Due to its reprise in 2017, major consumer technology manufacturer, Huawei has partnered up with the world-renowned Saatchi Gallery to redefine portrait photography through technology and design.
The partnership with Saatchi Gallery along with existing partner Leica Camera looks to build on the success of recent devices, including the HUAWEI P9 and P9 Plus, which have exceeded 10mn global sales worldwide.
This year, Huawei returns with the P10, a phone that’s very much faithful to the P9, though this time it has an updated spec sheet to make it ready for another tough year of mobile competition.
However, Huawei is extending the Leica branding to its front camera as well, and it’s doubling the brightness and extending the dynamic range. It also has an “adaptive selfie” feature built in, which will detect whether you’re taking a solo or group selfie — a groufie, in Huawei parlance — and will automatically expand to a wider angle for the latter. It’s a bit of automation that truly helps people without loading them up with extra widgets to adjust or things to be cognizant of.
The most interesting twist to Huawei’s P10 and P10plus might be its promise of an enhanced portrait mode. Twin 20-megapixel Leica cameras on the rear and a new image processor enable 3D face detection with up to 190 points of recognition. Huawei’s using this to make prettier portraits and depth-of-field bokeh-style camera effects.
Good news here is that these smaller P10 phones seem to pack a lot of the power of the larger Mate 9, using the same Kirin 960 octacore processors. Imagine the P10 as a portable powerhouse alternative, with potentially decent battery life (3,200mAh in the 10 and 3,750mAh in the 10 Plus). Storage options will expand from 32 to 128GB, with 4GB of RAM on the P10 and up to 6GB on the Plus, depending on configuration.
The design tweaks to the HUAWEI P10 are probably the most interesting. Much of the design language is similar to the HUAWEI P9, but there are a few noticeable changes here that make it a much more comfortable phone to use. The phone sits comfortably in the hand, with edges that are slightly less curved than on some of the current competition, making it an easy device to handle.
Limited versions of these phones have a new finish called ‘Hyper Diamond Cut’. You won’t have any fingerprints on the back of the phone like that, but it will look beautiful from afar. It feels a little strange on your fingertips but looks different to any other phone on the market.
Richard Yu, CEO of the Huawei Consumer Business Group detailed the features of the P10 and P10+ late on Sunday afternoon in Barcelona a day ahead of the official start of the 2017 leg of MWC.
“With Huawei P10 and P10+ we have created a Smartphone that revolutionises and redefines portrait photography. Thanks to the evolution of our partnership with Leica Camera, users now have an incredible Leica front camera on their Huawei device in addition to the rear. To match this innovation inside, Huawei’s partnership with Pantone Colour Institute ensures that the devices are equally as beautiful on the outside.”
Yu emphasised the photographic features of the P10 and P10+ which include 3D facial detection technology as well as enhanced lighting effects that can be used to make subjects stand out in different lighting conditions.
Xu Wenwei, Chief Strategy Marketing Officer at Huawei acknowledged that many may regard the cost of the new devices as prohibitive for customers in emerging markets such as Africa.
“The real challenge is how to offer smartphones with a reasonable cost and at a reasonable price. It has always been Huawei’s principle that the product itself must be of high quality and it should use advanced technologies. We try to control the cost so that the price will be accessible for the consumers. We have managed to lower the costs while sharing benefits across the value chain, but we have got one bottom line and that is quality. We would not sacrifice quality and we guarantee it for all the markets. Even if (the) price will be different (across the device range) the quality will be guaranteed.”
The Huawei’s new smartwatch may be the first one I actually wear for more than a month. HUAWEI WATCH 2 has almost everything I look for in a smartwatch.
There’s GPS to track my runs, an optical heart-rate sensor for my health and NFC for mobile payments. The international model will even be offered with a 4G LTE cellular connection, although Huawei hasn’t announced plans for an equivalent model in the US. It seems to be the all-inclusive Android Wear 2.0 watch.
On paper, the new HUAWEI WATCH 2 is similar to the LG Watch Sport, but it looks like the better Android Wear 2.0 sports watch. It feels more comfortable, and has nearly the same feature set. The original HUAWEI WATCH 2 was my favourite Android Wear smartwatch, while I’m not the biggest fan of the tachymeter-like scale around the bezel; the new model has almost all of the features I look for in a watch. I wish the LTE model was coming to the US, though.
The main selling point, though, is the watch’s battery life. The HUAWEI WATCH 2 has a special watch mode that can display the time and track steps for up to 25 days. You read that correctly: The watch can last almost a month on a single charge.
