Gadgetory

rumors have been floating around lately if huawei made Nexus and this just might be our very first taste of it I'm hi out to Houston bringing you pocket now full video review of the Huawei p8 here in the states while ways primarily known for making budget handsets targeted at the prepaid market the p8 is anything but that dropping the ascend brand-name found on most high-end Huawei phones the p8 is the company's latest flagship device and a showcase of exactly what it's capable of from the aluminum chassis and beveled edges to the ultra-thin design it looks and feels a lot like the Sony Xperia z3 or the iPhone 5 and like those two devices there's no denying that this is a beautiful well-built handset it weighs a comfortable 144 grams and it's just six point four millimeters thick the phone's 5.2 inch 1080p display is an IPS panel coded and Gorilla Glass 3 with fantastic viewing angles and good color reproduction though it's certainly not the brightest or most vivid panel we've seen so it looks great and can be seen in fairly well in harsh sunlight above the display sits the eight megapixel front facing camera the earpiece speaker and the ambient light sensor the hardware controls for the p8 set along the right-hand side consisting of just a volume rocker and a power button and there are ejectable trays for microSD and nano SIM cards here as well especially given its physical similarities to the Xperia z3 I would have loved to have seen a two-step camera button thrown in here but that's just a minor complaint for the outstanding Hardware there's a headphone jack and a pinhole microphone at the top of the PA and speaker and microphone grilles on the bottom surrounding the happiest microUSB port we've ever seen seriously this might be my favorite thing about the phone around back we see hallways logo and the 13 megapixel primary camera and F 2.0 Sony RGB W sensor with optical image stabilization and a dual tone LED flash the p8 runs Huawei's custom emotion UI 3.1 on top of Android 5.0 lollipop it's pretty far from the typical Android experience we're used to seeing but if you've used a high-end Huawei phone like the ascend mate 7 this isn't much differ there's no app drawer on the home screen but you can always sort your apps with folders and anything you can't find you can pull down anywhere in the home screen to search through apps contacts messages and more in the unified search bar there's also a search bar in the settings menu because there are so many options here that it's hard not to get a little overwhelmed along with the standard settings hallway offers options like one-handed UI motion controls and so on we like the constantly changing wallpapers each time you turn on the display and the lock screens quick toggles are reminiscent of Apple's control center overall it's a pretty good software experience but it's not without its quirks there's a new knuckle sensing feature that's supposed to make taking screenshots quick and easy just draw a box with your knuckle to capture a part of the screen or not twice for a full screen shot but all too often the p8 seem to have trouble differentiating my knuckle for my finger and the result was way too many screenshots and missed touch input there's also the way emotion UI handles Google notifications particularly from Gmail where the subject line is an illegible dark gray font over a black background speaking of Google notifications if you wanted to use your Android wear SmartWatch with the PA you might be out of luck something about the way the software handles notifications keeps the wear app from running properly and I couldn't get it to work for more than a few minutes with my Moto 360 with two quad-core processors and three gigabytes of RAM in its disposal it's no surprise that the p8 flies through just about any task you put it to it's pretty tough to trip up with normal use and even with demanding tasks like streaming high-res video or playing games you won't see much hesitation the media does have its troubles elsewhere while performance is fine the speaker is tinny and though it gets plenty loud it's easily muffled by the hand the battery life also takes a major toll here I was able to get over five hours of screen on time on days of just scrolling through Twitter and responding to emails and texts but even just opening YouTube for a short while I brought my average screen on time down to about two and a half hours the 13 megapixel camera is pretty good with varying shooting modes and decent manual controls it takes reasonably sharp photos even in low-light and colors are fairly well balanced too although nothing really seems to pop at you always included a quick shutter that allows you to double press the volume down key when the display is off to immediately launch the camera and snap a photo though this means that you can't frame the shot or focus on the subject beforehand but what really impressed me was how well the additional shooting modes worked like the LG g4 the PA has a few long exposure settings called light painting I tried silky water on this miniature waterfall and the result actually looks quite nice there's also panorama mode which does an excellent job at stitching together each angle you capture so long as you have a steady hand video also looks good thanks to the p8 s included oh is but keep in mind that there's no option for 4k or slow-motion just 30 frame 1080p call quality in our testing around the Indianapolis Metropolitan Area sounded good for both ends of the call and it's even pretty good on speakerphone the only network problem we ran into with the p8 was its lack of LTE compatibility in the States so 4G will have to do but that's slightly offset by all of Huawei's antenna optimizations the p8 connects to a network 33% faster at boot up than its fastest competition and it intelligently switches you between your mobile and Wi-Fi networks depending on which connection is the strongest the pH gorgeous hardware is paired with powerful specs speedy performance a reliable camera and is somewhat lacking software experience that leaves us thinking that Nexus version would be outstanding but until then always version is still a good buy for the right kind of user just so long as you don't use Android wear if you like the p8 and you want to know more about it check out our written review at pocketnow.com but subscribe to the channel first so you don't miss another video once again i'm hi out to houston and thanks for watching we'll see you next time