Finally, Huawei Malaysia has begun the rollout of EMUI 5.0 to the P9 and honor 8 smartphones. The announcement was made on the company’s social media platforms yesterday and will likely be rolled out in batches to both devices in the coming days. Here are some of the new features on EMUI 5.0.
1. You can now add an App Drawer to your home screen
Yes, finally. To me, this is perhaps one of the two best features on Huawei’s new Android skin that’s based on Android 7.0 Nougat. Just head into the settings menu under home-screen style and you can set it to “Drawer” which will chuck all your applications in a nifty little app drawer. Super awesome.
2. You also get a new notifications tray
Huawei’s notifications tray was a pain for me. It covered the entire screen and was always super annoying to navigate. With EMUI 5.0, you get a new one that’s more similar to Android Nougat’s notifications tray. This means you can do more in it, you can see more, and it’s also a nice aesthetic than it was.
3. App Twins
We’ve seen this feature before on the likes of Xiaomi’s devices. Essentially, it’ll let you install two different versions of the same app and log into them with two separate accounts — think two WhatsApp accounts on the same phone. This is useful when you want to separate your work life from your personal one.
4. A new look and settings menu
When developing the new software, Huawei said they worked hard on making sure the new settings menu was more accessible than ever, letting users get to the settings they want with just two or three taps. This also translated to a nicer-looking settings app which is always welcomed. Be sure to explore this new menu when you get your update as not everything is where it was before.
5. Performance improvements, Data Saver and more
Most of this goes on in the background. According to Huawei, their flagship P9 smartphone runs 20% faster on EMUI 5.0 than it did on the older version of this software thanks to the various improvements they’ve made to it.
They’ve also added a Data Saver mode to save data among other things. For more information on what’s new with EMUI 5.0, check out this post.
