The Huawei P10, a Powerfully Small Package

Like any modern citizen, I love my smartphone, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a power user, my phone is supplemental to my computer, not a replacement for it.

My last phone was a oneplus one, great specs but I always found it too large, I don’t wear tight jeans, but I like clothes that fit snuggly, and it always stuck out of my pocket, looking obvious, or worst case, breaking the stitching in my trouser pockets. For a while, I’ve been looking for a smaller device with good specs, and this was hard to find. Then finally Huawei released the P10 at this year’s mobile world congress that matched my requirements, and it didn’t take me long to snap one up.

The P10 is clearly designed as an iPhone 7 clone, there have even been times when I mistook it myself, the slightly different button designs and the logo on the back are the only differentiating marks. But hey, the iPhone 7 is a nice looking phone, and thus, so is the p10. a good bezel, thin and has pleasantly rounded corners.

Specifications

I won’t regurgitate the specs for the phone here, head over to GSM arena for a full list. In short, it’s a decent list, with features I was lacking in my last phone like a fingerprint reader, and NFC. I have experienced no slowness so far and the phone has always been responsive. The build quality is good, with a mixture of brushed metal, glass front and small bands of plastic for binding. It’s USB C, which I don’t find a major issue on a phone, apart from borrowing friends chargers becomes slightly harder. The European model was available in several colours, but none ever seemed to be available, so I ended up with the black model, where everything is black or dark grey except for a curious band of red around the edge of the power button. The camera stands out as it has dual Leica lenses with manual camera settings in the app, but in all honesty, I haven’t noticed a massive difference in quality from the oneplus one yet, and I’m not a massive enough camera buff to care too much about getting ideal settings on every occasion.

The battery life has been sporadic, but on average I get a full day, in contrast, I would often get a day and a half on my oneplus one, but again, a day is enough and I have never been left without enough to get me home.

Software

When it comes to Huawei devices, the biggest criticism often comes from the Emotion UI they add on top of Android (which is version 7). Again, it’s a strong attempt to make an Android phone look like iOS and the white, horizontal layout of system dialogues is easily confused as iOS on a quick glance. Some of the settings, features, and bundled apps are too much, but others I have found useful, so I am mostly happy with it so far and haven’t been game to try installing something more vanilla.

I have had one persistent bug which could be related to Android, or the skin, and that’s the WiFi selection dialog constantly crashing when trying to select a network, which is incredibly frustrating. I can fix it by going into another setting, and then back into WiFi selection, but that’s not a great solution when you’re hurriedly trying to connect to WiFi. One other small gripe is that switching airplane mode off always switches Bluetooth back on, even if it was off beforehand, not a major issue, but I am a control freak, so it annoys me.

Conclusion

A few minor gripes, and perhaps a slightly inflated price aside, I am so far pleased with the P10, it’s well made, fits nicely in my clothing, is light, and feels like something I will be happy to have for a couple of years, hopefully, it won’t fall foul to a lack of software fixes and updates as Android advances, since purchase Huawei have issued three system updates, so this looks encouraging.