Huawei announced the new P10 Plus at Mobile World Congress 2017, where the company managed to be one of the top attractions. The smartphone is an upgrade over the company’s well-received P9 smartphone and it once again features dual Leica-powered cameras at the rear.
The company will officially announce the launch of the P10 and the P10 Plus tomorrow (April 11, 2017). We received a review unit in advance and we didn’t wait a single moment to take it out for a test drive.
The Huawei P10 Plus features a 5.5-inch touchscreen display that offers a resolution of 1440-by-2560 pixels. The overall design and build quality of the device is quite good – it’s an all metal smartphone. The P10 Plus’ build is actually quite similar to that of the P9 – however, the P10 Plus offer a much smoother and rounder build quality.
The phone feels really nice in the hand, although slightly slippery, but not as slippery as the Honor 8. Under the hood, the Huawei P10 Plus is powered by octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 960 processor and it comes with 6GB of RAM.
The phone also packs 128GB of internal storage, which can be expanded via a microSD card. As far as the cameras are concerned, the Huawei P10 Plus features a Leica dual camera setup at the rear as mentioned before. One is a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and the other is a 12-megapixel colour sensor.
One of the key changes in design is having the fingerprint sensor on the front rather than the back. On the front, just above the display, you will find an 8-megapixel camera which offers an aperture of f/1.9.
In terms of connectivity and networking, the P10 Plus has some decent specs including 11ac dual-band Wi-Fi, NFC, GPS, and the reversible USB-C port. It doesn’t make a huge different but it has Bluetooth 4.2 rather than the newer 5.0.
We were also surprised to see an Infrared port on the top edge, which means the phone can be used as a remote control for various devices around your home such as the TV or the set-top box. It’s a shame that many manufacturers these days have gradually dropped this from flagship devices.
The fingerprint sensor on the P10 Plus is on the front of the device, just below the display. The sensor area is an etched-out touchpad – you will not be able to click it in any way and it just senses your touch. There aren’t separate Back and Recent Apps buttons on its sides as well.
All the home, back and recent apps buttons are laid out on top of the display just above the fingerprint sensor. You can however use the fingerprint sensor for a few jobs – you can tap once on the sensor to go back, hold down to go home and swipe sideways to multitask. Of course you need to set this up through the Settings menu, The default setting however was the onscreen navigation buttons.
In the photography department, which has recently become one of the biggest strengths of Huawei, the P10 Plus truly delivers. We were stunned by the P10 Plus’ ability to take amazing pictures. With the P10 Plus around, I do not miss my DSLR, which I usually use for my shoots and videos.
The Huawei P10 Plus has newer Leica sensors and a larger f/1.8 aperture than the regular P10’s f/2.0 setup. The P10 Plus’ rear features a 12-megapixel RGB sensor and a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor. Together, the cameras capture crisp, colourful photos with pretty bokeh, thanks to software that applies an artificial depth-of-field effect to pictures.
To gauge the performance, ran both AnTuTu and Geekbench benchmarks and we were happy with the overall results. The P10 Plus runs the same processor that powers the Mate 9. So expect blazing fast performance. With the new P10 Plus, Huawei has a winner in its hands.
Price: AED 2,599
