This afternoon Huawei announced in London a pair of new Android smartphones; the expected P8 and the entirely unexpected P8 Max. The latter is a total whopper of a phone but more of this later.
I watched the show the on-line (in between streaming drop outs) to see CEO Huawei Consumer Business Group Richard Yu show off the P8 and its strengths. The presentation focussed on four areas – Design, Camera, Connectivity and Usability.
The P8 looks good – it’s a metal unibody design with an almost frameless 5.2″ screen on the front, a rear camera that’s flush with the back and only 6.4 mm thin.
The presentation spent a great deal of time over the camera. That’s because it’s very impressive. The specs say that it’s a 4 colour (RGBW) 13 MP camera with OIS but it’s the other features that stand-out.
Enhanced for low light conditions. Macro capability. Director mode controls three cameras to capture a scene from different angle. Built-in time-lapse photography. Dual tone camera flash with both a white and warm light. Fast face recognition. Scene detection.
Despite being a metal unibody, Huawei have done clever things with the antennas resulting in 50% fewer dropped calls and a 20% increase in call connection rate. Other tweaks include “Wi-Fi+” designed to provide best quality of experience based on history and hotspot connectivity. The P8 is three times faster at connecting to the network when powered on, say, after being on a flight.
The P8 can take two nano SIM cards. With one dedicated SIM slot, the other slot can take either an extra SIM or a microSD card up to 128 MB card.
The smartphone is powered by Kirin 930 64 bit octacore CPU, with four 2.0 GHz cores plus four 1.5 GHz cores. As you’d expect, the cores are allocated tasks appropriate to their speed.
Average battery life is expected to be 1.5 days or 1 day of heavy use. A new and unique feature is what Huawei called a “power firewall” which is design to stop excessive or abnormal requests from apps, thus improving the battery life by an extra 2.3 days of standby time.
Another unique is a new gesture called “knuckle sense technology”. It’s slightly bizarre but simply the P8 can tell the difference between touching the screen with a knuckle rather than a finger.This is then used to do special things like cutting out selections.
Voice+ gives a 58% volume increase for noisy environments and the phone achieves a 90% wind reduction even when using a single mic headset. There’s also a “Super hands-free” mode for conference calls. The press release also mentions a P8 variant with a rear eInk screen which will handy for reading ebooks.
All-in-all, it’s a very impressive package and shows how far Huawei has come. There are two versions of the P8; the standard device for €499 and the premium version for €599, which is competitively priced as long as they use a reasonable exchange rate.
Turning to the P8 Max, it’s a full fat version of the P8 with a whopping 6.8″ screen, 64 GB RAM and 4360 mAh battery (cf 5.2″, 16 GB, 2680 mAh). Huge!!!
Check out the features of the P8 in the video below. If you want to see the whole presentation, it’s here.
https://youtu.be/ftz_kpaLefg