Gadgetory

Huawei brings their brand-new p-series device that undercuts the flagship mate line however the line between the two has gradually gotten blurred in previous generations does this new P series device bring its own flavor on top of features that we may have seen any previous may 9 well it's time to find out because it's Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and this is our review of the Huawei P 10 and P 10 plus now remember to head on over to the Android 30.com full written review to not only take a look at my opinions but also the opinions of our senior editor Chris Karlin who was able to take the P 10 to places like the Geneva Auto Show and this review written and in the video section we are going to have both of our opinions be represented the P 10 devices are still pretty reminiscent of the previous P 9 and other metal construction phones in the P series they have smooth sides and corners and all the buttons are on the right side including a subtle but very effective color accent that goes around the power button it's something that we really enjoy the phone is also pretty thin making it pretty easy to grip while remaining attractively slim now I hardly ever take the stance that any Android device looks like an iPhone but I literally felt like it when it came to the regular P 10 because of its slim profile and its overall size I got the feeling that it was like an iPhone 7 when holding it and now this is not really a big deal but I thought it was something that it was worthy of mention a small panel on the top when it comes to the backing houses the dual sensor system which does change in combination depending on which Edition is used below that however is the potential for a couple of new colors our P 10 unit has the new dazzling blue color we don't have the greenery edition but also there's another little quirk about the vacuum that we found kind of enjoyable the only real feature to take note of on the front is the capacitive key below the screen that is not only where the fingerprint sensor is but there's also what you can use in place of the soft keys you can press it to go back hold it to hit home or swipe left and right in order to open up the recent map screen it is pretty ingenious we admit but not only did it take a while to get used to the recent apps a gesture in particular wasn't as reliable as the soft key so overall the p10 the regular one is the easier to use device mostly because of its size however the p10 plus does have more screen real estate the design benefits mainly from the new colors otherwise there are few frills to speak of in these tried-and-true metal builds the screens do change between the two devices and not just in size the p10 5.1 inch display has 1080p resolution while the plusses 5.5 inch screen boasts 2k resolution now these are IPS screens and we give huawei some credit for claiming that these screens will get up to 600 nits in brightness which is pretty dang bright and in our testing we found that to pretty much be the case as far as the colors ago they do tend to the cooler side of the color spectrum but that's not that big of a deal when you can customize them in two settings which brings us to performance and underneath all that surface we have the ki-rin 960 and the mali g71 MP 8 graphics benchmarks put both of these phones pretty high up on the food chain which is not that big of a surprise and our p 10 plus gets the bump up to 6 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of on-board storage now I play plenty of games on the P 10 plus in particular including a rather intensive port of jade Empire and with hours of gameplay under my belt I didn't find any real hiccups with the game performance and the same goes for all general app usage and also getting through the interface of emui it is important to note however that higher resolutions and the Plus model make it work a bit harder under heavy graphical load this is really only mentionable because of the graphics benchmarks which favor the 1080p resolution P 10 over the P 10 plus now aside from the capacitive key that we have already covered there are no real big additions in the hardware all network connections are possible including NFC and I use the P 10 Plus on the t-mobile network without any issues when it came to speed on the mobile network or call quality our initial test using the Android authority battery testing app showed that B screen on time could get up to 5 hours and in my actual daily usage of the P 10 plus I found that to be the case with general usage ranging from Jade Empire gameplay to YouTube viewing to a lot of music playing and even GPS navigation from time to time I found the five hours of screen on time to pretty much be the case charging up the phone is also a breeze especially if you use the included break and cable now you'll be able to get from zero to 50 percent in about how an hour which is awesome however you're going to get slower speeds if you use other cables and chargers however I did really find that to be too much of an issue especially when using qc3 charger adapters a regular 12 megapixel camera at F 2.2 aperture is backed by a 20 megapixel monochrome sensor and that's in the case of the regular P 10 the P 10 plus gets a aperture bump to F 1.8 but before we talk about the main camera let's talk about the selfie or front-facing camera and 8 megapixel F 1.9 aperture shooter helps to get better low-light shots and is backed by what is pretty much only considered a powerful selfie mode that is a little bit uncomfortable in terms of its customization the perfect selfie mode requires users to look in a few different directions so it can take control of things like your eyes and even your jawline you can take a look here at the original photo and then what it looks like at five level and then full on at ten level you can almost barely recognize me otherwise pictures on the front facing camera and indeed the main camera benefit from a standard portrait mode that adds a little bit of a blur to the background and a few of these effects it's a nice touch that