Huawei P10 Plus preview: Premium package, without a price hike

Huawei is back once again with its latest P-seried flagship phones, and is ready to wow us with its most impressive components, all packed into a device which is attractive, fashionable and well priced. The P10 Plus is the big brother of the regular P10, and comes with a few notable improvements, and only a modest premium. At just €50 more than the P10, the question is, why not just go for the bigger one? 

Huawei P10 Plus preview: Ho, ho, ho green giant

• 153.5 x 74.2 x 7mm
• Metal chassis, plus diamond cut finish on some
• Multiple fashionable colours
• 165 grams

Unlike Huawei’s Nova range, the Plus model design is – in every way – a bigger version of its smaller sibling. It’s the same all metal back, with antenna bands running along near the top and bottom edges, similar to the iPhone 7. There’s also the narrow glass panel at the top which plays home to the cameras, LED flash and laser autofocus sensor.

• Huawei P10 preview: The lean, green photo machine
• Huawei P10 and P10 Plus: Release date, price, specs and everything you need to know

The phone is impressively slim and has gently rounded edges to ensure that, despite its size, it’s still pretty comfortable to hold. That’s also helped by the fact that its power button is within easy reach on the right edge, right below the volume rocker.

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The finish of the metal body depends very much on the colour of the device. As an example, the blue model has the diamond cut finish, which feels unusual in the hand and gives a really intriguing reflection. Other more traditional colours have the more usual anodised aluminium finish.

The front is just one big sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass 5 which is – as you’d expect – more scratch resistant, and stronger than the previous generation of tempered glass from the American glassmaker.

Huawei P10 Plus preview: Fingerprints

• Front mounted sensor
• New home, back, recent apps gestures
• Embedded in glass

In something of a break from tradition for the P series, Huawei has moved the fingerprint sensor to the front of the device. It’s embedded behind a pill-shaped sheet of glass under the display. In fact, Huawei claims this is the first fingerprint sensor to be seamlessly embedded under the glass.

It’s worth noting, this isn’t a clickable button, rather, just a sensor that’s designed to vibrate slightly to give the user at least a little feedback.

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Depending on which phones you’re used to, this shift to the front will either be a great or terrible thing. One thing that is a downside is that the sensor is no longer usable to bring down the notification and quick settings shade with a swipe down gesture. However, Huawei has equipped it with its own suite of other gestures.

You can use it to perform tasks normally undertaken by the onscreen virtual home, back and recent apps buttons. A single tap takes you back to the previous screen, press and hold goes home and a sideways swipe launches the recent apps menu.

You can still have the onscreen virtual buttons if you’d rather, but having them switched off means more screen real estate for your apps and content.

Huawei P10 Plus preview: Screen

• 5.5-inch LCD display
• QHD resolution 

Another first for the P10 Plus is the introduction of a Quad HD display. It’s not the first Huawei phone screen to be 2560 x 1440, but it is the first P-series phone to be equipped with that resolution. That means pixel density in the 5.5-inch LCD panel is an impressive 534 pixels per inch.

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On first impressions, the LCD screen seems really sharp and natural. The white balance is nice and clean, and content – even fine lines and text – is very smooth and doesn’t have the fuzziness you can see up close sometimes in big 1080p displays.

LCD isn’t usually quite as vibrant as an AMOLED screen might be, and they’re normally a cooler temperature too, but this new panel from Huawei didn’t leave us hankering for anything different. As a side note: if the default temperature of the screen isn’t quite right, there’s an option within the software’s settings to manually change the colouring to suit you.

Huawei P10 Plus preview: Power

• Kirin 960 processor
• 4GB or 6GB RAM
• 3,750mah battery

Huawei has long done a good job of optimising its hardware and software performance, and that’s thanks mostly to the company’s own custom processor sitting inside the device. The same is set to continue with the P10 and P10 Plus which both feature the brand new Kirin 960 oct-core processor. This powerful chip is coupled with either 4GB or 6GB RAM to ensure that whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t run slowly.

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Perhaps more impressive on the power side is that, somehow, Huawei managed to cram in a 3,750mAh battery in to a phone that’s only 7mm thin. With the software’s extensive battery optimisations, this could well be a two day battery for a lot of users. Huawei’s SuperCharge also means that you can fill it up again in no time. Just half an hour plugged in is enough to give you 50 per cent.

Huawei P10 Plus preview: Dual Cameras

• Dual 12MP and 20MP sensors
• Leica Summilix f/1.8 optics
• New portrait mode

The Plus model of Huawei’s latest phone features a similar camera setup as the smaller model. That’s to say it’s two cameras on the back, one with a 12-megapixel colour sensor, and the other a 20-megapixel black and white one. While the smaller P10 comes with Leica Summarit lenses, the P10 Plus comes with higher end Summilux optics with f/1.8 aperture. In normal terms, that means we should see clearer, brighter images from the bigger version.

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A lot of what makes using these cameras great is the software. With EMUI 5.1 built on top of Android Nougat, the camera app brings in some great Leica manual controls. It also now means we have portrait mode. Huawei wants us to think we can take professional quality portraits using a P10 Plus, but we’ll reserve judgment on that until we’ve tested it further.

The camera can track 190 points of face, to make sure it adjusts the exposure to best shoot skin tones and facial details, and can create a soft-focus bokeh effect, similar to the iPhone 7 Plus’ Portrait mode.

This may be a relatively new feature for Huawei, but the blurry background effects have been around in smartphones for sometime, and even with Apple’s version, effects can be hit and miss depending on lighting and the contrast between the subject and the backdrop. We expect Huawei’s P10 Plus to be the same as those.

First Impressions

On first look, there are a lot of reasons to like the P10 Plus. It’s a nice evolution from the P9 Plus which we liked, and with the improved cameras and much better software experience with EMUI 5.1 and Android Nougat, we’re very much looking forward to testing it further.

• Huawei P9 Plus review: The big and the bold

It’ll be available from March, alongside the P10, and will cost €649 when it goes on sale. Just €50 more than the small model.