Huawei P10 Plus

The Huawei P10 and P10 Plus launched at Mobile World Congress in an unusual year, when Huawei didn’t have Samsung to steal its thunder. That said, the Leica-branded P10 still didn’t manage to be the star of the show – although, really, what could beat the Nokia 3310? – and its larger sibling didn’t raise too much excitement either.

At £679.99, the Huawei P10 Plus is priced right up there with the best, but doesn’t offer the waterproofing of the iPhone 7 Plus nor the wireless charging of the Samsung Galaxy S7. 

It also reuses the Huawei Mate 9’s chipset, and while 6GB of RAM is great to see, that’s also available in the OnePlus 3T at almost £300 cheaper.

Meanwhile, Huawei’s EMUI interface is better than it once was – but when it’s up against Google's stock Android in the Pixel XL, it can’t win on that front either.

Combine this with some daft decisions – average sound quality; a confusing home/soft key combo; and not releasing in the US; and it’s difficult to recommend this phone. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s not the best at anything either.

Hope you Leica taking photos

• Dual-lens camera
• QHD screen

For this phone, Huawei continued its partnership with Leica from the Huawei P9, although thankfully there was less of a focus on awkward celebrity spokespeople this time (we will never believe Superman and Black Widow use a Huawei, sorry guys).

Instead, we have dual cameras with no hump whatsoever, and photography is rightly the key selling point of the device. At 20MP and 12MP, these lenses combine monochrome and RGB sensors with a creative Wide Aperture mode to make photography really enjoyable, often with pro-level results.

The spacious QHD screen and generous RAM allowance are also high points on the spec sheet, and Huawei made a huge song and dance of offering an insane amount of color choices, including Pantone’s color of the year (unfortunately mushy-pea green).

However, you can’t get any of those colors in the US or Australia, because you can’t get the phone there at all. And at £679.99 in the UK, the big P10’s plus points are looking a little overpriced.

Design

• More colors than a primary school classroom
• Slim and stylish

The first thing you’ll notice about the P10 Plus – other than its size, which presumably you were expecting – is that it’s surprisingly thin. At exactly 7mm, it’s 0.3mm slimmer than the iPhone 7 Plus, and you can bet your bottom dollar that was intentional.

The P10 Plus resembles its Apple competitor more than a little, too, but these days we’d be hard pressed to find a flagship that didn’t. It’s got the classic all-metal unibody with rounded corners, and a dual-camera setup on the back.

This is embedded in its antenna bar at the top, with no camera bump whatsoever: again, ner ner Apple. And of course, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, because – well, you get the picture.

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.

This one little design touch is surprising given the low-key look of the rest of the phone, but there are many (MANY) other color options available if you’d like something more fun.

There are seven versions of the Huawei P10 Plus in all:

• The basic metals, namely Graphite Black, Mystic Silver and Rose Gold.
• Pantone-collaboration Greenery (color of the year, apparently. Color of our nan’s bathroom suite, also).
• Ceramic White (note: not actually ceramic).
• Two in ‘hyper diamond’ anti-fingerprint finish, called Dazzling Blue and Dazzling Gold.

Of course, if you want anything other than black, it’ll be a toss-up whether your country and network offers it. 

Always the way with funky colors, like the Google Pixel’s ‘Really Blue’ option that turned up many months after the black and silver versions (in the UK, at least).

Display

• QHD resolution
• Tough Gorilla Glass 5
• Picks up grease

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.

However, the screen is surprisingly not oleophobic (which is a coating applied to most phone screens to repel oil), so if you do remove the protector, not only are you more susceptible to smashing but your phone will become a disgusting grease-fest too. What a choice.

On the bright side, the display does come with Gorilla Glass 5, so you have some inbuilt crack protection even without the plastic cover. It’s bright and colorful, with slim side bezels, and somehow looks more integrated into the phone than many. It won’t outshine a Samsung panel, but it’s plenty pretty enough for most.

It’s also good enough for mobile VR, with the generous size, 1440 x 2560 resolution and 540 pixels per inch giving an immersive experience even right by your eyeballs.

Interface and reliability

• EMUI 5.1, based on Android Nougat, isn’t the best but it’s improved
• Navigation/soft key combo is confusing and badly designed

The launch of the P10 Plus and the new EMUI version that comes with it marks a watershed moment in Huawei’s history: they finally, finally listened and brought back the app drawer.

