Reviewing the Huawei P10: Charming imperfection!

P10 is Huawei's attempt at breaking Samsung's domination in the world of Android flagships. It is an attractive smartphone, with many qualities and also a couple of defects. In some markets other than the USA, it is one of the best selling flagships. To learn why and what Huawei P10 has to offer, read this detailed review:

What is the Huawei P10 good at?

Huawei P10 is an excellent choice for many users and use-cases:

• A great flagship for people who don't want large smartphones
• Perfect choice for people who are bored with black smartphones and want more color
• Great smartphone for photography
• Great multimedia experiences
• Top-notch productivity device
• Good for gaming

Pros and cons

Huawei P10 is a flagship smartphone and, as you would expect, there are many positives to it:

• Great looking smartphone with many color variants for people who want something other than boring black smartphones
• It is the perfect choice for people that want small, light smartphones
• One of the best smartphones for photography
• It offers excellent multimedia experiences
• Great productivity device
• It is available also in Dual-SIM variants
• Fast and precise fingerprint sensor for unlocking your smartphone

There are also some downsides to consider:

• The battery life is not as great as on other flagships
• The fingerprint sensor is not a great navigational tool. You should stick to the default virtual navigation bar
• Gaming performance is on-par with previous generation flagships

Verdict

Huawei P10 is not a perfect smartphone, but it is a very charming one, available in lots of great looking color variants. If you are tired of black smartphones, you will love what Huawei has in store for you. When using Huawei P10, you get high-quality photography. Again, it is not perfect, there are some minor downsides, but the camera experience feels like it was created by someone who truly knows photography for people who love photography. There's plenty of hardware prowess for you to use in all kinds of usage scenarios, from productivity to social media, to gaming and other multimedia experiences. From a design perspective, Huawei P10 is a rather minimalist smartphone. It is discreet, good looking but not flashy. There are many details and nice touches to this smartphone, but they will be noticed only by people that truly look at it. For those of you who care about details, many small things make it stand out, like the back cover, which we love, or the tactile feedback you get when doing certain actions like pressing the Power button.

Hardware specifications and packaging

Huawei P10 comes in a minimalist white cardboard box that features little information. Except for some discreet branding elements, on the sides, you will find some stickers with serial numbers, and IMEI numbers for the device that you have bought, as well as details of where it was imported from. The box opens like a cupboard and you immediately see the smartphone, front and center. Behind the smartphone, you have two other small boxes which are discreetly labeled with symbols representing what you find in each of them. In the packaging, you will find the following: the smartphone, the headset, the charger, a USB Type C cable, the Eject tool for the SIM card tray, the Quick Start Guide, and the warranty. The Huawei P10 is pre-fitted with a screen protector which is a very nice touch, saving users from having to buy one separately. If you want a video overview of the unboxing experience, watch the official video below: The Huawei P10 is available in eight colors: Arctic White, Dazzling Blue, Rose Gold, Presting Gold, Graphite Black, Moonlight Silver, Greeney and Dazzling Gold. You can see them all in the picture below. We tested the Dazzling Blue variant. This smartphone features a 5.1-inch screen, with a 71.2% screen-to-body ratio and a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels. The panel is an IPS-NEO LCD, and the pixel density is 432 ppi. If you want to know what ppi means, read this article: What is PPI and does it matter? The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5. Huawei P10 is powered by Huawei's own Kirin 960 Octa-core processor with four cores running at 2.4 GHz and the other four at 1.8 GHz. The graphics chip is a Mali-G71 MP8. This smartphone comes with 32 or 64GB of storage space which can be expanded with a microSD card up to 256 GB. Regarding memory, it has 4GB of RAM. The cameras are a feature that makes this smartphone stand out: on the rear, we have a two-camera system with dual-tone flash and optical image stabilization. One camera has 20 megapixels while the other has 12. The two lens have an aperture of f2.2, and the optics are made by Leica. The front camera has 8 megapixels and aperture of f1.9. Regarding connectivity, we get Bluetooth 4.2 support, and connections to wireless networks using the latest 802.11ac standard. This smartphone also has a modern USB Type C port which is also used for fast-charging the device. This phone is available both in single-SIM and dual-SIM configurations. The dual-SIM variant works in Dual SIM Dual Standby, which means that your smartphone can have both SIM cards active at one time, but only as long as they are not used. Huawei P10 has a variety of sensors built-in, such as an accelerometer, a g-sensor or accelerometer, a gyroscope, a proximity sensor, a compass, an ambient light sensor and a fingerprint reader on the front, just beneath the display. The smartphone is equipped with a generous non-removable Li-Ion 3200 mAh battery. Concerning size, Huawei P10 is rather small when compared to many other flagships. It has 5.7 x 2.7 x 0.27 inches or 145.3 mm x 69.3 mm x 6.98 mm in height x width x depth. Concerning weight, this smartphone is very light at 5.11 ounces or 145 grams. If you want to see all the official specifications of the Huawei P10, visit this page: Huawei P10 - Specifications. Huawei P10 offers a very satisfying unboxing experience, worthy of a premium device. Also, the smartphone is beautiful when you take it out of the box, and it has the high-end hardware you would expect from a device in its class.

