Huawei P8lite review: Style on a budget

Neat image gallery

The Huawei P8lite, just like the P8, may run on an entirely new Android version, but, as already stated, MIUI 3.1 has borrowed a lot of its styling and features from its predecessor. The image gallery is one of them. It still offers a Timeline view, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. It defaults to the Timeline view, but you can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums.

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you some basic sharing options (including streaming it over DLNA).

The Gallery app • Viewing an image

You can also go into a more capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), filters and beauty enhancements (which detects faces automatically).

It is very intuitive and packed with options, including things like filters, effects, levels and even special watermarks for time, location, weather, food and mood. Every teenager would be pleased with the selection.

The image editor is quite capable

Video player

When it came to playing videos, the Huawei P8lite default player does a good job supporting every common video codec, but unfortunately it lacks support for AC3 audio as is usually the case with most Android phone anyway.

We couldn't find a way to load subtitles. Not much else, however, is available in terms of options. It does have a neat floating windows video mode, but other than that, the player seems kind of basic. It still works great though.

Simplistic video player with few options

Music player

The Huawei P8lite comes with Huawei's custom music player app. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your own playlists, too.

The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. There are no equalizers to speak off, but the app does have a few extra features. It would try to pull album art, song info and lyrics automatically for you.

Another nice little touch is the ability to filter the songs by length, so no pesky ringtones show up in your library.

There is a rather odd interface at the beginning of the app, which unlike all the other screens can't be accessed by swiping left or right. It is alike a pre app environment with a sort of song browser.

The Music player

FM radio

The Huawei P8 has a built-in FM receiver. It can play through the headset or the loudspeaker, but you'll need to have the headset plugged in as it serves as an antenna.

We were disappointed not to find RDS support - you'll have to name your radio stations by hand.

The FM Radio also has a notification area shortcut

Audio quality is uninspiring

Audio output is yet another corner cut when going lite as the mid-ranger couldn't quite replicate the performance of the Huawei P8. The smartphone had mostly very good readings when connected to an active external amplifier, but its volume levels were below average and so was the stereo quality.

Plugging in a pair of headphones caused yet another hike in stereo crosstalk, making this one of the worst readings we've seen lately. Some intermodulation distortion also creeps in, but that's barely detectable to the naked ear. Still, with the loudness remaining disappointing we can't give this one too easy a recommendation to audiophiles.

Anyway, here go the results so you can do your comparisons.

Huawei P8lite frequency response

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