Huawei reviews have lamented the fact that EMUI steals your app drawer and doesn’t even offer an option to put it back, forcing you to use iPhone-style home screens with everything on display.

In EMUI 5.1, you still have that setting on by default, but if you’re determined (or the sort of person who would have resorted to using the Google Now launcher otherwise), you can change it to get your lovely menu of app icons back.

Go to Settings > Home Screen Style and pick ‘Drawer.’ You still have the slightly ugly Huawei themes to contend with, including their matching icons for default apps like Clock and Messaging, but there are many (MANY) free themes to choose from, so chances are you can find one you like.

Sadly, at the time of writing there isn’t one called “Stock Android,” which is what we’d have picked.

Another thing that’s significantly different from other Huawei phones is the new ‘navigation key.’ It’s on the front of the phone and contains the fingerprint sensor (which is usually on the back of Huawei and Honor handsets). 

This one’s a horizontal oval like everyone seems to be doing right now, but it doesn’t press in – similar to the ones on the OnePlus 3T or the HTC 10.

When you first get the phone, you naturally assume this button is your home key. It’s not. Once you’ve set up your fingerprint, it does unlock the phone – and very quickly too – but try pressing on it to go to your home screen and nothing will happen, because Huawei has gone for the worst of both worlds and whacked the Android software nav buttons on there as well. 

Normally you do one or the other. This is somehow worse than both.

In short, you’ve got two options. You can either use the hardware button just as a fingerprint sensor and have the software nav keys for everything else, including the home key. 

Or you can go into the menu settings and switch to just the hardware button, which we relievedly thought would fix the issue of not being able to press to go Home. But that would be too easy.

Instead of using either the Android or the iPhone method, Huawei has gone its own way and come up with a third: you have to tap the pad once to go back (which quite clearly should have been home), long press to go home (which should have been recent apps), and swipe left or right on the pad itself to see recent apps (surely a left swipe should be back?). 

The swipe is also irritatingly hard to master.

After several days of this nonsense, you do get used to it, but it’s incredibly counter-intuitive and stands in the way of not only iPhone users getting used to this device, but Android users as well. This was a huge SNAFU and we hope it gets fixed in a software update.

EMUI 5.1 is based on Android Nougat, which is good. But it’s been tweaked too far, in our opinion. 

There’s lots of Huawei stuff, like HiVoice, their version of Siri. The notification shade has also been redesigned and the labels rewritten in ways that are, at best, no different, and at worse actually less intuitive than stock Android.

And those infernal “App is using too much power” push notifications are still there, so you get to turn them all off after they’ve annoyed you for the fiftieth time.

Movies, music and gaming

• Average sound quality
• Gets warm during gaming

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.

Videos look superb on that sizeable QHD screen. Brightness goes exceptionally high (to the point that it hurts slightly) and colors, while bright, aren’t unrealistic. There’s a little screen darkening at extreme angles, but the most frustrating thing is the patina of greasy fingerprints if you remove the screen protector – and, at times, even if you don’t.

Nonetheless, this is undoubtedly an excellent phone for watching HD movies, but that’s not a standout feature in the current flagship market.

Intensive gaming, and in fact any intensive process, will cause the phone to run hot at the back, sometimes very hot, particularly in the top half. Running Asphalt 8 turned the P10 Plus into quite a pleasant hand warmer on an excessively windy day, but that’s probably not a good thing.

Graphics and performance-wise, it’s more than capable, handling demanding games without any lag. We’re also slightly disappointed to report that the GPS is very accurate, so you won’t be able to hatch your eggs in Pokémon Go by sitting on the sofa like you can with some handsets. That game does decimate the battery at a particularly alarming rate, but there’s nothing new there.

Performance and benchmarks

• 6 lovely gigs of RAM
• Slightly outmoded chipset

The P10 Plus is packing the Huawei-made Kirin 960 CPU, an octa-core SoC consisting of four 2.4GHz cores and four at 1.8GHz. It’s not the newest or flashiest chipset, and Huawei fans will be a little disappointed to see it trotted out again after its appearance on the Mate 9.

However, the bright side is that very generous 6GB of RAM – though OnePlus has taken the shine off somewhat by releasing the excellent OnePlus 3T with the same amount at a much lower price. Huawei says the P10 Plus learns from your usage so it can delegate RAM to where it’s most needed, but we couldn’t see a difference from other Androids.

