Shane
With a name that I struggle to pronounce. Huawei (Who Are We) may appear to be the new kids on the busy smartphone block, but in actual fact, as a company they have been in both the Telco and I.T. realm for eons.
Huawei shipped 75 million smartphones during 2014 and in the first half of 2015 has shipped 48.2 million with the intention of capping at 100 million at this years end.
In the last 12 months they have shown that they have got what it takes to run with the more known brands and to be fair they offer up one hell of a serving at a much lower price point.
No longer do you have to sell off a family member or mortgage the house to have the latest and greatest personal device. And such a device is their just released P8 flagship android based phone.
From the moment that you open the box you know you have acquired something truly remarkable. The phone is slotted in neatly and precisely on it’s side so you can marvel at the 6.4 millimeter thinness of it’s full metal unibody.
The P8 has under the hood a Kirin 930 Octa-Core 64BIT chipset and 3GB RAM to keep you multitasking, social posting and gaming like a legend.
The Huawei P8 is loaded with Android Lollipop v5.0.2 without the bloatware we have been used to with other brands, and perfectly reskinned with what I have learned to be familiar Huawei icons.
For me personally, having a personal device, tablet or smartphone, the music player has always been the owning factor. I am a self confessed audiophile.
Android as an OS has never really done the personal audio on their OS quite right. I’m very pleased to say that Huawei took this into consideration with a software mod; DTS, which amplifies your greatest playlists to ear heaven.
The 5.2″ gloss screen has the slimmest bevel in history, infact the face of the phone is basically all full HD screen at 1920 x 1080.
Being super gloss the screen is a finger print magnet though, so if you are a clean freak, you will be constantly cleaning the screen of the P8.
Other areas that the P8 astound are not only with the 13 MP back camera (front 8MP – also FHD) but with the lens filters, including one that is designed for capturing moving lights and so forth at night. You can infact even ‘paint’ pictures on your, well pictures, with any light source using the ‘Light Painting’ feature.
I can see this being a huge appeal to the more astute and arty snappers out there.
And of course (quiet sigh) there is Selfie enhancements. The most amusing would be ‘Beauty’ where the mode places a subtle warmth to the pic, goodbye wrinkles and tired lines, helloooo sexy face.
But it doesn’t stop there, of course. For those that like to make some seriously cinematic masterpieces worthy of an Emmy Award, Huawei have just the thing for you; Director Mode. What this allows you to do is to film a single event at multiple angles and then, like the Stephen Spielberg that you are, you can cut and paste the entire footage into your finest epic feature film. Yup. Nothing quite like it.
Combine that with slow mo mode and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible will have nothing on your action sequences.
The P8 comes in two storage flavours, 16GB (which we trialed) and a 64GB, this is of course upgradeable with a microSD, up to 128GBs.
If you do the colour thing, then your options with the P8 are Titanium Grey, Mystic Champagne (16 GB model) and Carbon Black, Prestige Gold (64 GB model).
In New Zealand Huawei has a strong market share (around 15 percent as at June 2015) placing the company third in sales.
With models; Mate 7 and P8 reinforce Huawei’s focus to us mere mortals and show the company’s design and performance level is world class.
With the P8 having a price point beginning at $799.00 NZD Huawei have released a Ferrari affordable to everyone.
Try as we might (and we sure did) we actually could not fault the phone. It’s top shelf all the way.
The Huawei P8, where we think the ‘P’ deservedly stands for perfection.