A number of Huawei P10 and Huawei P10 Plus owners have complained that their phones are benchmarking slower than expected, and we now know the reason is due to Huawei’s use of slower eMMC 5.1 memory on select models. Huawei Business Group CEO Richard Yu explained that the company had to rely on eMMC memory, rather than the faster UFS 2.0 or UFS 2.1 chips, on some Huawei P10 and Huawei P10 Plus models that shipped due to a “serious shortage” of flash memory. With the slower eMMC chips, sequential read speeds of 250 MB per second from the internal storage drive were roughly half of the speeds of UFS, benchmarks revealed. Despite the slower benchmarked performance, however, Yu claims that Huawei is still able to deliver solid real world performance on these phones, regardless of the type internal storage, due to software and hardware optimization. The executive also blamed Huawei’s rivals for shining a spotlight on the problem in trying to tarnish the company’s reputation on quality.
The Huawei P10 is powered by Android 7.0 Nougat with the company’s custom Emotion UI 5.1. The phone ships with a 5.1-inch full HD IPS display, a HiSilicon Kirin 960 processor, 4 GB RAM and either 32 GB or 64 GB of storage. The larger Huawei P10 Plus has a larger 5.5-inch QHD display and either 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage or 6 GB RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. For its part, Huawei did not give specifics about the type of flash memory used inside the phone. For US customers, concerns about flash storage speed shouldn’t be a problem. While the Huawei P10 series is available internationally, Huawei has not revealed plans to bring that range to the US market. Instead, the company points to the Huawei Mate 9 flagship for US customers looking to get a high-end Huawei phone with a dual optics camera system that’s co-branded by German camera manufacturer Leica. The Huawei Mate 9, Yu said, uses the much faster UFS storage, and comes with a larger display and a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor rather instead of a front-mounted one on the Huawei P10.
The memory shortage is only the latest issue in recent weeks to plague the Huawei P10 and P10 Plus phones. Prior to this, users were upset that the P10 didn’t come with an oleophobic coating on the glass screen to repel oils and fingerprints. That coating, instead, was used on a factory-applied plastic screen protector that ships on the phone. If the screen protector is removed, the phone would become a magnet for fingerprints, and some were concerned Huawei made cost-cutting measures to its premium phones. However, in the same post on Weibo, Yu explained that the coating interfered with the Gorilla Glass in-cell panel. Since then, Huawei has come up with a new coating technology, and customers in China can take their phones to a Huawei store to have an oleophobic coating applied with the new technology.