Huawei P10

With the P10, Huawei has chosen to deviate from the blocky, rectangular design of the P9 and opt for a softer, more ergonomic form factor instead. The P10, with its rounded corners, curved edges and antenna lines running along the top and bottom could easily be mistaken for an iPhone 7 – our black unit is particularly reminiscent of Apple’s matte black hue. Incidentally, Huawei has launched eight colour variants of the P10, including unconventional colours like green and blue, so there's plenty of choice on that front. At the rear, Huawei has retained the glass strip at the top with the two cameras, dual-tone LED flash and Leica branding. We appreciate that as with the P9, the cameras on the P10 sit flush with the rear. However, we noticed that after a couple of weeks of usage, the glass strip tended to pick up scratches by virtue of being placed on a desk or table. The antenna line at the bottom in particular became very scuffed towards the end of our review period, and we would recommend using a case with the phone.

While the Huawei P9 featured a 5.2-inch screen, Huawei has decided to shrink it even further with the P10. The 5.1-inch display features full HD resolution, just like its predecessor, equating to a pixel density of 432ppi. The screen isn’t exceptional by Android flagship standards, but it’s sharp with punchy colours and good viewing angles, and gets the job done. The smaller size doesn’t make it ideal for watching videos, but there’s always the P10 Plus with a larger 5.5-inch screen if you lean towards phablets.

While the P9 featured dual 12MP cameras, one with a monochrome sensor and the other RGB, the P10 upgrades its monochrome sensor to 20MP while retaining the original 12MP RGB sensor. Both lenses feature f/2.2 aperture, and Huawei has also added extras like OIS and 4K video recording which were missing on the P9. The camera app is loaded with features, most of which we saw on the P9 as well.

The Huawei P10 runs EMUI 5.1 atop Android 7.0 Nougat. EMUI is packed to the gill with features, and Huawei’s skin pretty much takes away from any stock Android resemblance. By default you’re greeted with a homescreen that lacks an app drawer, but in settings you can choose to enable it, which is a pleasant addition. For the P10, Huawei has chosen not to add capacitive Android navigation keys on the lower bezel, and instead opts for a multifunction home button / fingerprint sensor. The home button is capacitive, so you can tap once to go back, and long press to go home. Recent apps are brought up by swiping to the left or right, and swiping up from the bottom of the homescreen brings up Google Now. It’s quite a complicated setup, and although we got used to it in a few days, we can’t help but wish Huawei had opted for dedicated recents and back keys considering the ample bezel space. If you simply can’t get the hang of the navigation key, there is an option to enable onscreen keys, but this takes away from the already precious screen real estate. 

While most Android flagships these days stick to Qualcomm’s high-end Snapdragon chipsets, Huawei has used its in-house HiSilicon Kirin 960 processor, an octa-core SoC paired with 4GB of RAM. During our two week usage of the P10, we found virtually no instances of slow down, with the phone able to handle all the apps and games we threw at it. There was the occasional app freeze, but nothing major enough to warrant concern. Our only pain point when it comes to the P10 is that it heats up a fair bit – especially when using the camera. The problem is worse when using the cameras outdoors, where it gets uncomfortably hot. The problem doesn’t persist as badly when it comes to gaming, and we were able to play a 20 minute sessions of NOVA Legacy and Super Mario Run without the phone getting too warm. Our P10 unit ships with 64GB of expandable storage, out of which you get a little under 50GB out of the box. The microSD card slot supports expansion up to 256GB.