Huawei P10 Plus:A affordable gorgeous phone With a dual camera
Its Leica camera is excellent in both light and dark scenarios, battery life is impressive and it comes with a generous amount of storage. It’s the first Huawei handset that can easily compete with big-name flagships such as the LG G6, iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S7.It isn’t perfect – there are a few frustrating missteps along the way – but with the P10 Plus Huawei has taken a significant step forward from churning out forgettable budget phones.
While LG and Samsung have chosen taller, narrower shapes for their latest phones, Huawei has retained the familiar 16:9 aspect ratio for the P10 Plus. It’s far from anonymous, though, with a stylish finish that makes it look and feel different from any other smartphone on the market, and it’s available in seven colours: Ceramic White, Graphite Black, Dazzling Gold, Rose Gold, Greenery, Dazzling Blue and Mystic Silver.
One key new feature is the dual-sensor rear camera, which gains a 20-megapixel sensor – up from the 12-megapixel sensors in last year’s P9 and the regular P10. With an f/1.8 aperture at the rear and f/1.9 at the front, the P10 Plus is also able to collect more light than any other Huawei device, making it better for low-light photography.
Other interesting features include 4K video shooting, optical image stabilisation and an ultra-fast Kirin 960 processor. The main difference between the P10 and the P10 Plus - at least from a photography perspective, is that the lenses are different.
Huawei P10 Plus:Design and Build quality
The Huawei P10 Plus is an attractive phone, but you’ll no doubt have the feeling you’ve seen it before. It appears to be modelled, like many Android smartphones, after the iPhone.
The P10 Plus has the same matte metal back, the same rounded corners, the same general camera placement, a similarly placed minimal rear logo, a front-facing fingerprint sensor and antenna bands — albeit less intrusive than on the iPhone.
Huawei has been improving its basic design for some time now, tweaking its formula with every release rather than starting afresh each time. The P10 Plus continues in this vein, but with useful changes to keep it from feeling stale.
It’s clear that the design influence here is the iPhone 7. It isn’t unusual to see Android phones that resemble Apple’s flagship, but the P10 Plus takes it up a
Huawei has pulled out all the stops when it comes to build quality and design. The gorgeous diamond-cut finish around the back gives the P10 Plus a stylish, high-end appearance. It’s also very easy to grip, so you don’t need to worry about accidental slips, and the phone’s smooth edges make it comfortable to hold.
Like the 5.1in P10, the P10 Plus has a front-facing fingerprint sensor. At first, we wasn’t sure about its placement, as We still love using the rear fingerprint sensor on my Huawei P9. However, there is a benefit to doing it this way: Huawei has integrated the Android navigation buttons into its fingerprint sensor, giving you back the bottom part of your screen.
On the comfortably curved bottom edge, you’ll find a solo speaker, centred USB Type-C port and that much-loved headphone jack.
Switch to the top and you’ll find an IR blaster, something that’s becoming a bit of a rarity lately. The top of the left edge houses the SIM and microSD slot, and on the right edge there’s the volume rocker at the top, and, on our Graphite Black handset, a rather lovely etched power key edged in red.
Additionally, the P10 Plus features one small but elegant point of differentiation: a red-edged home button that glints in the light. Above that is the volume rocker, at the bottom edge of the phone is a USB-C charging port, 3.5mm headphone jack and a speaker grille (which can be easily covered during one-handed use, unfortunately).
In comparison to other leading flagships, the P10 Plus is 74.2mm wide, less than the iPhone 7 Plus and Google Pixel XL, but wider than the Samsung Galaxy S8+ and LG G6, which both adopted an elongated form to add more display while remaining easy to hold.
It’s thinner, however, than the above-mentioned competitors and at the light end when it comes to weight – at 165 grams, it’s heavier than the G6, but lighter than the Google Pixel XL, Samsung Galaxy S8+ and the iPhone 7 Plus.
One of the eccentricities that I’d prefer to do without is the P10 Plus’ home button options. Users can choose one of two options: have virtual home buttons take up space on the display while the fingerprint sensor is dedicated solely to unlocking the device, or use the fingerprint sensor as all three buttons through gestures — long tap for home, quick tap for back, swipe for app list.
