupy valuable space on the screen. One of the biggest changes from the 5.0.1 launcher is the lack of an app drawer. What this means is that every app that is installed will be present in one of the home screens, similar to the iPhone system. While the apps can be put in folders, some users will not be comfortable with this change, especially since you can't quickly rearrange or hide apps from the home screens. The notification area has two sections: one handles the actual notifications while the other toggles the various options. Simple and easy to use, although potentially, more actions are required to get to the needed shortcut. A brilliant feature present in the Huawei P8 Lite settings is the Permissions section, which allows the user to individually allow or deny the permissions for each installed application, including the permissions to use the data connection. This is immensely useful for users who have a limited data plan and want to conserve their network usage over the mobile network. The same level of user interaction is also possible for application notifications, with each of the applications having separate permissions for displaying info on the lock screen, the status bar or on the home screen. Power settings also follow this trend, as the user can decide what applications will be closed when the screen is locked and what apps will be "protected". Yet another useful feature is the Motion Control section, from which you can choose what a variety of motions and gestures do: from silencing the smartphone to rearranging your icons and starting specific apps. As far as apps go, the Huawei P8 Lite has no bloatware and some very useful applications, the most important being the Phone Manager. From this "command center" you can clean up the RAM, the storage, adjust the power saving settings, the permissions and notifications as described earlier and you can also block calls or messages. Furthermore, by pressing the Scan button, your phone will automatically search for issues/tips for all of the sections and allow you to individually fix them. The smartphone has other useful apps, such as the File Explorer , the WPS Office suite and the HiCare app which provides useful links to manuals, forums and customer service. The usual applications are present, with aesthetic customizations: calculator, calendar, voice recorder and flashlight app. In line with the design and the hardware specifications, the software is well balanced, good looking and practical. There is no unnecessary bloatware and the level of customization and user control is well above the average. On the next page we will see how the Huawei P8 Lite performs in benchmarks and in real-life usage scenarios.

Benchmark performance of the Huawei P8 Lite

For starters, let's take a look at raw computing performance, with the Vellamo suite and its Multicore and Metal tests. The results are far from stellar, but the Huawei P8 Lite fares reasonably well, with 1538 points on the Multicore test and 1004 on the Metal test. Furthermore, comparing it to the competition at the same price point, the Chinese phone has excellent results. Many devices in the $170-$200 price range, like the ASUS Zenfone Max we reviewed, use the inferior Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset. The scores reflect the real-life performance, since we rarely saw any lag or slowdowns during our usage tests. We had some problems when we tried to run the GFX Bench GL Benchmark suite. Most of the tests could not be completed, and the T-Rex offscreen test produced 308 frames, which is a rather poor result. Based on the graphics tests from other devices with the same chip, we think that the bugs are more likely caused a software optimization issue than a hardware fault. We hope that Huawei will address the issues in a software update. The browser experience is good, with rare slowdowns, and the Explore test from the Vellamo suite confirms this, with a score of 1967. Granted, it's not a top score, but for the price and considering the alternatives, the score is average. We tested the Chrome browser, although the phone comes with its own browser. We did this in order to have a better view of the performance level of the phone compared to the competition, rather than the performance of the browsers. We also tested the network connection using Speedtest.net by Ookla. We tested both LTE (4G) and wireless connections (the latter with a 70 Mbps download / 20 Mbps upload internet connection). The results show an average level of performance using LTE (left) and a rather poor result with using WiFi (right). Finally, we ran PCMark to see how much juice can the battery provide. The result was rather poor, 6h 38min. The benchmarks showed mixed results. The computing power of the Huawei P8 Lite is above the average for this price point, but the device is let down by the graphics chip and the battery with a small capacity.

