Huawei P10 – Hands-On Quick Review with Camera Performance

Huawei P10 was launched globally later in February, following by the release in Pakistan a month later. Now after another month Huawei’s flagship phone has just quickly gone through our hands. In a single line – it’s cute and compact, we liked it.

Let me tell here that P10 is the most attractive phone, I think, Huawei has made. It’s solid, smooth, compact and this black thing, I believe, is the best of all colors Huawei P10 is available in – I can’t tell for sure about that. What I can assure you is, this black color will more easily give you glimpse of scratches than any other color. But the aluminium metal sheet on the back is much better than those with glass on the back.

First noticeable factor was obviously the presence of not-physical but single capacitive navigation key and that’s it. You will use this key for going home, back and forth. Well, at first it can confuse you to navigate but it’s a multi-purpose key that will work as a “back” button. You need to touch and hold to go to home screen.

Unlike iPhone 7’s pressure sensitive home key, this navigation on Huawei P10 is simply a capacitive key with a rounded rectangle area. It also embeds in a fingerprint scanner, first time in a commercial Huawei flagship phone. It was first appeared in the limited editions of Mate 9 Pro or Mate 9 Porsche Design.

Huawei p10 – Quick Specifications

• OS/Software: Android 7.0 Nougat with Emotion UI 5.1
• Display: 5.1-inch IPS, Full HD 1080p, 432ppi pixel density
• Processor: Kirin 960 – Octa-core
• Memory:
  • RAM: 4GB of RAM
  • Internal Storage: 64GB, microSD card support
• Camera:
  • Dual Rear Camera: 12 megapixels RGB sensor, 20 megapixels monochrome sensor.
  • Front Facing: 8 megapixels
• Connectivity: 4G/LTE, WiFi a/b/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, USB-C, NFC, GPS/A-GPS
• Dimensions: 145.3 x 69.3 x 6.98 mm
• Weight: 145 grams

This phone, while has a lot from the company running inside, wants you to focus on its photography features. The dual-camera configuration with Leica optics on the back has been improved since last year’s Huawei P9. In addition the front camera on P10 also carries Leica optics this time.

With the quick hands-on, we did experience the native camera interface on Huawei P10 which is intuitive but felt sometime congested with features spread around the screen. Navigation was pretty much similar to previous iterations however.

As we have mentioned earlier, he P10 runs Huawei’s latest octa-core chipset – Kirin 960, borrowed from Mate 9. The new P10 also borrows the 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage from Mate 9 and should be considered equally performer.

As this was only quick hands-on we can’t tell how does it perform in the long run under regular usage – you have to wait for an in-depth review for that. For now you can just look at the design and observe what we did.

Simply, everything on a phone as you get to operate, is just intact as you have seen mostly. The volume rocker and the power buttons are on the right hand side of the phone. On the left – there is a SIM slot.

Then on the bottom, there is a speaker grill, a USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm audio jack. Top portion of the phone hosts a secondary mic while a primary mic is hosted on the bottom as well.

We did use the camera for instance which is the main thing Huawei wants you to look at. It’s indeed impressive in taking quick shots. It’s fast and efficient.

Technically it has a 12 megapixels RGB image sensor coupled with a 20 megapixels monochrome image sensor. The latter works to capture extended amount of light and detail in each image which is used to deliver better colour output in a single image. It also provides a lossless 2x zoom.

With improvement in this side of a phone, Huawei introduced the Leica optics on the front camera as well which should deliver result comparatively.

FYI, Huawei P10 has already crossed iPhone 7’s camera performance in DxO’s charts.

In addition, the aperture mode – or now called the portrait mode, now works with the front camera as well. Provided it’s still a single camera on the front, this function is purely based on the software – and may be that’s why it was really not useful. In most cases I had to turn it off while taking a group selfie. One thing is to tell, front camera is really impressive. You can have a closer look into the single selfie in above set of photos (last one.) by going to our flickr album and using zoom feature.

We’ll reserve our verdict until we try Huawei P10 in more detail. So stay tight and wait for an in-depth review. Or sure you can go ahead and buy this phone if you want.