Huawei’s new P10 is the P9 with a little bit of iPhone and 2017 thrown in

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The Huawei P9 was one of my favorite phones of 2016, combining rock-solid build quality with a minimalist design and a very attractive price. It was, in many ways, the definition of the flagship phone for those who couldn’t afford or simply didn’t care for all the bells and whistles of a full-on premium device like an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S.

For its reprise in 2017, Huawei returns with the P10, a phone that’s very much faithful to the P9, though this time it has an extra couple of tricks borrowed from Apple’s iPhone playbook plus an updated spec sheet to make it ready for another tough year of mobile competition. I spent some time with the P10 ahead of its launch today, and I found it to be a competent update to a phone that was already doing a lot of things right.

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Like the P9, the new P10 comes in two sizes: a 5.1-inch device with a 1080p display and a 5.5-incher, called the P10 Plus, with WQHD resolution. Huawei’s own Kirin 960 processor lies at the heart of both, powering its EMUI 5.1 software built atop Google’s Android, however the larger model gets 6GB of RAM plus 128GB of storage versus 4GB of memory and 64GB of storage on the regular P10. Both phones have MicroSD expandability and generous batteries: 3,200mAh for the P10 and 3,750mAh for the P10 Plus.


The Leica-branded dual-camera system makes a return, with the P10 Plus benefiting from a higher class of lenses that gets it a wider f/1.8 aperture than the P10’s f/2.2. Huawei equips its new flagship phones with a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and a 12-megapixel one for colors, using the former to capture sharper detail and more light, which the latter essentially colors in. The camera is where one of the iPhone associations surfaces: Huawei now has a Portrait Mode that’s a direct match for Apple’s in the iPhone 7 Plus.