Design and build quality

Huawei P10 has a beautiful full metal unibody design with a side curvature that's a bit flatter than what you find on other smartphones. As mentioned earlier, it is pre-fitted with a screen protector, which saves you from buying one separately. The screen looks beautiful, and it is a pleasure to watch. The fingerprint sensor is just beneath the screen, covered in glass. It's a very comfortable place that mimics the approach used on the latest iPhone. Hardware buttons are only on the right edge of the smartphone: the traditional Power button and the volume rocker. A nice touch is the fact that the Power button has a different texture and tactile feedback so that you recognize it even when you are not looking at it, like when you take the smartphone out of your pocket. This button also has subtle red highlights, which makes it also stand out from a visual perspective. The left edge of the smartphone holds the SIM tray which you can eject using the pin bundled in the packaging. As you can see, you can either use a SIM card and a microSD card or two SIM cards and no microSD card. On the bottom edge, you have the USB Type C port in the center, the microphone pinhole, the loudspeaker and the audio jack. There's another microphone pinhole on the top edge of the Huawei P10. The back of the smartphone not only looks great but it is also a pleasure to touch. The blue hue is beautiful to watch in direct sunlight, and the other color variants are impressive too. For this smartphone, we recommend that you skip the Graphite Black variant and choose any other color. You won't be sorry you did. The "hyper diamond cut" finish on the back feels very satisfying to touch, and it makes it harder for your smartphone to slip from all kinds of surfaces, as often happens to all-glass smartphones. The two cameras are nicely integrated into the back of the Huawei P10, and there's no "camera bump" as you see on other smartphones. Overall, we are very pleased with the looks of the Huawei P10, its lightness and the quality of the materials that are used in its construction. It's more discreet than other flagships, but that's something we appreciate. We highly recommend skipping the boring Graphite Black variant and going for the more colorful options. They look great! If you would like to learn more about the smartphone experience offered by Huawei P10, its camera, bundled apps and performance in benchmarks, go to the second page of this review.

The smartphone experience on the Huawei P10

The feature that we appreciate the most when using the Huawei P10 is its small size, its lightness and the tactile feedback you get when holding it and using it. It's a discreet and beautiful smartphone that will be appreciated first and foremost by users who don't want large smartphones. The signal reception is excellent, and so is the quality of your phone conversations. The audio quality you get is top-notch both when using the headset that's bundled with the Huawei P10 and the external speaker. The Full HD screen is perfect for watching movies on your smartphone. While it doesn't impress with a lot of punch like the display on the Samsung Galaxy S8, it is a high-quality display, with great outdoor visibility. A minor but useful feature is that you can turn on the Gloves mode so that you can use it while wearing gloves. Gaming is also a positive experience on the Huawei P10. There's no Android game that this smartphone can't run with ease, at high-quality graphical resolution. However, benchmarks have shown that performance in games is lower than on other flagships it is competing with. Luckily, from a subjective experience, you won't notice a difference in this regard when compared to other flagships. You won't have any issues when multi-tasking and, if you are a big Facebook or WhatsApp user, you will appreciate the App twin feature that allows you to use two different accounts for the same app, at the same time. The fingerprint sensor on the Huawei P10 can also be used as a navigational button, similar to the latest iPhone. However, when setting it to work like that, the gesture recognition is not always precise, resulting in unnecessary frustration. That's why it is best to keep using the virtual navigation bar on the bottom of the display and configure it to work as you wish. Battery life is good but not as great as on other flagships. In typical usage scenarios, it shouldn't have any difficulty lasting you for a day. However, you shouldn't expect more than that unless you are a very light smartphone user. Its fast charging helps a lot though, and you can lengthen the autonomy you get by connecting your smartphone to the power line for a couple of minutes. Huawei P10 offers an excellent smartphone experience: it's small and easy to carry, it looks, and it feels great, it is fast, and you get great audio quality both in phone calls and in multimedia experiences. It's only notable downside is the autonomy. In most cases, the battery on the Huawei P10 only lasts you for a day on a full charge. Other flagships offer more.