Huawei P10 Plus:Display
At 5.5in, the IPS screen on the P10 Plus is a fair bit bigger than the 5.1in display of the regular P10. But size isn’t the only difference: the P10 Plus also has a higher QHD (1,440 x 2,560) resolution, representing a 540ppi pixel density. That makes it ideal for virtual-reality applications.
The display is bright, at a measured 587.1cd/m2 maximum brightness: I had no trouble using the phone under bright sunlight. Colour reproduction is good, too, with a 98.5% sRGB gamut coverage.
Its tested 0.44cd/m2 black level is disappointingly high, however, so dark scenes in movies will be a little lighter than they should be. I measured its contrast ratio at 1,326.9:1 – some way behind the LG G6’s HDR display, which delivered a 2,112:1 maximum contrast ratio. At this price, I’d have hoped the P10 Plus would include an HDR screen, since HDR video content is increasingly becoming available.
Taking the P10 Plus out of its rather beautiful double-doored box, you’ll go to peel off the plastic screen covering and find another one underneath. Some manufacturers, like OnePlus, have started pre-applying plastic screen protectors to new phones – presumably to save people who buy them from bubbles and misaligned edges – and it seems Huawei has joined them.
You can peel the protector off very easily, and you’ll be tempted to because it feels and looks really horrible on your expensive box-fresh phone.Out of the box, the colours on Huawei’s display are a tad on the cool side – which is our preference anyway – but you can tweak them in settings to warm them up. Whites can sometimes look a little pinkish or yellow when scrolling, but this is a minor issue.
The screen is capable of going fantastically bright, and for much of the time we were happily able to keep it at 45-50% without running into any issues. The auto-brightness is accurate, too – something I often have trouble with on Android phones.
The P10 Plus ships with Android 7 Nougat and EMUI 5.1, Huawei’s own overlay. It feels perfectly fluid, and Huawei claims that various techniques used to defragment, compress and recycle RAM will prevent Android from slowing down after a few months of usage.
Obviously at this point it’s too early to say if it really works: we'll update this review in a few months’ time with any observations.
Huawei’s 2017 handsets are based on the impressive HiSilicon Kirin 960 chipset. The P10 Plus thus benefits from an octa-core processor – comprising four 2.4GHz Cortex-A73 cores and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 cores – along with 6GB of RAM. It flies through intensive tasks: no matter what we threw at it, from heavy multitasking to graphically intense games, the P10 Plus provided impressive performance.
The Geekbench 4 benchmark confirms its multi-core power. Single-core performance isn’t quite so spectacular, but that’s no surprise given the relatively low clock speeds. Overall, performance was similar to the P10 and Honor 8 Pro, both of which use the same Kirin 960 chipset.
When it comes to gaming performance, the P10 Plus isn’t quite a top performer, but it certainly proved smooth enough for my mobile gaming needs. In the offscreen 1080p gaming benchmark it delivered almost double the frame rate of last year’s P9 Plus. In the onscreen test its score of 26fps was also respectable, bearing in mind it’s driving a QHD display.
Huawei P10 Plus:Camera and Picture Quality
Its 20-megapixel black and white sensor allows for the capture of more light and detail, while it’s 12-megapixel sensor with OIS and f/1.8 aperture adds colour. The 20-megapixel B&W shooter can also be used alone to take some stunning monochrome snaps that put pictures with B&W filter overlays to shame.
Additionally, the P10 Plus’ pro camera mode is easy to access with one hand, coming up as a sort of scroll-through dial at the bottom of the screen, and saves photos in RAW for access to more in-depth editing features.
Though far from a professional photographer, my shots did come out bright, with a high level of detail captured. Nighttime shots, too, lived up to the brand’s claims of great low-light shooting. My only slight issues were a tendency towards blown out skies and a lack of colour saturation, especially when compared with the Pixel, which has a stunning capacity for dynamic range with its HDR+ feature.
Manual mode is easily accessed with a flick up from the bottom of the app, and allows you to mess about with exposure, white balance and so on. It’s also easy to lock a setting where you want it, which displays a little dot to show it’s fixed at that value. On the whole, though, we found the camera mostly took great pictures without needing to adjust the settings.
