Pop-up selfie cameras seem to be a norm among Chinese smartphone manufacturers. This time, Huawei, which has been reluctant to kill the notch, is finally embracing the pop-up trend with their latest mid-range smartphone, the P Smart Z.
Upfront, the Huawei P Smart Z gets a rather large 6.59″ display that has no notches or punch-holes. The LCD panel pushes a Full HD+ resolution and it has a slim earpiece speaker at the top. In terms of design, the rear looks different from other mid-range Huawei devices as it gets a Pixel-inspired dual-tone appearance.
Powering the device is a Kirin 710F chipset that is mated to 4GB RAM and it also has 64GB of onboard storage. Huawei didn’t reveal any info on the Kirin 710F chip so it isn’t clear if it is a huge improvement over the current Kirin 710 processor.
When a selfie is required, the device has a pop-up 16MP f/2.2
front-camera which elevates in one second. According to Huawei’s product page, the selfie mechanism is resistant to 12kg of pressure and it is tested for resistance over 100,000 times.
For normal shots, it gets a 16MP f/1.8 + 2MP dual-camera combo that is assisted with AI. It can recognise over 500 scenarios in 22 categories in real time and then apply the necessary optimisations to improve your photos.
Powering the P Smart Z is a generous 4,000mAh battery and it charges via USB-C. The device also retains a 3.5mm headphone jack and there’s also a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. Out of the box, it runs on Android 9.0 Pie with Huawei’s EMUI 9.0 skin on top.
In Italy, the Huawei P Smart Z is priced at 280 EUR which is about RM1,299. At the moment, it appears to be sold only in Europe and there’s no indication if the device will be coming to other markets. If it does, we are guessing that this could be released as a new Nova smartphone in Malaysia.
