Huawei P10 Review

Battery

In a similar fashion to other feature-rich UIs of manufacturers from China, EMUI 5.1 has an integrated Phone Manager app, which we have discussed in the Applications section of this review. An integral part of this application is the Battery Management. It provides information about the current battery capacity and status with an estimation of remaining battery life. There are toggles for two major modes - a Power saving one and an Ultra-saving mode, which changes the UI appearance entirely and allows only basic functions with the phone. You can also manage a list of applications that are white-listed from being cleared as a background process as well as check, whether there are active power-intensive apps. There's also an option for decreasing the resolution of the display in order to save more power. You can monitor the power consumption level by onboard hardware and software and the battery usage details. Of course, there are options for optimising battery life and additional settings. Huawei P10's super-compact body houses a 3200 mAh battery that supports Huawei Super Charge 3.0 and arrives with a fast charger that supports the following power outputs - 4.5V/5A; 5V/4.5A, and 5V/2A. It is backed by a 5-gate protection for increased safety. It also automatically adjusts the voltage and current for more efficient charging. The battery is said to provide 24 hours of talk time. You can check out its performance below. All battery tests we run here are developed by us and performed with the screen of the device being calibrated to 200 cd/m². Battery saving features are disabled. The 3200 mAh accumulator charges from 0% to 100% in 1 hour and 26 minutes, which is quite fast. The charging process is step-like. After 37 minutes of charging, the capacity reaches 65% and the process slows down. After 10 minutes, it reaches 75% and slows down more. This trend continues till the capacity reaches around 82%. At that point, charging becomes very slow and it needs 34 minutes to charge the battery in full. The temperature of the accumulator starts off at 29°C and in 10 minutes rises to 33°C, which is maintained for the next 30 minutes, after which the temperature starts dropping and at the end measures 27°C. The browsing test shows the battery drains completely in 5 hours and 50 minutes. The process is almost linear. It starts slowly but quickly gains speed and maintains it almost until the end, when it slows down a bit for several minutes. The battery temperature starts from 33°C, gradually increases and throughout the whole process fluctuates between 35°C and 38°C. The video battery discharging test uses a 1080p video at 30 fps with a ~20Mbps rate. The result of 10 hours and 13 minutes is an excellent one. The battery did not get hot at all. Its temperature fluctuates from 28°C to 32°C. For the 3D Graphics/Gaming test, the Epic Citadel's tech demo in its Guided Tour mode is used. The result from this test only confirms our observations from using the device. When it relies on the CPU mainly, it is quite power efficient, however, when the GPU manages most of the load, the battery drains quickly. That's why the 3 hours and 50 minutes result is not impressive at all. The discharging pattern is the same as the one of the video test above. Another noteworthy detail is that the battery drastically raises its temperature. Starting from 30°C, in ten minutes it reaches 40°C and continues rising till 45°C. Until the end of the process the temperature fluctuates around this level with peaks to 48°C. At the end, it measures 40°C.

Final thoughts

Huawei P10 offers solid build and premium design coupled with amazing colour options. The display is near to excellent - impressively bright, with good contrast, and perfect viewing angles. It could improve in colour accuracy and temperature, but these are within tolerable ranges. The device packs a super-fast fingerprint sensor, embedded in the home button enabling its smart tap navigation feature. EMUI 5.1 brings Android 7.0 Nougat with Huawei's touch on usability and software design. The Kirin 960 chipset offers a new generation of CPU cores and a major leap in GPU performance. In general, it is easily comparable to most flagship SoCs. The dual camera setup is better than all other smartphones with two rear shooters we have reviewed, but still experiences some flaws, which are acceptable. Actually, it works better when the shooters take photos as single ones. Audio quality is fine and the speaker is very good. Battery life is quite sustainable, suffice you don't put the GPU under heavy use - in this case, you will see the battery deplete quicker than expected. To sum it all up, Huawei P10 brings major upgrades over the Huawei P9 on all levels and from that point of view it is worth investing in it.