Swiping left brings up the settings panel, whereas right gives you Modes. There are some great ones (Night Shot, Light Painting, Good Food) and some useless ones (Watermark, Audio Note, Document Scan), but they’re all fun to try out.
Once you’ve pressed the shutter button, the snaps captured by the P10 Plus really are exceptional. Black and white shots have exceptional contrast and are bursting with detail, while 12MP colour snaps are punchy and vibrant, while managing to stay (mostly) true to life.
Laser- and phase detection autofocus help you lock on to subjects incredibly quickly, and optical image stabilisation meant that every shot I took in daylight was perfectly sharp. You’ve still got to have a steady hand to get the same results at night, but it copes well here too.
With its bigger f/1.8 glass, the P10 Plus copes better in low light than its smaller brother. ISO settings aren’t pushed as high to keep shots looking sharp, meaning you keep more detail in each snap, without adding unwanted noise. Image processing on the Apple iPhone 7 Plus give it a slight edge in terms of overall quality here, though. Still, the twin-LED flash helps to illuminate scenes without making them look too fake or forced.
With no auto-HDR mode, you’ve got to go into a menu and toggle it on and off. It won’t work with other modes, either, but the shots you can take with it enabled are otherwise quite impressive. Some of my test shots looked a little ethereal, but it really helps balance out scenes with different levels of light. The Google Pixel’s auto-HDR managed to keep similar scenes looking realistic, giving it the win.
Huawei’s camera app helps you jump between the numerous modes and settings quickly, with one swipe bringing up shooting modes and another to enter Pro mode. This lets you control ISO speeds, white balance and exposure compensation completely manually.
You’d need to put it side-by-side with an iPhone, Google Pixel or Galaxy S7 to spot the minor shortcomings in daylight photos, but the P10 Plus has so many other camera features that it’ll easily be up there with the best phones of 2017 once we get to awards season.
Huawei P10 Plus:sound quality
Considering the price of the P10 Plus, we’d have hoped for better audio. The handset has one speaker, on the right of the bottom edge, and while the sound is perfectly fine, it’s not what we’d expect from a top-end phone. Pushing it to max volume results in considerable noise, and at moderate volume the quality is average – and of course, very directional due to the speaker placement.
There is at least a 3.5mm headphone jack, so Huawei hasn’t fallen into the trap of emulating Apple there. The bundled headphones are standard fare: white, cheap-looking, plasticky. They sound fine, but leak music quite badly.
Again, we’d have expected better for the price, especially when competitors like HTC include high-end earphones with their flagships
The Huawei P10 Plus offers one of the bigger battery packs on the market right now, at 3,750mAh. That’s a lot, but it’s also got a lot of pixels to power: the 5.5-inch QHD display means those milliamp hours don’t go as far as they would on a smaller or lower-res device.
That said, the P10 Plus handles its hardware well, and while it’s nothing special, battery performance on this phone comes out at about what we’d expect from a flagship. With heavy use, it usually had about a quarter left at bedtime, while a lighter user could easily push it to a day and a half without charging.
Screen-on time does unsurprisingly drain the battery pretty quickly, so bring a charger if you’re planning to stream HD movies on a cross-country train ride (good luck with the train Wi-Fi).
In our standard battery test, which involves running a full screen HD video at top brightness with Wi-Fi and account syncing on, the phone started at 100% and still had 79% left an hour and a half later – that’s a loss of 21%, fact fans.
By comparison, fellow 5.5-inchers the Google Pixel XL and OnePlus 3T lost a rubbish 32% and a tiny 14% respectively, putting the P10 Plus squarely in the middle. The standard Huawei P10 came out about the same, at 20%.
As we’d expect from a new flagship, the P10 Plus uses USB Type-C to charge. There’s a SuperCharge fast charger in the box, which does make a significant difference to how fast it powers up, but there’s no wireless charging on this device.
Conclusion
One of the best plus-sized phones you can buy right now and unbox.
