Announced at MWC this year, the Huawei P10 Plus is here with its dual-Leica cameras. How will it hold up against the fierce competition from LG, Samsung and other? We’re here to find out.
Design & Hardware
The P10 Plus is beautiful, and with its 5.5-inch screen size, the P10 Plus is only a tad bigger than its 5.1-inch little brother, the P10, but maintains the same 7mm thickness, and weighs only 20g heavier at 165g. It also rocks an all aluminium body with a small glass piece at the top which houses the cameras and flash.
The P10 we reviewed was the Graphite Black, and one couldn’t help but notice that Huawei was aiming for the same matte-black scheme of the iPhone 7 — but hey, personally, I feel this is a good thing. The phone has some stylish touches added to it, like the red colour around the sleep/wake key, and the finish was overall quite refined. In a move against other manufacturers, the fingerprint sensor has been moved to the front and located below the screen.
To our disappointment, the P10 Plus isn’t waterproof.
Screen & Display
As mentioned, the Huawei P10 Plus has a 5.5-inch IPS LCD, at a resolution of 2560 x 1440 with 534ppi. Although it doesn’t offer the deep blacks and saturated colours of an AMOLED panel, the screen is gorgeous — it is bright, vidid, and outdoor visibility is excellent.
The colours are adjustable but the user, and includes a low-light / late-night comfort reading profile.
Software & Performance
The P10 plus runs Android 7 Nougat with Huawei’s EMUI interface on top if it. Although the company’s updated EMUI packs a lot of new and useful features — and feels that it is moving towards a clean Android aesthetic — it still does not offer the stock Android experience which a lot of users are asking for.
Huawei has incorporated a lot of tweaks, like power saving, performance enhancing, and other features that bring under the hood performance boosts.
On of the most noticeable features is the new fingerprint scanner, which can be used as soft keys for navigation as well. When activated, you will be able to press to go home, swipe left to go back and swipe right to open recent apps. Long pressing the scanner activates Google Now On Tap. The gestures will take some time to get used to, but once mastered, they would work flawlessly, and alternatively you can use the standard visual navigation bar.
Camera
The Leica co-branded camera is back again with a slew of new updates. The camera packs a 12-megapixel color sensor and a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor with Summilux-H lenses and f/1.8 aperture, which makes the P10 Plus perform great in low-light conditions. Overall we’re very impressed with the dual-camera setup, the P10 Plus delivers impressive results. Images are sharp, the colours realistic, and the monochrome sensor brings out the detail in the photos.
On the front, there’s an 8Mp Leica branded camera with an f/1.9 aperture. It has the ability to automatically detect the number of people in the picture and can adjust to wide-angle if needed — nifty if you’re on a night out with a group of friends.
Huawei and Leica have also collaborated on the camera software, bringing a powerful camera user interfaces to the P10 Plus. Swipe left or right to access option menus like Night Shot, Light Painting, Good Food and some less usable ones like Watermark, Audio Note and Document Scan. Swipe up to access the pro manual mode with options to play around with exposure, white balance and so on.
Performance & Battery
The P10 Plus is powered by the Kirin 960 octa-core processor, 4GB of RAM with 64GB version and 6GB of RAM with the 128GB model. We had no issues with performance while testing with games and heavy apps.
The P10 Plus has a 3750mAh battery and performed surprisingly well under heavy use. Although the standby time doesn’t seem to be as good as other flagships, the P10 Plus can easily take you through an entire day. The screen-on time delivers around 4.5-5 hours and around an hour of video streaming eats up about 6% while on WiFi.
Huawei’s Supercharge fast charging via the USB Type-C port is can go from 0 to 100% in about 90 minutes.
Conclusion
The P10 Plus is solid smartphone from Huawei bringing in a great design, high-end hardware and refined software experience. It’s missing important features compared to other rival Android devices like waterproofing and wireless charging, but it’s still one of the best smartphones available in the market to date.