The camera experience on the Huawei P10

The camera experience offered by Huawei P10 is a high point of this smartphone. Not only do you get plenty of photography mods that are useful to beginners, but there are also plenty of manual controls for professionals. Unlike the camera apps on most smartphones, the app on the Huawei P10 feels like it was designed by photographers. When using the rear cameras, pictures can be taken at very high resolutions, like 3968 x 2976, 3264x1840 or 5120 x 3840 pixels. You can also record videos in Full HD at 60 frames per second or at Ultra HD 4K and 30 frames per second. When using the front camera, pictures can be taken at high resolutions, like 3264 x 2448 or 3264x1840 pixels. You can also record videos at Full HD and 30 frames per second. Picture taking is a great experience on the Huawei P10, especially if you are into photography and you have some technical skill. The autofocus works great, the white balance and the color rendering is impressive in most conditions. The only downside of this smartphone is with taking pictures in very low light environments. Details get lost in the darker parts of the picture, and there's also some luminance noise visible in the sky. Also, the night photography mode asks users to keep the smartphone steady for many seconds, and you need a tripod to get good results. Other than that, you can count on the Huawei P10 to deliver good looking pictures that are very close to reality. To give you an idea of the results you get on this smartphone, browse the gallery below which includes portraits, landscapes, macro shots, selfies, and other pictures taken in different lighting conditions. We used to be big fans of Nokia Lumia devices for photography, and Huawei P10 was the first Android smartphone that felt like a spiritual successor in this regard. Recording video is also a positive experience. To give you an idea, look at the landscape we filmed below in a very hot summer day. Shooting moving subjects also works well on this smartphone, as you can see in the video below. Users who are passionate about photography will be very happy with the Huawei P10. It works great in all conditions except in low-light environments, where details to get lost.

Android 7.0, EMUI 5.1 and bundled apps

Huawei P10 comes with Android 7.0 Nougat installed and the proprietary EMUI user interface that's developed by Huawei. EMUI stands for Emotion UI and it is available in version 5.1. We like its minimalism and customizability. You get access to all kinds of themes, wallpapers and customization options. For example, you can use the classic on-screen buttons for Back, Home and Recent apps. But, you can use the Home button and different actions to get the same result: a single tap means going Back, a long press means going Home while a swipe to the left or the right brings up the Recent apps. Another useful feature of the EMUI is the fact that you can sign on WhatsApp and Facebook with two different accounts for the same app, at the same time. When it comes to bundled apps, Huawei P10 does have some installed but, their number is smaller than on the more affordable model Huawei P10 lite. Also, the apps that are bundled tend to be more useful, which is great. Here is the list of pre-installed apps that come with the Huawei P10:

• Backup - use it to backup personal data such as contacts, messages, call logs, apps and also multimedia content. You can save backups to an SD card, on the internal storage, on a USB storage device connected to the smartphone, or on a PC.
• Booking.com - the official app for the popular travel service. If you are not interested in using it, you can remove it with ease.
• Compass - a simple compass app that tells you the cardinal points.
• Files - your basic file manager for Android. It is easy to use and useful.
• Flashlight - the app does what its name implies, and it can be useful at times.
• Gallery - this is Huawei's reinterpretation of the Google Photos app, which is also bundled with your smartphone. Even though it is a well-built app, we tend to prefer Google Photos.
• HiCare - a support app that provides you with customer care services. You can use it to find information such as the nearest service center, read the warranty policy, check your warranty status, read the manuals and so on.
• HiGame - a portal for discovering, downloading and installing games on your smartphone.
• HuaweiHealth - provides information about health activities such as the steps you have taken or the calories you have burned.
• Mirror - while a mirror isn't always at hand, your smartphone is, and you can use it to see how awesome you look in the morning. 🙂
• Music - a simple music player.
• Notepad - a simple note-taking app.
• Phone Manager - cleans your smartphone of junk files, cache, and malware, and shows details about the mobile data you used, the app permissions you gave and so on. It is worth mentioning that Avast powers the antivirus.
• Recorder - a basic voice recorder that can be useful when you need this type of app.
• Themes - a portal for discovering and installing themes and wallpapers. It works only if you log in with a Huawei ID.
• Todoist - you get a free 1-year subscription to this task management service.
• Videos - basic movie player for viewing the movies that are stored on your smartphone.
• Weather - gives you the weather forecast for your area or for the places you specify.