The Huawei P10 Plus was announced alongside the standard sized P10, the latest flagship mobile phones from the company. It builds on the success of last year’s P9, with its most interesting (for photographers) feature being its dual-camera setup, which has been co-engineered with Leica. The new Leica Dual Camera 2.0 Pro Edition includes features such as precise 3D facial detection, dynamic illumination and natural portrait enhancements. On the front of the phone is a new front-camera, which is also co-engineered with Leica. It promises to capture twice the amount of light as the previous model, which should make it better for self-portraits. Both of the rear cameras feature 20 megapixel sensors and SUMMILUX-H lenses with a large f/1.8 aperture.
The P10 Plus is Huawei’s best phone yet. It takes the decent P10 and improves it in a variety of ways.
While LG and Samsung have chosen taller, narrower shapes for their latest phones, Huawei has retained the familiar 16:9 aspect ratio for the P10 Plus. It’s far from anonymous, though, with a stylish finish that makes it look and feel different from any other smartphone on the market, and it’s available in seven colours: Ceramic White, Graphite Black, Dazzling Gold, Rose Gold, Greenery, Dazzling Blue and Mystic Silver.
One key new feature is the dual-sensor rear camera, which gains a 20-megapixel sensor – up from the 12-megapixel sensors in last year’s P9 and the regular P10. With an f/1.8 aperture at the rear and f/1.9 at the front, the P10 Plus is also able to collect more light than any other Huawei device, making it better for low-light photography.
The Huawei P10 Plus is an attractive phone, but you’ll no doubt have the feeling you’ve seen it before. It appears to be modelled, like many Android smartphones, after the iPhone.
The P10 Plus has the same matte metal back, the same rounded corners, the same general camera placement, a similarly placed minimal rear logo, a front-facing fingerprint sensor and antenna bands — albeit less intrusive than on the iPhone.
Huawei has been improving its basic design for some time now, tweaking its formula with every release rather than starting afresh each time. The P10 Plus continues in this vein, but with useful changes to keep it from feeling stale.
It’s clear that the design influence here is the iPhone 7. It isn’t unusual to see Android phones that resemble Apple’s flagship, but the P10 Plus takes it up a
Huawei has pulled out all the stops when it comes to build quality and design. The gorgeous diamond-cut finish around the back gives the P10 Plus a stylish, high-end appearance. It’s also very easy to grip, so you don’t need to worry about accidental slips, and the phone’s smooth edges make it comfortable to hold.
Like the 5.1in P10, the P10 Plus has a front-facing fingerprint sensor. At first, we wasn’t sure about its placement, as We still love using the rear fingerprint sensor on my Huawei P9. However, there is a benefit to doing it this way: Huawei has integrated the Android navigation buttons into its fingerprint sensor, giving you back the bottom part of your screen.
Switch to the top and you’ll find an IR blaster, something that’s becoming a bit of a rarity lately. The top of the left edge houses the SIM and microSD slot, and on the right edge there’s the volume rocker at the top, and, on our Graphite Black handset, a rather lovely etched power key edged in red.
Additionally, the P10 Plus features one small but elegant point of differentiation: a red-edged home button that glints in the light. Above that is the volume rocker, at the bottom edge of the phone is a USB-C charging port, 3.5mm headphone jack and a speaker grille (which can be easily covered during one-handed use, unfortunately).
In comparison to other leading flagships, the P10 Plus is 74.2mm wide, less than the iPhone 7 Plus and Google Pixel XL, but wider than the Samsung Galaxy S8+ and LG G6, which both adopted an elongated form to add more display while remaining easy to hold.
It’s thinner, however, than the above-mentioned competitors and at the light end when it comes to weight – at 165 grams, it’s heavier than the G6, but lighter than the Google Pixel XL, Samsung Galaxy S8+ and the iPhone 7 Plus.
One of the eccentricities that I’d prefer to do without is the P10 Plus’ home button options. Users can choose one of two options: have virtual home buttons take up space on the display while the fingerprint sensor is dedicated solely to unlocking the device, or use the fingerprint sensor as all three buttons through gestures — long tap for home, quick tap for back, swipe for app list.
At 5.5in, the IPS screen on the P10 Plus is a fair bit bigger than the 5.1in display of the regular P10. But size isn’t the only difference: the P10 Plus also has a higher QHD (1,440 x 2,560) resolution, representing a 540ppi pixel density. That makes it ideal for virtual-reality applications.