The P10 Plus has a tendency to get very warm during intensive activity, but we’ve noticed this on other Huawei handsets, like the Honor 8, and it tended to dissipate after the first few weeks (with the exception of long periods of gaming). 

However, if you’re thinking of water-cooling it, don’t: there’s no water or dustproofing on this phone, unlike competitors like the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.

Our benchmarking puts the P10 Plus firmly in the Android big leagues. An average of three Geekbench 4 multi-core CPU tests came out at 5,090, which at current rankings would place the P10 Plus fourth overall, between the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and the Huawei P9, and below the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge.

Meanwhile, AnTuTu’s graphics, rendering and performance tests gave a total result of 119,164, placing the phone down at number 24. However, that’s not as bad as it sounds: the two Galaxy S7s are at 17 and 18, while many of the phones in the top 20 are relatively obscure Asian handsets.

The top 3 currently consists of the iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 7, and OnePlus 3T – though the latter has previously been accused of cheating.

All things considered, you’ll get strong and durable performance from the Huawei P10 Plus, but it’s not going to blow any of the existing Android kings out of the water.

Battery life

• Capacious 3,750mAh power pack
• Fast charging but no wireless

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. 

That seems a little stingy at this price point, and means it’ll have a harder job competing against the upcoming Galaxy S8.

Camera

• Dual rear cameras: 20MP monochrome and 12MP RGB
• One of the best camera apps
• 8MP front-facing snapper

The Huawei camera app is one of the good ones. It’s feature-rich but intuitive, and in this case includes some extras that make the camera genuinely fun to use.

First, the basics. Auto mode is easy to use and surprisingly fast: it’s quick to open, quick to switch modes, and very quick to snap. When you’ve got used to certain camera apps hanging forever (*cough* Pixel *cough*), this makes a very welcome change.

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.

The best bit of the P10 Plus camera, though, is found on the camera taskbar at the top. Alongside the flash is an aperture icon, which is where the double camera comes into its own. Tapping this turns on Wide Aperture mode, which lets you take very cool SLR-like photos.

Even better, when you take a photo in this mode, you can refocus it later by opening it in the native gallery and tapping the part you’d like to focus on. Not overly useful (or new), but very cool.

There’s also a Portrait mode, which is like beauty mode but for the main camera, as well as Artistic mode in the selfie cam which, again, gives an SLR-ish image by blurring the scenery behind your head. We’re not huge fans, but lots of people will think it looks expensive and amazing, so it was a good thing to include.

Low light performance on the main cameras is very good, even without the assistance of flash or Night Shot mode. For night-time selfies, the screen automatically turns white to use as a light.

Camera samples

Verdict

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.

Who's this for?

It’s difficult to know who to recommend this phone to. Our best guess would be Huawei enthusiasts with deep pockets and a passion for photography.

It takes excellent pictures and they look beautiful on-screen, no doubt about that, but other photo-centric phones offer a better overall software experience or a lower price point.

Should you buy it?

Probably not. If you’re looking to spend around £700 on a big phone, wait and see what the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus have to offer.

Or, if you need a new phone now now now, weigh up whether you’d rather have the priority Android updates of the Pixel XL, the waterproofing and app ecosystem of the iPhone 7 Plus, the bargain price of the OnePlus 3T, or the all-round fine-ness of the Huawei P10 Plus. It’s a hard one to recommend.

The Huawei P10 Plus is an impressive phone if you ignore the price, but the following three handsets offer more for the money, or a similar amount for a whole lot less.

iPhone 7 Plus

Sold on a dual-camera phablet but not 100% sure about Android? You might prefer the big Apple. The price is comparable, you’ll get apps and updates sooner, but the trade-off is less impressive hardware under the hood – it has just half the RAM, for instance.

• Read our full iPhone 7 Plus review

Google Pixel XL

Google’s own-brand phablet is guaranteed to get Android updates first, so if that’s a key concern, pick this over the P10 Plus. The screen is the same size and resolution, but the Pixel XL has a third less RAM and just the one rear camera.

• Read our full Google Pixel XL review

OnePlus 3T

If you want every bit of that 6GB of RAM, the OnePlus 3T offers a much cheaper way to get it. You still get a 5.5-inch screen, albeit at a lower resolution, and there’s no microSD card slot if you run out of storage. That said, it’s not much more than half the price.

• Read our full OnePlus 3T review

First reviewed: March 2017