Huawei Ascend P8 review - hands on

Huawei has announced the Ascend P8, its flagship smartphone for 2015. It's the follow-up to last year's super slim, but rather disappointing Ascend P7, but you only need to take one look at the Ascend P8 to see that it's by far one of Huawei's most promising handsets to date. Not only is it the first Huawei phone to use a full-metal aluminium unibody chassis, but it's also the company's thinnest one yet, measuring a mere 6.4mm thick.

That may be only 0.1mm thinner than the P7, but the P8 is a huge leap forward in terms of design. Available in 'Mystic Champagne', 'Prestige Gold', 'Titanium Grey' and 'Carbon Black', its beautiful chamfered edges and rounded sides are extremely comfortable to hold in your hand and its subtle glistening finish will no doubt draw several comparisons to the iPhone 6.

DISPLAY

However, whereas the iPhone 6 is quite large for a 4.7in handset, measuring 138mm high and 67mm wide, the Ascend P8 manages to cram a much bigger 5.2in Full HD display on a chassis that measures just 145mm high and 72mm wide. 

This is thanks in part to the phone's miniscule bezels, which cut down on excess space and keep the P8 nice and compact. It's certainly a good-looking piece of kit, and to make things even better, Huawei's said it's also spill-resistant due to its nano-coating technology, so you can take calls in the rain without the phone taking damage.

The display uses what Huawei calls an IPS-NEO panel, which is supposedly meant to deliver brighter, sharper images while being more energy efficient. We'll be putting the screen through our profiling tests shortly, but initial impressions are good. Blacks seem to be very deep, and colours are rich and vibrant.

Admittedly, Huawei's Emotion 3.1 UI doesn't do a particularly good job of selling the phone when you first turn it on, as its muted colour palette and dull colour schemes do little to accentuate the phone's display. There will be multiple themes to choose from, though, so you'll probably want to spend a bit of time customising your handset to suit your own tastes.

CAMERA

Like the P7, one of the Ascend P8's headline features is the camera. While its rear-facing 13-megapixel sensor won't be able to match the resolution of Samsung or HTC's rear cameras on the Galaxy S6 or One M9, the P8 does have the world's first 4-colour RGBW imaging sensor.

According to Huawei, this provides 32% higher brightness and contrast levels and cuts down on noise in low light by 78%, leading to brighter, more detailed images in a wider variety of conditions. We couldn't see much evidence of this ourselves when we tried taking a few pictures on the showfloor, but we'll be testing out the camera in full very soon.

It also has optical image stabilisation, but Huawei's increased the anti-shake angle to 1.2 degrees compared to the usual 0.6 degrees you'll find on the iPhone 6 Plus, for example. This should help the camera take better pictures in low light and record more stable video footage.

Moreover, Huawei's included a DSLR-level independent image signal processor on the Ascend P8, which should help noise reduction in low light. It should also be able to help the camera expose images more accurately, producing more natural colours and providing the right white balance.

The front camera, on the other hand, has a 5-megapixel sensor and has a 'perfect selfie' mode, otherwise known as an enhanced 'beauty mode'. You'll also be able to use the P8 together with up to three other smartphones to create videos from four different angles simultaneously using Huawei's new Director Mode. Huawei didn't go into much detail on whether the other smartphones had to be P8s as well, but we'll be testing this feature in the coming week as we put our review sample through its paces.

SPECIFICATIONS & BATTERY LIFE

As for the phone's specifications, the Ascend P8 is powered by a 3GB of RAM and a 64-bit octa-core processor comprised of a quad-core 2.0GHz Kirin 930 chip and a 1.5GHz Kirin 935. According to Huawei, this provides a 20% increase in power efficiency over the Ascend P7 thanks to ARM's big.LITTLE technology. This allows the four Kirin 930 cores to take over when you're playing a game or watching a video, for example, while the slower Kirin 935 cores tackle lower intensity tasks to help keep energy consumption to a minimum. 