Alongside these Huawei apps, you get all the default Google apps that are installed on any Android smartphone (apps like Google Drive, Maps or Google Photos) as well as the official apps for Instagram and Facebook. The EMUI user interface on the Huawei P10 is beautiful, fast and very customizable. We like its minimalism and its App Twin feature. Unfortunately, this smartphone also comes with some bloatware, most of which cannot be removed. However, Huawei has also bundled many useful apps.

Performance in benchmarks

The first benchmark we ran was Vellamo, which is an app developed by Qualcomm. In the Multicore tests, which measures the speed of the processor when it runs multiple tasks simultaneously, Huawei P10 delivered an impressive score, which is higher than anything we ever tested. Other websites which tested the latest Samsung Galaxy S8, reported smaller scores for the Samsung smartphones. A great start for the Huawei P10! Then we ran the Metal tests from Vellamo, which measure the speed of the processor when it runs a task using a single core. Many apps are not optimized well enough to use multiple cores, and this test is necessary for this reason. Huawei P10 got a solid score of 2737, but that was lower than what you would get on a Samsung Galaxy S8. Next, we went on to check the smartphone's performance when browsing the internet. We used Vellamo again, but this time we ran the Browser test. Huawei P10 got a fantastic score of 5992 points, meaning that browsing the web is a swift experience on this smartphone. The Huawei P10 offers support for 4G data connections, so we measured its performance in this area also. To do the measurements, we used Speedtest, an app which tests how fast your internet connection is. The results were very similar to what you get with other high-end smartphones in our area. Next came the gaming benchmarks, for which we used an app called GFXBench GL Benchmark. We recorded the results measured in the 1080p Car Chase Offscreen, 1080p Manhattan 3.1 Offscreen and 1080p T-Rex Offscreen tests. We only used the 1080p tests because the resolution is standardized at 1080p and that gives us results that can be compared easier with other smartphones, even if their screen resolutions differ. In the 1080p Car Chase Offscreen test, Huawei P10 rendered a similar number of frames to Samsung Galaxy S7 edge. This is a good result for users who are interested in gaming on their smartphone. The second graphical test we ran was 1080p Manhattan 3.1 Offscreen, in which Huawei P10 managed to render 1589 frames. This result too was very close to what you get on a Samsung Galaxy S7 edge. The third and final gaming test we ran was 1080p T-Rex Offscreen, a test which shows you how the smartphone fares in older games with fewer visual details. Again, Huawei P10 performed great. The conclusion of the gaming benchmarks is that the Huawei P10 is a good smartphone for gamers, delivering a performance level that is very close to what you get on a Samsung Galaxy S7 edge. One other significant thing about any smartphone is how long it lasts on a full battery charge. To measure that, we used PCMark's Work 2.0 battery life test, which measures the autonomy of the battery when the device is running the usual day to day activities like browsing the web, working with documents, or editing photos. Huawei P10 managed to last for 7 hours and 26 minutes. It is an average result in the world of high-end smartphones. Other models like the Samsung Galaxy S8 managed to last a bit more than 8 hours. However, in real-life situations, under normal use, it shouldn't have any difficulty in lasting you for a full day. Benchmarks have shown that Huawei P10 is a great performer. In day-to-day app use, its performance is comparable to that of the Samsung Galaxy S8 while in gaming it is very similar to Samsung Galaxy S7 edge. Not too shabby, if you ask us! You will surely be pleased with the performance of this smartphone.

What is your opinion about Huawei P10?

Now that you know the strengths and weaknesses that we identified for the Huawei P10 share with us your views about this smartphone. Is its performance in benchmarks enough for you? Do you like the camera samples that we took with it Is it a flagship that you want to buy? Share your comments below and let's start a conversation.