Huawei announces its new flagship duo - the P8 and P8 Max

Huawei today has announced its new flagship smart phone line up with their new P8. Dropping its Ascend naming, the latest flagships now come in two sizes, the 5.2″ P8 and a larger 6.8″ P8 Max phablet. Both screens are still pushing Full HD 1080p resolution and powering the device is their in-house developed 64-bit Kirin 930/935 Octa-Core processor that boasts 2X the performance of its former Ascend P7.

With most brands focusing on premium design, Huawei has stepped up with a better crafted unibody metal design with a larger screen to body aspect ratio. Although the 5.2″ is big in size, it is roughly the same size as the 4.7″ iPhone 6. The P8 is still incredibly slim at 6.4mm while its larger P8 Max phablet has a respectably thin side profile at 6.8mm.

Its imaging capabilities take centre stage with what they claimed to be the world’s first 4-colour 13MP camera in RGBW format. For stable shots, it is also assisted by Optical Image Stabilisation that claims to tolerate shakes better at 1.2 degrees, which is double of the iPhone 6 Plus. There are a couple of camera tricks included which makes light painting a breeze with real time preview. For the front, it gets a 8MP selfie camera for the P8 and a 5MP shooter on the P8 Max. As usual, it also comes equipped with group selfie and beautification features.

There are a couple of new additions with the P8 including a new Knuckle Technology. This is basically a new gesture feature that lets you use your hand knuckles to draw or to crop images on the device. In terms of accessories, what we found interesting is an add-on 4.3″ E-ink display which is attached to the back of the device. This looks like an interesting alternative to the dual-screen YotaPhone.

Both P8 and P8 Max claims to provide more than a day’s worth of use on a single charge. The compact P8’s 2,600mAh capacity battery is rated to last 1.5 days on average or 1 day of heavy usage. Meanwhile the mammoth P8 Max with a huge 4,360mAh battery claims to push more than 2 days of use or 1.4 days for heavy duty users. To prolong its battery life, there are some software features like an App Firewall which blocks power hungry apps from running in the background. Out of the box, it runs on Android 5.0 with its custom Emotion UI 3.1.

For each model, it comes with either standard or high-spec version and fortunately Huawei is packing 3GB of RAM across the range. The only difference is storage where the P8 gets 16GB for standard and 64GB for the premium model. For the P8 Max, it starts with a minimum of 32GB storage for the standard and it doubles up to 64GB for the premium version. To distinguise the versions, the standard version comes in Titanium Grey and Mystic Champagne, while the Premium version gets Carbon Black and Prestige Gold colour options.

The Huawei P8 is a dual-SIM 4G LTE device which comes with 2 nano-SIM slots. If you need more storage, the 2nd SIM slot can be used for microSD expansion. Connectivity shouldn’t be an issue as it supports a wide array of 4G LTE bands in FDD and TDD standards, while reception has been improved with a dual antenna design. For those who roam a lot, the device has a Roaming+ feature that allows it to connect to your roaming partner telco 3X quicker than other devices.

In terms of price, the P8 standard version goes for 499 Euros (RM1958) and 599 Euros (RM2352) for the premium model. The larger 6.8″ Huawei P8 max is priced at 549 Euros (RM2155) for standard and 649 Euros (RM2548) for Premium.

Overall the P8 is quite a huge step up from its previous P7 flagship and this is quite obvious with its higher price tag. On the Ascend P7, the performance was quite disappointing from its Kirin 910T processor which pales in comparison to its affordable Honor 6 with Kirin 920. With its price tag touching the RM2,000 mark, Huawei believes they are now on par with the establishments in terms of build quality and performance.

During the event, Huawei has mentioned that the new devices will be available first in 30 countries and good news for us, Malaysia is part of the list.