Huawei has high hopes for the phone's battery life, too, as it says the 2,000mAh battery should be able to last a full day under heavy usage and 1.5 days in normal use. The Ascend P8 also has the world's first app power consumption firewall, according to Huawei, which will monitor your apps' power usage, such as those always working away in the background, for instance, and block anything that seems to be using too much energy. This will apparently prolong the phone's standby time by an extra 2.3 days.

If true, it could give the P8 the advantage it needs over other top flagship phones this year such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 and HTC One M9, which only lasted 13h 37m and 9h 18m respectively in our continuous video playback tests. Huawei also mentioned a quick charge feature, but didn't mention any details on how much charge you'd get from plugging the phone in for a specific amount of time.

KNUCKLE SENSE

One of the stranger aspects of the Ascend P8 is Huawei's new Knuckle Sense technology. This allows you to perform certain functions with a tap of your knuckle instead of your fingertip, such as taking a screenshot or cropping an area of a web page so you can share it instantly with your friends. When we tried it out for ourselves, it certainly worked very well, but we doubt it's going to be the P8's killer feature.

HUAWEI ASCEND P8 MAX

If one smartphone wasn't enough, Huawei also announced the massive Ascend P8 Max, a 6.8in monster phablet that measures just 6.8mm thick. Huawei claims you can still fit it in your pocket, but it is truly huge to hold in your hand.

Still, its aluminium alloy chassis certainly looks and feels the part of a premium handset, and its rounded edges were just within reach. Just in case you don't want to look a complete fool while taking a call, though, you use the phone hands-free together with Huawei's TalkBand B2 Bluetooth headset.

To provide a little more protection, Huawei unveiled a brand new case for the P8 Max, taking more than a few ideas from HTC's DotView cases for the One M8 and One M9. Made of real leather, you can either use it as a stand for watching movies, or to check the time and weather using the LED-illuminated front panel. You can also take calls through the cover so you don't need to have it flapping in the wind when chatting to your friends.

Its Full HD 6.8in display also uses Huawei's IPS-NEO technology, and has a supposed contrast ratio of 1,500:1. Admittedly, its Full HD resolution doesn't bode well for picture sharpness, as its large display only gives it a pixel density of 323 pixels-per-inch (the smaller P8, for instance, has a PPI of 423), but during our time with the device we certainly didn't have any problems reading text or looking at the phone's menu screens.  

Likewise, its huge screen gives you the opportunity to multi-task with different apps simultaneously. Huawei's included a dual-window mode, allowing you to have split windows or a panel view, so you can keep your emails open while browsing the web, for example.

As you might expect from such a mega smartphone, it has an enormous 4,360mAh battery, which Huwaei claims will be able to last for 2.23 days under normal usage conditions and 1.4 days under heavy usage. Otherwise, it's more or less identical to the Ascend P8, as it has a 13-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilisation, a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, and it's powered by an octa-core 64-bit Kirin 935 processor and 3GB of RAM.

PRICE & AVAILABILITY

Huawei didn't announce an exact date for the Ascend P8 and Ascend P8 Max, but both will be available in two different models: 16GB and 64GB. Both will have a microSD card slot which you can expand up to 128GB, though, so we're not sure whether the 64GB version of either handset will really gain much traction.

Neither of them are particularly cheap either, but at least they're more affordable than Samsung or HTC's current offerings. The standard 16GB version of the Ascend P8, for example, will cost 499 Euros (approximately £359), while the premium 64GB version will cost 599 Euros (around £430). The P8 Max, on the other hand, will cost 549 Euros and 649 Euros respectively (£395 or £467). All P8 Max handsets will be dual-SIM as well, while the P8 will be available in both single SIM and dual-SIM variants.

We'll be bringing you our full review of the Ascend P8 in the next few days, but so far it looks as though it could potentially be this year's dark horse in the flagship smartphone arena, especially if Huawei's battery life claims prove to be true. Check back soon for our final verdict.