Huawei P8 to lead Chinese move on smartphone market

This could be the year that Chinese manufacturers start to get serious about selling premium phones in the Aust­ralian market.

This could be the year that Chinese manufacturers start to get serious about selling premium phones in the Aust­ralian market.

With the sliding Australian dollar and increasing price of premium brands, the likes of OnePlus, Oppo and Huawei have an opening in the local market. They can produce near-premium smartphones at about half the price of the four-figure amounts you pay for an iPhone 6 or Samsung S6.

Take Huawei’s P8, destined for local release around August. I got to play with the P8 over several days in Shenzhen last week. Sporting a 5.2-inch 1080p display, it’s a tad bigger than iPhone 6 and the S6, and weighs a fraction more than the S6 — 144g versus 138g. Yet it’s thinner than both.

It has an aluminium case and exudes a premium look, although it’s somewhat squarish. It has a 1080p high-definition display rather than the newer QuadHD display on the S6.

While its 424 pixel-per-inch screen resolution lags the S6, it’s ahead of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus resolutions. The display is clear, sharp and colourful. The unit I tested had two 4G SIM card slots. One doubles as a microSD card slot, which is just as well as you get only 16GB of internal storage.

The P8 has a fast 8-core processor (4 cores at 1.5 GHz and 4 at 2.0 GHz), 3GB of memory and high-resolution 13 and 8 mega­pixel snappers. That’s the specs of high-end smartphones. And it runs Huawei’s modified Android 5.0 Lollipop, Emotion UI 3.1.

I tested processor performance using AnTuTu Benchmark 5.7 and the P8 scored 52405, a hair’s breadth less than the new HTC One M9, which is rated at 52709. The S6 is rated at 67520. But the P8 costs hundreds of dollars less than either and is faster than last year’s smartphones.

Battery life is very good. The P8’s 2680 milliampere hour fixed battery survived for 7 hours 16 minutes playing video at 75 per cent screen resolution.

The back facing 13 megapixel camera comes with optical image stabilisation, a built-in image processor, a four-colour sensor, and dual LED flash. The camera shoots quickly — colours are strong but not overly saturated. There’s time-lapse video as well as regular 1080p video recording, and some eccentric features. Beauty mode, which softens skin texture, got rid of my six o’clock shadow. Thank you, Huawei.

There’s a light trails mode which creates a still by taking video of a light source as you move the phone. Alas, my attempt at this resulted in photos of large Freudian-esque white inkblots.

The 8mp front-facing camera snaps decent selfies. A small image appears in the top right of the phone, showing you where to look so your eyes don’t appear off centre. There’s a couple of other eccentric features. You take a screenshot by double tapping a clench fist knuckles at the screen, as if you’re about to punch the hell out of your phone.

And one version of the P8 apparently includes an e-ink screen on the back.

We don’t know if it will come to Australia. This feature is similar to the “always-on” screen on the Russian-built Yota2.

Finally there’s Emotion UI, Huawei’s user interface layered on top of Android Lollipop. It has a selection of themes.

But I’m no fan of manufacturers’ customised themes. Instead of endearing users, they can frighten them away.

Here, the colours of the default theme’s apps are different to the ones I’m used to. That means I’m momentarily reading app names before selecting them, which slows me down. I believe that manufacturers are better off sticking as close as they can to a vanilla (original) Android UI with standard familiar app icons and colours. Users are more familiar with it.

That doesn’t stop them adding features like Huawei has with its cameras.

While Huawei isn’t so well known for its smartphones in Australia, last year it sold 75 million of them globally, up from 52 million in 2013, and it enjoys a 5.8 per cent market share, thanks mainly to its home market of China where it claims to be second to Xiaomi in shipments.

According to its own figures, it’s behind Apple and Samsung in mid to high-end smartphone market revenue, so the P8 becomes an important vehicle for addressing that.

Overall the P8 is a feature-rich smartphone which Huawei says will sell for less than $700 when it goes on sale here around August. If that’s so, you’ll get a lot for your money.

Chris Griffith travelled to Shenzhen courtesy of Huawei.