Huawei P10 review: The Mini-Mate

Software overview

The Huawei P10 runs on Android 7.0 Nougat. As usual, you get a healthy dose of Huawei customizations behind the Emotion UI name or EMUI. The proprietary overlay is a brand-new version 5.1, which reuses a lot from the previous iterations but focuses on improving the performance.

EMUI v5.1 introduces two new under-the-hood optimizations - Ultra Memory and Ultra Response.

Ultra Memory is a new algorithm with focus on recycling and thus it frees RAM faster. It also learns from your app habits and speeds up app launching/resuming by keeping what you consider important in the RAM.

Ultra Response on the other hand allows for faster touch response thanks to a new driver. The screen will have lower touch latency and the driver adds support for predictive finger tracking. According to Huawei, their screens are now as fast and accurate as the iPhone's, and from our experience with the P10 - they might be right. The funny thing is that we've never recognized the iPhone's screen to be any more accurate than its similarly priced competitors but we won't argue with the engineers.

Another addition courtesy of the EMUI 5.1 is the new Home key support. You can get rid of the touch-sensitive Back and Tasks keys, and use the hardware Home key as a multifunctional tool. Once enabled - you tap for Back, hold for Home, or swipe for Tasks. There is also advanced gesture support on the key, where available, where you can assign some custom actions per gesture.

The lockscreen is one of the elements being carried over, but it was already quite functional. The Magazine unlock style greets you with a different wallpaper every time you wake up the device, with new ones being downloaded when you connect to Wi-Fi and an option to delete the ones, which are older than three months.

The lockscreen itself is minimalist at first glance, with just a large clock with a date and a shortcut to the camera. You can also quickly start the camera by a double press of the Volume Down button with the option to take a snap right away, or just go to the app.

Back to the lockscreen, you can pull up an iOS-style menu from the bottom, where you get a ton of functionality. The top row lets you manage the wallpapers - you can remove, favorite, share, or pause on the current one. In addition to that, you get a row of handy shortcuts for basic apps - voice recorder, calculator, flashlight, timer, and QR code reader.

The Lockscreen

Now, you likely won't be seeing much of the lockscreen, though, as the fingerprint unlock works so fast it makes it redundant.

On top of the multi- and guest user support that comes standard with Android, you can also set up a so-called Private space, which you can access with a different fingerprint. The data accessible there is independently encrypted, Huawei says, and is inaccessible to the other users. Only one Private space can be set up per device.

Fingerprint settings • enrolling a fingerprint • Twin app • A couple of Facebook accounts

In addition to that you can have two app instances for some social apps, so two users can access their accounts from the same phone user profile.

We got a little carried away with the privacy talk, but back to basics now. Beyond the lockscreen, we're treated to a pleasant surprise - on top of the usual all-apps-on-the-homescreens approach Huawei now gives you the option to pick the standard Android two-tiered interface with homescreens for your most-used apps and an app drawer for all of them. Kudos to Huawei for letting the user choose.

No app drawer by default • but you can opt for one • app drawer shortcut • app drawer

The app drawer is a vertically scrollable list of all your apps, 4 in a row, with a search field on top.

Themes are available as well. A theme will change your homescreen wallpaper, lockscreen style, system and app icons, system font, system color and the sound profile. You can also adjust things like homescreen transition effects.

Themes

The notification area is a 50/50 mix between stock Nougat and Emotion. Huawei has tweaked the look of the quick toggles and added the auto-brightness switch, which Google so stubbornly refuses to keep in plain sight. The notifications themselves look just like on a Pixel.

The task switcher is rather straightforward, but again with added functionality over Google's own - apps in the rolodex can be locked by tapping on the padlock icon, so killing all apps will spare the locked ones. The kill all button is readily available too, not up in the right corner as Google does it.

Notification shade, step 1 • • expanding notifications • step 2 with more toggles • task switcher

For certain scenarios, like in-car use, you can enable a Simple homescreen mode, which features large tiles for easy tapping. It's not particularly consistent, though, offering simple version of some menus, but not others - the dialer is the same size as in regular mode (in all fairness it's fairly oversized to begin with).

Simple homescreen with a tiled interface

Throughout the interface, you get contextual menus with relevant options right at the bottom of the screen above the navigation bar - hugely convenient for single-handed operation. The universal drawer that pulls out from the left side of Google apps is a lot better suited for left-hand use than right-hand, and even for lefties some of the higher-placed options are still too far away.

Contextual menus

The P10 features granular notifications control - Huawei had that even before it was a part of vanilla Android. You can control which apps can send you the three types of available notifications - the shade notifications, the lockscreen notifications and the banner style notifications.

This level of control is also employed when it comes to the app access to network data. The user can control the rights of each application to access either WiFi or mobile data. This can save a lot of traffic and help you optimize your data plan and consumption in an easy and convenient way.

Notifications • Notification management • Notification permissions • data permissions

While these are options accessible from the settings menu, they are also featured inside the Phone Manager app. In there you'll also find a one-touch optimization button (which may make you feel better, but we see no reason not to let Android do it for you). A virus scanner, powered by Avast is on board as well.

Battery saving modes are available from the Power manager, two of them. There's Power saving, which imposes some minor limitations on hardware and software, and then there's Ultra power saving, which condenses your entire P10's functions to a single black homescreen with six shortcuts. You can choose all of those, and you can pick from any app on the phone, so it's very much a psychological constraint than anything else.

By Huawei's estimates, that should triple your battery life, so apparently, there's more going on under the hood. Ah, there's no task switcher in this mode, you only get one app at a time, though judging by the loading times, they have to be in the RAM. Screenshots are disabled.

Power manager

You can enable the so-called Floating dock - it's a virtual key you can move anywhere on the screen, allowing you to expand it to the primary Android keys - Back, Home, Task Switcher, Lock and Close all running apps. It will help you control your phone with just one hand.

Smart assistance • navigation key options • navigation key • mini screen view • floating dock

Motion control also plays a significant role on the Huawei P10 as it did on previous Huawei models. There are flip gestures, as well as picking up, tilting and even things like knuckle detection and drawing. All of those are extensively customizable to your liking as well.

You can start recording a video of your interaction with the UI by the intuitive double knock with two knuckles while drawing an S with a single knuckle launches the scrolling screenshot. Thank goodness that latter is available from the regular Power/Volume down shortcut.

Motion and knuckle gestures

Voice control lets you operate the P10 entirely hands-free. The functionality boils down to the ability to trigger a voice command even when the phone is locked and its screen is off.

Huawei does this by always listening for a "trigger word", which by default is... "Okay, Emy." Once triggered, the phone wakes up and awaits further voice instructions, like placing a call. Speech awareness is also customizable. The wake-up phrase can be changed, and you can also train the device to recognize better your voice.

Voice control