Huawei launches P10 and P10 Plus at MWC 2017

Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group  took to a packed stage at MWC in Barcelona and revealed their latest successors to last year’s P9: the new P10 and the P10 Plus. Both phones come in not one, not four but a whopping eight different colours with two of them specially created by Pantone – a metallic looking Greenery and a fetching shade of Dazzling Blue on top of the usual black, metal and gold finishes.

The designs follow their aesthetic blueprint from prior incarnations with a front-facing fingerprint reader cum home button at the base of the phone, rounded edges and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 sheathing the touchscreen display along with cameras that are noticeably flush with the casing.

Contrary to speculation, both phones come with flat touchscreen displays. The P10 has a 5.1-inch 1080P432ppi display while the P10 Plus has a larger 5.5-inch WQHD 534ppi resolution display. Both phones come with Android Nougat overlaid with their EMUI 5.1 software on their new Kirin 960 processor. Barring size, the P10 sports 4GB RAM and either 32GB or 64GB of storage along with a 3,200mAh battery while the P10 Plus comes with 6GB RAM and up to 128GB of storage and a heftier 3,750mAh battery. The larger P10 Plus also has a few interesting bonuses over the smaller P10, notable 4×4 MIMO for up to 600Mbit download speeds on account of a quartet of beefed up antennas spaced throughout the casing.

Continuing last year’s partnership with Leica, both the P10 and P10 Plus come with Leica-issued camera tech not just on the rear camera but on the front too for Leica-standard selfies.

The rear camera is a refinement of their prior dual camera setup but this time around it has a larger 20-MP mono sensor combined with a 12-MP sensor like that seen on the Mate 9. Where it gets a sprucing up is the inclusion of a Leica Portraiture Mode that uses what they claim as 3D detection tech to track facial features at a pixel level to offer a studio relighting effect, rich detail and bokeh in every portrait shot.

The front cameras for selfies on both the P10 and P10 Plus have an F/1.9 aperture, Leica issued tech and also have what they call an Adaptive Selfie mode – the camera automatically refocuses the shot to make sure everyone is in the frame. There are some slight differences between both phones on the camera front – the P10 has an F/2.2 aperture on both rear cameras while the large P10 Plus enjoys a wider F/1.8 aperture.

There’s no confirmation yet on which colour variants will reach Malaysia but it has been confirmed that we’ll be in the first wave for releases which should arrive soon. In terms of pricing the p10 Plus will retail for 699 Euros (about RM3,277) for 4GB/65GB while the larger one with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage will retail for 799 Euro (about RM3,764) . The P10 will retail starting from 649 Euro (about RM3,043). More news as we get it.