Huawei is a well-known brand, no doubt about that. This China-based smartphone manufacturer has been around for a long time now and are, in fact, one of the biggest smartphone manufacturers in the world. Huawei has announced the company’s new flagship line the other day which consists of three devices, the Huawei P8, P8 Lite and P8 Max. The Huawei P8 Lite is a somewhat tuned down version of the P8, and the P8 Max is a huge 6.8-inch phablet with top-of-the-line specifications. That being said, we’re here to take a closer look at the Huawei P8, its features and talk about the device in general.
The Huawei P8 is a premium, high-end offering by Huawei. This thing is made out of metal and it does somewhat remind me of the iPhone 5/5S, especially from the back. Anyhow, this handset features a 5.2-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) IPS LCD display along with 3GB of RAM and 16GB or 64GB of expandable internal storage (depending on which version you choose to purchase). Huawei’s very own HiSilicon Kirin 930 octa-core processor is powering on this device along with a Mali-T628 MP4 GPU for graphics. The 13-megapixel OIS camera is located on the back of this device along with a dual-LED, dual tone flash, while you’ll find an 8-megapixel snapper up front. This handset comes with Android 5.0.2 Lollipop pre-installed with Huawei’s Emotion 3.1 UI on top of it which is full of software features.
This handset is only 6.4mm thick, which makes it thinner than both the Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6. The thin design along with premium metal frame make the P8 look really premium and sleek. Let’s take a closer look at its rear-facing camera, shall we. The 13-megapixel camera on the back actually deploys an RGBW sensor with an extra white pixel, which allegedly offers superior low-light performance and high dynamic range abilities, it remains to be seen how will it perform. This sensor is quite a mystery, Sony was actually developing something like that three years ago but had to scrap it because of some issues they encountered with the color presentation. This sensor might be developed either by Sony, Samsung or OmniVision, all three of those companies released an RGBW sensors.
Another interesting thing about the Huawei P8 that not many people know, is the fact that this device has a modular antenna design that precludes the so-called ‘death grip’ and connects to the best network available within milliseconds (3G, 4G, Wi-Fi… you name it). Huawei is a carrier equipment giant and they know what they’re doing when it comes to antennas and connectivity. This thing will connect to a network without any issues even if you’re travelling 200 miles per hour, which is interesting. Huawei’s Kirin 930 SoC is an interesting one, mainly because it’s not as mainstream as Qualcomm’s and MediaTek’s chips. This SoC sports a HiSilicon Hi6402 audio DSP with a smart amplifier and a single box audio chamber speaker system. The SoC also supports voice wakeup and we’re talking about a 64-bit octa-core unit here which supports Cat. 6 LTE speeds. The Huawei P8 features a 5.2-inch JDI IPS-Neo display on the front which is manufactured by Japan Display. This thing is probably not that well-known to most of you, but it’s somewhat similar to Samsung’s OLED panels considering it allows for true-black appearance (high contrast). It also offers great viewing angles, it won’t seem washed out from the sides or anything to that effect.
Huawei definitely tried to hype up their P8 handset, and I’d say they succeeded for the most part. The company has released a ton of teasers including their rather odd video teaser which managed to grab people’s attention. Huawei P8 is a great device, no doubt about it, but will it succeed? Well, only time will tell, but I’ll tell you this, it will have a difficult job doing so. Huawei intends to make this device available in a lot of markets all over the world, but its price is somewhat too high in my humble opinion and its unfortunate iPhone 5/5S-like design certainly doesn’t help, not to mention that Huawei doesn’t have the brand recognition Samsung and Apple have (for example). I personally really don’t mind the resemblance, I never do, but I’ve seen really harsh reactions to this design and am kind of afraid that people won’t see this handset as anything but a blatant copy. The Huawei P8 is a lot of things, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a copy, at least not to me.
I personally do not intend to purchase the Huawei P8, but not because it resembles other devices, rather because I do consider it to be too expensive and it’s just not to my liking mainly because of software. I would really love to hear your opinions here, do you like Huawei’s new flagship or do you think the company should have done better this time around?