The brand Huawei is no longer strange here in Malaysia, the Chinese giant Telco has build a steady share of wallet and even positioned top 2 phone maker in Malaysia according to IDC report. Last year the company released a flagship phone, the P9 that well-received Globally.

This year Huawei introduced the successor of Huawei P9, the Huawei P10-series. It consist of P10, P10 Plus and P10 lite.

Here I’m gonna share with you the Huawei P10 which I’m currently using it as my daily driver for 2 weeks now.

Design and build

First impression was the full metal unibody design is solid and has a very slim profile at 6.99mm. The curving edges is so comfortable on hand and look very premium.

A few of my friends told me that the P10 does look similar to the iPhone especially the black version review unit that I have. The Huawei P10 shared the same design language with the Huawei P9, just that the fingerprint sensor on the P10 relocated to the one piece front glass’s capacitive home button.

The new fingerprint sensor on the P10 works pretty fast and accurate. Beside function as a home button and fingerprint reader, it can combine the navigation keys into the home button so you can fully utilized the screen.

The volume rocker and power button are tactile. The bottom edge of the phone is the mono speaker, USB Type-C and 3.5mm headphone jack.

The black version that I have is matte finishes on the rear, it tend to pick up smudges and fingerprints grease. No problem for me as I’m using a protective case that came along with the device.

Display

P10 sports a 5.1-inch 1,080P Full HD resolution display that protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The display is bright, crisp and sharp despite it’s only Full HD. In fact, the 1,080P resolution is more than enough for a 5.1-inch display size and it consume lesser power compare to QHD.

Co-engineered “Leica” Dual Camera Setup

Huawei P9 was the first phone debut with the Leica branded dual-camera and follow by the Mate 9, now the P10 and P10 Plus. The camera setup were very similar to the P9 and the company has boosted up the monochrome sensor to 20 megapixel. So now it has a 12 megapixel color sensor with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) accompany by a 20 megapixel monochrome sensor, placing both behind is f/2.2 aperture Leica SUMMARIT-H lenses. Yes! It’s the same setup with the Huawei Mate 9.

The phone takes a photo using both of the sensors and combines both of the images to output with an enhanced details and contrast in the color photo. This able to be done because the monochrome sensor are able to capture 100% details and contrast and give more data to work on the color image processes.

With this dual camera setup, the P10 able to capture sharp, bright and pretty awesome artificial Bokeh aka depth-of-field effect picture. In portrait mode, the P10 will enable the 190-points detection to identify outlines of faces before blurred out the background. The accuracy has improved much over the P9.

All the photos turned to more eye-catching and focus with the Bokeh effect. This doesn’t only apply to faces, it also works on object where the camera recognize the focal of the object and background.

Photo-taking with the Huawei P10 is easy as one, two, three. You can shoot like a “Pro” with the wide aperture effect.

The P10’s front camera is an 8 megapixel camera that also feature Leica’s portrait mode that blurred out the background for more details and focus image. But still the Portrait Mode is not as accurate when comes to face-line detection. It also has this group selfies tool that detects faces in the shot and zoom wider to take groupfies.

On the app itself, it features three color profiles; standard, vivid and smooth colors for your photo liking taste. The manual mode can be enabled by just a flick up from the shutter button and has all the controls; ISO, shutter speeds, auto-focus, exposure focus, exposure value and white balance. These are all the control you will find on a semipro camera.

If you are not into manual mode, there are a lot camera modes available;

Here are some photos taking with the Huawei P10;

(all the photos were not post edited/photoshop-ed and uploaded to flickr straight from the Huawei P10)

Rear Cameras
Click on the image for high resolution viewing

Front camera


Normal vs Portrait Mode

Normal vs Portrait Mode

Performance and Battery Life

Huawei has its own home-breed SoC, the HiSilicon Kirin 960 chipset (that can be found on the Huawei Mate 9) and paired with a 4GB of RAM. It comes with one storage size option which is 64GB and can be further expands up to 256GB via microSD card slot that took up the second SIM slot.

The chipset was not disappointed, after all it’s a flagship processor. Based on AnTuTu benchmark, the P10 scored 136,808 points which are on par with others flagship chipset like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 and Samsung Exynos 8890.

The P10 able to handle graphically demanding games like the Need for Speeds, Super Mario Run and more. Didn’t encounter any lagging or heat problem throughout the review.

The Huawei P10 is packed with only 3,200 mAh battery and it has a quite decent battery life. With usage almost 5 hours of SOT, it still left about 14% juice and it would definitely last a full day use with a single charge.

To charge the phone, it comes with Huawei SuperCharge fast charge that operates at 4.5V and 5A, promise to deliver a full charge in 90 minutes or a day’s usage with a 20 minutes charge.

EMUI 5.1

The Huawei P10 is packed with the latest Android software, Android 7.0 Nougat and skinned with the Emotion UI 5.1 (EMUI 5.1). By default the EMUI doesn’t feature app drawer and all the apps are placed all over the home screens like the iOS. You can obtain the app drawer in the settings.

Despite the Huawei P10 runs on the latest Android 7.0 OS, it doesn’t have the Google Assistant which I find it a let down.

The EMUI 5.1 also feature this “App Twin” that allows you to have two same apps to runs simutoneously in one phone. For example; WhatsApp, Facebook, WeChat and more. This take the advantage of have dual SIM enabled phone.

Verdict

The Huawei and its partner Leica have done with the hardware and software is worth taking note of. The company would face a very tough competitions with the flagship phone from LG and Samsung that feature a new radical tall display screen size. We are still doubting whether the acceptation is there, futhermore there wasn’t much contents on that screen ratio.

Ultimately, the Huawei P10 is a performer with excellent cameras. You wouldn’t need to think much if you are looking for a phone that turns everyone into a “PRO” photographer. After all photography/videography is a thing for years now where everyone sharing it more on Social Media platforms.

With the price of RM 2,499 there are a lot flagship phone options out there such as OnePlus 3T, Samsung Galaxy S7, Samsung Galaxy S7 edge and ZTE Axon 7 but none of the mentioned offers such uniqueness camera quality and functions.

Built – 9.0/10
Display – 8.5/10
Software – 8.0/10
Camera – 9.5/10
Battery – 9.0/10
Value – 7.5/10

Overall – 8.6/10