The display is bright, at a measured 587.1cd/m2 maximum brightness: I had no trouble using the phone under bright sunlight. Colour reproduction is good, too, with a 98.5% sRGB gamut coverage.
Its tested 0.44cd/m2 black level is disappointingly high, however, so dark scenes in movies will be a little lighter than they should be. I measured its contrast ratio at 1,326.9:1 – some way behind the LG G6’s HDR display, which delivered a 2,112:1 maximum contrast ratio. At this price, I’d have hoped the P10 Plus would include an HDR screen, since HDR video content is increasingly becoming available.
Taking the P10 Plus out of its rather beautiful double-doored box, you’ll go to peel off the plastic screen covering and find another one underneath. Some manufacturers, like OnePlus, have started pre-applying plastic screen protectors to new phones – presumably to save people who buy them from bubbles and misaligned edges – and it seems Huawei has joined them.
You can peel the protector off very easily, and you’ll be tempted to because it feels and looks really horrible on your expensive box-fresh phone.Out of the box, the colours on Huawei’s display are a tad on the cool side – which is our preference anyway – but you can tweak them in settings to warm them up. Whites can sometimes look a little pinkish or yellow when scrolling, but this is a minor issue.
The screen is capable of going fantastically bright, and for much of the time we were happily able to keep it at 45-50% without running into any issues. The auto-brightness is accurate, too – something I often have trouble with on Android phones.
Huawei P10 Plus:Performance
The P10 Plus ships with Android 7 Nougat and EMUI 5.1, Huawei’s own overlay. It feels perfectly fluid, and Huawei claims that various techniques used to defragment, compress and recycle RAM will prevent Android from slowing down after a few months of usage.
Obviously at this point it’s too early to say if it really works: we'll update this review in a few months’ time with any observations.
Huawei’s 2017 handsets are based on the impressive HiSilicon Kirin 960 chipset. The P10 Plus thus benefits from an octa-core processor – comprising four 2.4GHz Cortex-A73 cores and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 cores – along with 6GB of RAM. It flies through intensive tasks: no matter what we threw at it, from heavy multitasking to graphically intense games, the P10 Plus provided impressive performance.
The Geekbench 4 benchmark confirms its multi-core power. Single-core performance isn’t quite so spectacular, but that’s no surprise given the relatively low clock speeds. Overall, performance was similar to the P10 and Honor 8 Pro, both of which use the same Kirin 960 chipset.
When it comes to gaming performance, the P10 Plus isn’t quite a top performer, but it certainly proved smooth enough for my mobile gaming needs. In the offscreen 1080p gaming benchmark it delivered almost double the frame rate of last year’s P9 Plus. In the onscreen test its score of 26fps was also respectable, bearing in mind it’s driving a QHD display.
The Huawei P10 Plus is chiefly being sold on the pre-eminence of its dual-camera setup, which is optimized for low-light shooting — while its dual camera competitors, the iPhone 7 Plus and LG G6, use their setups for optical zoom and wide-angle shots, respectively.
Its 20-megapixel black and white sensor allows for the capture of more light and detail, while it’s 12-megapixel sensor with OIS and f/1.8 aperture adds colour. The 20-megapixel B&W shooter can also be used alone to take some stunning monochrome snaps that put pictures with B&W filter overlays to shame.
Additionally, the P10 Plus’ pro camera mode is easy to access with one hand, coming up as a sort of scroll-through dial at the bottom of the screen, and saves photos in RAW for access to more in-depth editing features.
Though far from a professional photographer, my shots did come out bright, with a high level of detail captured. Nighttime shots, too, lived up to the brand’s claims of great low-light shooting. My only slight issues were a tendency towards blown out skies and a lack of colour saturation, especially when compared with the Pixel, which has a stunning capacity for dynamic range with its HDR+ feature.
Swiping left brings up the settings panel, whereas right gives you Modes. There are some great ones (Night Shot, Light Painting, Good Food) and some useless ones (Watermark, Audio Note, Document Scan), but they’re all fun to try out.
