Huawei is on an absolute tear at the moment. Hot on the heels of the Mate 9, it has two new phones just announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The P10 and larger P10+ are built around front and rear cameras co-developed with Leica, and sold in two fashionable Pantone colours.
The 5.1-inch P10 looks very similar to last year’s excellent P9, while the 5.5-inch P10+ (or P10 Plus) takes the same design and stretches it out some. Both are cut from the same cloth, but suit different uses: you’ll fit a P10 better in your pants pocket, but watching videos and browsing the ‘net will be more fun on a P10+.
Echoing the iPhone 7/iPhone 7 Plus duality, the Huawei P10+ also benefits from a slightly better rear camera setup than the P10. The P10’s front camera, now, is Leica branded as well as its two rear cameras — one of which is a regular 12-megapixel RGB sensor, and one of which is a 20-megapixel monochrome one, an identical setup to the big-screened Mate 9. But the P10+’s rear lenses are f/1.8 aperture (and Leica Summilux-H branded) where the regular P10’s are f/2.2. A background-blurring Portrait Mode is built into the camera app, and face detection optimises focus and exposure for photos including people.
Otherwise, we’ve seen a lot of the P10 before in previous Huawei phones. The processing power underneath the hood comes from the (more than adequate) Kirin 960 octa-core developed in house, as well as either 4GB or 6GB of RAM in the 64GB and 128GB variants of the phone. The 5.1-inch P10’s AMOLED display is 1080p, the 5.5-inch P10+ is 1440p; both have microSD slots for expandable storage, and 3200mAh and 3750mAh battery sizes respectively should make for more than a day of regular full-ball usage patterns.
The new phones, too, are going to be quite fashionable — and will be sold in two finishes co-developed with the Pantone Colour Institute. One, Greenery, is Pantone’s colour of the year for 2017 — representing new beginnings, restoration and renewal — while the other is Dazzling Blue, one of Pantone’s spring 2014 picks. As well as those two Pantone colourways the P10 and P10+ will be out in white, black, silver, and rose gold and two different tones of regular gold. Eight colours in total — woof.
Huawei is forecasting that the P10 and P10+ will make their way to Australia in May or June of this year. When it gets closer to that point, we’ll have all the Aussie prices and release dates, variants, plans and stockists for you right here. As a forecast, the phones are set to cost 649 Euros for the P10 and 699 Euros and 799 Euros respectively for the 64GB/128GB variants of the P10+. [Huawei]