Huawei P10 Plus review: Eyes wide open

Gallery with Quick

EMUI 5.1 comes with an updated Gallery app. GoPro has partnered with Huawei to bring the Quik video editing app into EMUI's Gallery. With EMUI 5.1, Quik is responsible for all Highlights and custom video edits.

The gallery defaults to a timeline, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. The pinch gesture is available for setting thumbnail size. You can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums, and you can also have hidden albums, though that's more of an organizational tool than a privacy one - they are there when you hit hidden albums.

Gallery

Highlights is a new gallery feature. By that we mean it isn't new for Android, but is now making its way to EMUI's default gallery app. While your phone is idle, the gallery will index your photos and sort them by places and people. GoPro's Quik integration generates video highlights from your best moments. It can detect faces and frame the picture accordingly, or it can even sync the whole video with music's beat. All of these new features are available in the new Discovery tab.

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you a host of sharing options. The info icon up top gives some pretty detailed information about the image, including a histogram.

Viewing a single image

The built-in editor is also pretty capable. It offers nifty light and exposure adjustments, including shadows and highlights. To top off the manual controls, there are also levels. If you prefer a more automated approach, there are quite a few filters (more than Instagram and Prisma combined) and beauty enhancements.

The image editor is quite capable

Video Player

By contrast, the video player is pretty basic. It still gets the job done, but the only extra features you really get are playback speed and a hovering windowed mode.

Simple video player

Music Player

The P10 Plus has quite stylish Music app pre-installed. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your playlists, too. The background of the app changes dynamically to match the album art, which is a nice little touch.

The music player

The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. If you're especially into lyrics, you can have them overlaid on top of the homescreen.

Audio player settings • Stereo+ is a opt-in system-wide toggle

Interestingly enough, we couldn't find any audio mixer adjustments. These would have been a nice touch. Stereo+ is one option that goes hand in hand with the P10 Plus' interesting stereo setup. On paper it boils down to this: In portrait mode, the earpiece is only used to enhance the main speaker in what is essentially a two-driver mono setup. Rotating the phone horizontally routes the left and right channels to their own respective speakers. The thing is, the earpiece can't keep up with the dedicated speaker, so some compromises to quality and loudness are made to make the whole setup work and maintain uniform sound. It is not an ideal solution by a long shot, but stereo is always a nice option to have around. You can always leave it off.

Audio output has its ups and downs

The Huawei P10 Plus clarity was as high as we'd expect when hooked to an active external amplifier, posting excellent scores top to bottom. Its below average loudness however doesn't go well with its flagship status.

Volume was equally disappointing when attached to our standard headphones. We also saw a moderate amount of extra stereo crosstalk plus some extra distortion. While this certainly is a decent performance, we had much higher hopes going into this.

Huawei P10 Plus frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.