The smartphone experience on the Huawei P8 Lite

Now that we've seen the numbers, how do all these results translate into real-life usage? Well, during our tests, Huawei P8 Lite was responsive and we rarely experienced slowdowns. While the results for the graphics system were mediocre, we had no issue during playback of media files and during browsing. Playing graphics-intensive games is not a very good experience on the Huawei P8 Lite, but other than that, the smartphone behaved very well. Telephony was good: signal reception is above average, the earpiece is loud and clear and the secondary microphone helps remove the background noise and improves the quality of the user's voice during calls. The speaker is surprisingly loud, although it lacks bass. The earphones are loud but, not being a sealed in-ear solution, lack bass. Subjectively, the screen is not particularly bright and you may have difficulties reading it in bright sunshine. Color reproduction is good and the images are reasonably sharp. We feared that the battery would be too weak for the features this smartphone has, but our fears were only partly justified. The battery lasted between 16 and 30 hours on one charge, which is pretty much what you can expect from the average smartphone right now. Of course, we can't compare it to the monster battery on the ASUS Zenfone Max, but although the results could have been better, the Huawei P8 Lite stamina is okay. Charging takes a bit over two hours (no quick charging is available for the P8 Lite). The Huawei P8 Lite is easy to handle and the materials are not only good-looking, but also fingerprint-proof. Overall, we were satisfied with this smartphone, with only two exceptions. We found a pretty important bug with the unit that we reviewed: the phone would not, despite our best efforts, display any notification on the lock screen. If you need a quick fix, there are applications in the Google Play store which provide that function, but the integration with the phone theme is far from ideal. Since it's a software bug, it may or may not be present on your device, depending on the version of the UI, and will surely be fixed in a later software release. Also, we were not happy with the lack of an app drawer (apparently we're not the only ones ), but this issue can also be fixed by using a custom launcher application.

The camera experience on the Huawei P8 Lite

The 13 Megapixel camera of the Huawei P8 Lite is as average as the rest of the package. It has no optical image stabilization, but does have a dual-LED flash. The interface is simple, with few options easily accessible. You have the option to take a normal picture, a "beauty" picture (which softens the details), you can record a video or make a slow-motion clip. Additional shooting modes include HDR, panorama, all-focus and best photo. Settings are displayed by pressing the cog button: you can toggle geo-tagging, object tracking and smile detection, and also adjust ISO and white balance. The pictures are reasonably sharp, with neutral colors and a higher-than-average amount of noise. There is no visible distortion or chromatic aberration, but the dynamic range is very limited. The HDR effect compensates for this and produces good results, without saturating the colors too much, as you can see in the example below. The indoor pictures are still sharp, but color reproduction is a hit and miss affair. For dark subjects, the flash is advised, in order to get accurate colors. In the image below you can see the correct shade of pink (left image, flash on) and the color of the doll without flash (right image). Despite the BSI sensor, which helps when there is not enough light, the night shots are not really usable for anything else than social media. Then again, there are very few phones that take half-decent night shots. Below you see the same scene from the first picture, but at night. The Huawei P8 Lite makes beautiful Macro shots, as it is able to get very close to the subject. The quality is good when there is plenty of light. The secondary camera, despite having 5 Megapixels, is not much good beyond the usual selfies. The option to "beautify" the selfies is a neat feature, perfect for the moments when your fans want to see you but you are having a bad acne day. As always, you can take a look at the full gallery to see the actual quality of the photos. Videos are not great, with a bitrate of under 10 Mbps for 1080p resolution and a frame rate which varies quite a lot (between 23 and 30 fps). Here is a dynamic video, with lots of fast moving objects. We also recorded a static video, and although the lighting was good, you can clearly see the lack of dynamic range of the camera. The Huawei P8 Lite has an average main camera, with reasonably good photos but only mediocre video recording. The front-facing camera is also not something to write home about.

Pros and cons of the Huawei P8 Lite

Summarizing our findings, we liked the following:

• Excellent price
• Elegant design and good choice of colors and textures
• Small size and large screen
• Good CPU power
• No bloatware

However, there were also some things that we didn't like:

• Poor graphics performance
• Buggy software
• No app drawer

Many of the features of the Huawei P8 Lite were average, so we can't really put them in either of the categories above.

Verdict

The Huawei P8 Lite is a balanced option for the $170-200 price range. It has more processing power than the competition, a large screen, and an elegant design. It's perfect for users who are not willing to spend a fortune on their smartphone but still want decent performance. The small size may be appealing for users who dislike the "phablet" trend and want a smartphone which can fit in the front pocket. None of the Huawei P8 Lite's features are deal-breakers except maybe the poor graphics performance in games.