The Huawei P8 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on June 4, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- P8
- Kirin 930
Software - EmotionUI 3.1
One of the aspects I found positive about the Mate 7 and Honor 6 was EmotionUI. In both iterations Huawei was able to impress with their differentiation, even if there were some stumbles in terms of usability. The P8 ships off with the first Android 5.0 Lolipop implementation of EmotionUI, which now sits at version 3.1. To get to the point, it seems that this was only a minor incremental update in terms of UX design and experience.
The P8's default theme and general design language shifts from the extremely bright and minimalistic take that we've seen in EmotionUI 3.0 of the Mate 7 towards a more colourful and contrasted UI. The blindingly white screens and hard to distinguish grey icons of the previous version are now gone in favour of more distinguishable replacements. All that needed to be done was to add colourful backgrounds to the glyphs - and that's exactly what Huawei has done here.
The notification shade is now a translucent black with a gaussian blur effect. It also seems Huawei has made better use of the settings panel, as it drops the lesser used shortcuts and increases the size of the remaining ones. The settings menu is comprehensive and offers a variety of options in the categories you expect them to be.
Huawei continues the choice of not including an application drawer with the EmUI launcher, so all installed apps are placed on the launcher screens. Here again we see the practice of having standardized icon frames for all applications, something I'm personally not a big fan of and see it as the biggest incentive to go the route of an alternative third-party launcher. It would be appreciated if Huawei had at least included the option to disable app-icon framing throughout the OS.
The system applications are a minor evolution of what we saw on EmotionUI 3.0. The most notable changes are the theme accents such as the black bar colour of the various in-built apps such as the dialer and gallery app.
A rather nagging aspect of the default settings of the device is the power monitoring of background applications. Huawei closely tracks and logs process activity whenever an application is active in the background. This is certainly helpful to track down rogue applications, but it would have been better to have the tool have more lax warning thresholds as it will get triggered by many apps even if their background activity is only minimal.
Since starting the review on the device's stock firmware of GRA-L09V100R001C900B039 Huawei has already sent out two OTA updates which are supposed to improve system stability and performance. A notable fix which some reviewers didn't get to see was the option to disable "Smart Screenshot", a feature where one would double-tap or draw with a knuckle to capture a screenshot. This was quite annoying as it had quite a lot of false positives detecting normal fingers as a knuckle and making you start drawing an outline for a screenshot when for example you wanted to pull down the notification shade. With this being addressed in the latest OTA, I'm left to find very few outstanding faults with the software.
EmotionUI 3.1 on the P8 didn't bring any larger changes even though this is Huawei's first Android 5.0 Lolipop implementation. The very simply addition of coloured icon backgrounds brings a lot variety to the UI, and it polishes what was for me an already clean and good-looking OEM skin. Considering this device is powered by a weaker A53 SoC, the UI performance was still good although not perfect. At the first glance it seems that the CPU isn't able to match other more powerful flagships with bigger cores, so let's move on to the benchmark section to see what it actually performs like.
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Pissedoffyouth - Friday, June 5, 2015 - link
Bus width, sorry.Kepe - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
Android 5.0 is called Lollipop, not Lolipop (every time you mention it, you misspell it). But thanks for the article, I thought the performance wouldn't have been as bad as it seems to be. The phone is way overpriced. It's a shame really, as the camera seems to be very good.Kepe - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
"The P8's gamut remains too large and veers off from the sRGB targets in the blue and green spectrums."According to the chart above this text, the blue colors seem to be very accurate. It's the red and green that are not accurate.
Ranger101 - Friday, June 5, 2015 - link
It's easy to see the standards of written articles dropping everywhere you look on theinternet, just more annoying when it's a website you visit frequently. Do you guys @
Anandtech bother to read through the articles before you publish? A simple spell
check perhaps?
If English isn't Mr Frumusanu's native tongue this would go a long way towards explaining
the kinds of errors we find in this article. Sadly it seems native english speakers/writers, such as Mr Cutress, are just as prone to said errors in their pieces.
This is sheer carelessness and creates the impression of falling standards at Anandtech.
I don't recall nearly as many errors under the tenure of Mr Lal-Shimpi.
Just a couple of the points from this article:
"Huawei started Ascend P-line" should read as "the Ascend P-Line."
"I regard the Kirin 920 as quite of an embarrassment" should read as "quite a bit of an
embarrassment.
Rod_Serling_Lives - Friday, June 5, 2015 - link
Anandtech gives us the most in-depth reviews on modern technology and you are having a tizzy over spelling and small grammatical errors. Your corrections are valid, but your tone is condescending and unnecessary. Maybe, you should fill out an application for Editor.Ethos Evoss - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link
What is unnecessary is this in ATOM-DEPTH review !Ethos Evoss - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link
Exactly I noticed this and + their new invented words e.g. ;app-icon framing throughout :DDDBA5620 - Friday, June 5, 2015 - link
very usefully post, i just bought a P8 days ago http://www.dhgate.com/product/huawei-p8-sliver-201... and not see anything wrong yet, and cheap.Ethos Evoss - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link
u purchased it to expensive .. the phone cost much lesshttp://www.aliexpress.com/item/Original-HUAWEI-P8-...
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HUAWEI-ASCEND-P8-5-2-OCT...
SoC-IT2ME - Friday, June 5, 2015 - link
Is the LG G4 review in the works?