Huawei P10 (around $1000)
After a month using Huawei’s P10 smart phone, I’m starting to wonder whether the other phone giants should be looking over their shoulders.
Since arriving in the New Zealand market in 20XX, Chinese manufacturer Huawei has been starting to make inroads in the smart phone market dominated by Apple and Samsung. The P10 is one of the company’s flagship models (the other is the P10 Plus), aiming itself at Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S range.
I put my own Galaxy S7 and the P10 side by side & they’re roughly the same thickness. The P10 doesn’t have a physical home button on the front of the phone’s chassis and the only physical buttons are the volume rocker and a stylish red-coloured power button. The P10’s finger print scanner is blazingly fast. Amazingly fast, actually.
Often with the fingerprint scanner on my S7, it’ll take two or three times before it’ll unlock my phone. With the P10, it was unlocked instantly and first time. Powered by a Kirin960 Octacore CPU and packed with 4Gb RAM, Huawei’s phone has a 5.1-inch full HD panel, a 3200 mAh battery, 64Gb of storage and is running Android 7.0.
I used the P10 every day for pretty much a month and was impressed with it. I used it for a mix of social media, web browsing and general day-to-day stuff and the battery life seemed about standard with a modern smartphone these days (about a day). Call quality was good and the camera excellent.
With dual Leica lenses (20MP on the back and 12 MP on the front), the P10’s camera is damn good. I was impressed with the resultant images, taken in a variety of light conditions (although I only have shots of the lake near my house here). I’m still undecided whether the camera is good as that of my Galaxy S7, though, which is my benchmark for smart phone cameras, though.
If there was one thing I wasn’t that keen on with the P10 it was the EMUI user interface: I just didn’t like the look of the interface as much as that on my Galaxy S7 or stock Android. That’s just my personal preference, though, and isn’t a deal breaker as the rest of the phone is so damn good.
I really enjoyed testing out the Huawei P10 and I’d definitely consider buying one if my Samsung Galaxy S7 suddenly died tomorrow.