PICTURE QUALITY
Once you’ve pressed the shutter button, the snaps captured by the P10 Plus really are exceptional. Black and white shots have exceptional contrast and are bursting with detail, while 12MP colour snaps are punchy and vibrant, while managing to stay (mostly) true to life.
Laser- and phase detection autofocus help you lock on to subjects incredibly quickly, and optical image stabilisation meant that every shot I took in daylight was perfectly sharp. You’ve still got to have a steady hand to get the same results at night, but it copes well here too.
With its bigger f/1.8 glass, the P10 Plus copes better in low light than its smaller brother. ISO settings aren’t pushed as high to keep shots looking sharp, meaning you keep more detail in each snap, without adding unwanted noise. Image processing on the Apple iPhone 7 Plus give it a slight edge in terms of overall quality here, though. Still, the twin-LED flash helps to illuminate scenes without making them look too fake or forced.
With no auto-HDR mode, you’ve got to go into a menu and toggle it on and off. It won’t work with other modes, either, but the shots you can take with it enabled are otherwise quite impressive. Some of my test shots looked a little ethereal, but it really helps balance out scenes with different levels of light. The Google Pixel’s auto-HDR managed to keep similar scenes looking realistic, giving it the win.
Huawei’s camera app helps you jump between the numerous modes and settings quickly, with one swipe bringing up shooting modes and another to enter Pro mode. This lets you control ISO speeds, white balance and exposure compensation completely manually.
You’d need to put it side-by-side with an iPhone, Google Pixel or Galaxy S7 to spot the minor shortcomings in daylight photos, but the P10 Plus has so many other camera features that it’ll easily be up there with the best phones of 2017 once we get to awards season.
Considering the price of the P10 Plus, we’d have hoped for better audio. The handset has one speaker, on the right of the bottom edge, and while the sound is perfectly fine, it’s not what we’d expect from a top-end phone. Pushing it to max volume results in considerable noise, and at moderate volume the quality is average – and of course, very directional due to the speaker placement.
There is at least a 3.5mm headphone jack, so Huawei hasn’t fallen into the trap of emulating Apple there. The bundled headphones are standard fare: white, cheap-looking, plasticky. They sound fine, but leak music quite badly.
Again, we’d have expected better for the price, especially when competitors like HTC include high-end earphones with their flagships
Huawei P10 Plus:Battery
The Huawei P10 Plus offers one of the bigger battery packs on the market right now, at 3,750mAh. That’s a lot, but it’s also got a lot of pixels to power: the 5.5-inch QHD display means those milliamp hours don’t go as far as they would on a smaller or lower-res device.
That said, the P10 Plus handles its hardware well, and while it’s nothing special, battery performance on this phone comes out at about what we’d expect from a flagship. With heavy use, it usually had about a quarter left at bedtime, while a lighter user could easily push it to a day and a half without charging.
Screen-on time does unsurprisingly drain the battery pretty quickly, so bring a charger if you’re planning to stream HD movies on a cross-country train ride (good luck with the train Wi-Fi).
In our standard battery test, which involves running a full screen HD video at top brightness with Wi-Fi and account syncing on, the phone started at 100% and still had 79% left an hour and a half later – that’s a loss of 21%, fact fans.
By comparison, fellow 5.5-inchers the Google Pixel XL and OnePlus 3T lost a rubbish 32% and a tiny 14% respectively, putting the P10 Plus squarely in the middle. The standard Huawei P10 came out about the same, at 20%.
As we’d expect from a new flagship, the P10 Plus uses USB Type-C to charge. There’s a SuperCharge fast charger in the box, which does make a significant difference to how fast it powers up, but there’s no wireless charging on this device.
Huawei has brought a flagship to Canada that offers a beautiful high-end design and fantastic camera experience at an extremely affordable price for the market.There’s a lot to like about the Huawei P10 Plus, but like is as far as we’re going to get with this phone.The dual camera is great, but so is the LG G6’s. The screen is beautiful, but Samsung’s are better.
The design – and all the colors – are perfectly nice, but so are Apple’s - have you heard about the red one? - and its latest phones are water-resistant. There’s nothing here you can’t find on another phone, either for less money or with better extras.
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