falls short in implementation when you see that the bouquet actually eats up parts of the subject sometimes which brings us to the main camera an actual aperture setting can be used to pull the foreground away from everything behind it on top of the portrait mode we just mentioned it can get as low as 0.9 v aperture which is impressive but in reality it doesn't fully emulate what real lenses can do at that aperture and at the same time there's still the problem that the bouquet could actually eat up parts of the subject video modes now include 4k and 1080p 60 frames per second recording which is all good to see now while the resulting videos look quite good and don't really lack in any one aspect and hence stabilization only works on the 1080p shooting modes you have óas available for 4k but if you want the smoothest video you'll probably have to stick with 1080p now the main thing about the camera is that you have to learn its little quirks and you also have to know a thing or two about photography to get the best photos when it comes to HDR for example the best way of getting the best HDR photo is to hold on your subject that you want to focus on and then drag the exposure compensation over to a very bright portion of the blown out image so that will allow for the highlights to be brought down while the shadows can be bumped up with the HDR enhanced this isn't really something you would know off the bat and you can't really just go to HDR and shoot a photo and expect it to be amazing and while we will always enjoy seeing manual controls and built-in camera software it does require you to kind of use those settings in order to get the best possible photo the Huawei P 10 and P 10 plus have great cameras but they're not necessarily the most user-friendly auto cameras well really overall we see that the pictures from the P 10 proved that the dual camera lens and sensor combo still works not to mention the fact that monochromatic photos look awesome because it has a 20 megapixel sensor dedicated to it all pictures have a good level of detail and color modes can be changed through their output to vivid or soft aside from the standard profile it's really the level of detail that makes us understand why this camera got good marks on the XO mark now while we wouldn't really recommend it for just anybody looking for a great auto shooter if you know a thing or two or dive into the settings of the camera you can get some of the great pictures that you would expect from the P 10 and P 10 plus and finally emui the huawei Android iteration that has seen a few changes in the last generations and the P 10 emui still has a large number of features that make it one of the most robust versions of Android so far and it only gets better with Android nougat especially with the addition of Google assistants at first glance the Mui kind of grates on the senses because it doesn't have an app drawer but thankfully even that is an option in the settings and after adding the app drawer a lot of what I didn't like about emui even in previous generations got remedied that's only one facet of this operating systems capabilities ever there's a ton that the software can do and users may not even know it without looking through the settings for example the capacitive key we mentioned earlier but also a floating dock that also can replace these soft keys by adding a small button that floats on the screen and then you can just press all of the different home back or recent apps buttons there and that doesn't even include the knuckle feature that emui has kind of been known for already you basically take a knuckle and you almost punch the display and do a number of gestures with your knuckle and it will trigger different shortcuts or applications and all of these functions and more under an interface that actually isn't too hard on the eyes anymore especially after adding in the app drawer we're not the biggest fans of the icon pack but we give lobby credit where credit is due because of the level of polish that they put into emui this time around not only do elements no longer really bleed past their designated areas but even then animations are crisp and easy on the eyes and everything works very smoothly we do admit that users might have a bit of difficulty fathoming all that it can do without some proper due diligence but in general you couldn't really go wrong with this version of emui so with that the huawei P 10 and P 10 plus are going to be available in a number of different markets but availability in the u.s. is still a bit let's say blurry for now in Europe you'll be able to get the phone for 649 euros in the case of the p10 and 699 euros for the P 10 plus and so there you have it - the huawei P 10 and the P 10 plus these are very solid devices and really show that Huawei is blurring the line from its flagship mate line down to its P serious phones on the P 10 is a wonderful example of that while we do think that it's camera is quite stellar it does require a bit of due diligence and the display is great the design is very solid and one thing we really love about the Sun is its battery life it's one of those phones that requires users to kind of do their homework and then once figuring out all of the different quirks of the phone you might end up having one of the best Android experiences of 2017 especially considering that we are expecting all of the competition in 2017 to be pretty fierce if you do have the ability to get the Huawei P 10 and choose between it and other Android flagships this year we think you might actually have a fight on your hands so from there thank you so much for watching as always and remember to stay tuned to android authority for all of the best including more about the Huawei P 10 P 10 plus and more from always lineup as we saw them at MWC 2017 you'll see reviews of all of the upcoming flagships here as well so make sure you stay tuned by subscribing to the channel if you haven't already and then from there you can head on over to Andrew 30.com for even more from us because we are your source for all things Android