Huawei P10 and P10 Plus – specs review

It's flagship season in Barcelona, and a new pair of high-end smartphones by none other than China's prime mobile export – Huawei – has been bestowed upon us. The Huawei P10 and P10 Plus are a pair of hot Android smartphones with a lot going on about them, so let's dig into their spec sheets and see what they have to offer to the mobile user of 2017.

Design

More of what made the P9 and P9 Plus great

The Huawei P10 is a stylish, curved-screen high-end smartphone built out of sturdy aluminum with a bit of glass on the back panel for added splendor – not at all unlike its predecessor, the Huawei P9. The home button is still part of the design, featuring an embedded fingerprint sensor. Huawei is also giving colors more diversity – the P10 is available in white, black, gold, green, purple, and the inevitable rose gold. Of course, all of this goes for the Huawei P10 Plus as well – it's basically the P10's bigger brother.

Display

Quad-HD resolution AMOLED panels are what's up now

In tune with modern technology, Huawei equipped the P10 with a 5.1-inch AMOLED display that outputs images at a 1440 x 2560 resolution. The bigger P10 Plus has a 5.5-inch screen with the same fidelity. That's everything needed in order to stay competitive against other high-end smartphones from this year. It's also a significant upgrade over last year's P9 phones, which boasted 1080p-resolution LCD screens.

Performance

The self-made Kirin 960 chipset occupies the flagships' engine rooms

Not unlike Samsung and Apple, the two most important players in the smartphone game, Huawei develops its own silicon for its needs – to generally great results. The P10 and P10 Plus are powered by the Kirin 960 chipset that comes with an octa-core CPU (clocked to max. 2.3GHz frequency), a Mali-G71 graphics unit, and between 4GB to 6GB of RAM. Storage-wise, users can choose between 64GB or 128GB of memory. The processor has a disadvantage over the Samsung Exynos 8895 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 830 chipsets in that it's produced on an older, 16nm process, whereas they are made at 10nm. But its performance and feature set are more than adequate enough to provide performance parity and a degree of future-proofing.

Huawei has augmented the platform with bespoke software tweaks, too. The machine learning algorithm learns how users use their phones while the Huawei Ultra Memory engine anticipates app usage and manages RAM memory, so that the most-used apps and services load faster and stay available for multitasking. Additionally, the EMUI 5.1 interface has improved touch response with a faster touch control driver, predictive touch tracking, and parallel graphics rendering.


The Huawei P10 is powered by a 3200mAh battery, while the Huawei P10 Plus has a 3750mAh unit. Both devices support Huawei SuperCharge technology – a low voltage, low temperature fast charging solution with real-time voltage, current and temperature monitoring.

Camera

More of the Leica-engineered dual camera goodness is on offer

Continuing its partnership with Leica, Huawei brought up a Dual Camera 2.0 setup for the P10 that comes with a wide list of features, such as precise 3D facial detection, dynamic illumination, portrait enhancements, natural bokeh effect, and Huawei Hybrid Zoom. The dual camera setup has a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and a 12-megapixel RGB sensor, combining the fine detail from the black-and-white sensor with the colors from the RGB sensor. On the front side, an 8-megapixel Leica front camera takes care of selfies.

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