For years now the battle has been raging. Android versus iOS. Apple versus Samsung. Galaxy versus iPhone.

At the top end of the smartphone market , there's really only been two heavyweights and they've been going at it hammer and tong for a pretty long time, virtually uncontested.

In cyber land, a long time is measured in months, not years, but Samsung and Apple really have been the double act at the head of the market for nearly a decade.

Recently LG and Sony have come close, technically speaking, but only two brands consistently have customers queuing for each new generation of their flagship handsets.

Huawei may be about to change all that...

 

The P8 is a very, very good phone.

I'll start with what's wrong with it, because there isn't much.

First, no wireless charging. I know I keep bleating on about this but seriously, now Samsung has proclaimed wireless charging to be the way of the future and has started building it into its phones, any competitor who opts out is kidding themselves. Hell, Nokia/Windows phones have been charging wirelessly for years.

My other pet peeve any regular readers are probably bored silly by is no landscape mode for the default home screen. I think any display over 5 inches is easier to use sideways and and when almost all the apps auto rotate, being bound to a portrait profiled home screen just seems so... iPhoney. In fact, a quick glance at Huawei's EMUI home screen and you'd be forgiven for confusing it with iOS's now very dated grid of uniform tiles.

Of course, thankfully Android offers many alternatives and even Huawei asks you if you'd prefer to use Google Launcher right from your first use.

(I use Nova Launcher by the way, no problems getting that to auto-rotate)

Another feature which various manufacturers seem to move towards and then mysteriously away from is dust and water resistance. Sadly, there's no indication the P8 would survive much of a dunking, although it is sealed up pretty tight. Unlike some handsets, there's no removable back to acess the battery, although there are slots for both sim and microSD cards on the side, meaning there's not much incentive to splash out on the 32gb model when you can expand the 16gb version with a microSD up to 128gb.

One more little niggle, then I'll get onto the good stuff. The P8's navigation buttons are on screen, like an LG, not physically on the phone like a Samsung. This isn't too annoying, as they disappear when you're watching video (a swipe will bring them back) but I'd like them to disappear when using other apps as well, or at least have that option. On the plus side, you can change the order they appear in.

Now... Let me tell you how good this phone really is.

Let's start by talking battery life. I've read other reviews suggesting the P8 only demonstrated mediocre charge life but I've found the opposite to be true. This could be due in part to the built-in battery saver function which prompts you to turn off apps that are running in the background, consuming power. I know you can download similar apps to perform the same function, but the P8's stock app seems to do a pretty effective job. 

This handset looks and feels amazing, by the way. The lines are minimalist and smooth, it's very slim and the display stretches almost to the very edge of the phone. Unlike almost every other device, the camera lens and flash are completely flush with the back, tucked subtly in the top left corner.

The camera performs well - in fact, critics have accused it of performing TOO well, bizarrely claiming some photos look too colourful! As for nighttime shooting, initially I did struggle to capture a pic that wasn't overexposed, but then I simply turned off the flash and clicked on the little light bulb symbol instead. This lit up my subjects the whole time I took the photo and provided a much better image, a really effective function I've never come across before. 

As for performance, apparently there's all sorts of twin octa-core processing going on I can't begin to understand, but the upshot is, everything worked extremely smoothly, just as you'd expect from a modern, high-end phone. My browsing experience was effortless and the stock email and messaging apps did the job without any fuss. 

One feature that really excited me was the default Huawei Swype keyboard. Usually I find the limited functionality of most stock keyboards so frustrating, it's not long before I resort back to my preferred option, SwiftKey. The P8's Huawei Swype keyboard has me hooked though, apart from the tiny space bar it's almost perfect, especially the long list of suggested words at the top instead of just the 3 options I get with SwiftKey. 

The P8's connectivity also impressed me, once again prompting me with the battery saving option to turn off the WiFi when out of range of a known network. Again, while I can download an app to do this,  with the P8, it's built in. 

All in all, I found the P8 to be a great phone, matching top-of-the-range handsets from other manufacturers in most areas and even outperforming them in some. 

It looks sexy and best of all, it's at least $200 cheaper than its big-name rivals.