The bottom mounted single speaker surprisingly makes for a great audio experience

Huawei has been on a solid run lately, with various fantastic smartphone offerings that cover the price spectrum. With their latest flagship, Huawei decided to drop the Ascend moniker, while retaining what defines the company’s P-series of smartphones: style, beauty, and great performance. Does Huawei succeed in taking things to the next level? We find out, in this in-depth review of the Huawei P8!
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Huawei has been known to deliver in the design department with some very well crafted devices, and the P8 is certainly no exception. In fact, it is one of the most well-designed handsets from the company yet, and is quite the looker with its unibody steel construction. Like any other smartphone that features the use of metal, the P8 feels extremely solid.
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The design is very angular and flat with chamfered edges, but the corners and sides have been slightly rounded to allow for a more comfortable feel in the hand. The metal body has been treated with what Huawei calls “diamond shaped blasting,” that enhances the texture of the metal, and provides the phone with some extra grip in the process. Keeping with one of the trends of the P-series, this device is extremely thin with a thickness of just 6.4 mm, resulting in an appearance that is sleek and stylish. The slim profile and fairly thin bezels on the sides of the display also allow for some ease with one-handed use, even though the bezels aren’t as thin as the press renders may suggest.
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Taking a look around the device, the left side is completely bare, with the power button, volume rocker, microSD card slot, and SIM card slot all placed on the right. The power button and volume keys are easy to press and very tactile, but the latter did exhibit a slight amount of wiggle, though it isn’t particularly noticeable in everyday use. Up top is the headphone jack, and at the bottom is the microUSB port, flanked by what looks like a dual speaker setup. Unfortunately, the two speaker grills are just a design element present just for parity’s sake, with only the left grill actually housing a speaker, and the right housing a microphone. A multi-colored notification LED is located up front, next to the front-facing camera, earpiece, and usual array of sensors.
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The Huawei P8 features a 5.2-inch IPS LCD display with a 1080p resolution, resulting in a pixel density of 424 ppi. The display size is great for those looking for a “normal-sized” phone, at least in the Android world, and a 1080p resolution is more than enough, especially given how much more battery friendly the panel will be.
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The screen is bright, vivid, and saturated with some great contrast, along with good viewing angles and outdoor visibility. You do have the option to change the color temperature of the display in the Settings menu to a little warmer or colder to better suit your tastes, but the default out of the box settings were good enough, as is, in my opinion. Overall, the P8 comes with a gorgeous display that will provide a great experience regardless of what you’re doing on the screen, and the thin bezels allows for it to really stand out.
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Like previous Huawei smartphones, the P8 utilizes the company’s in-house chipset, with the standard version of the device featuring the 2 GHz octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 930 processor, with the premium version packing the Kirin 935, both backed by the Mali-T628 MP4 GPU and 3 GB of RAM. This particular review unit is of the Kirin 930 variety, but functionally, these processors are mostly identical, save for the 200 MHz bump in speed that you get with the Kirin 935.

Huawei’s chipsets have impressed in the past, and the fantastic performance you might expect continues this time around as well. The P8 is very fast and responsive in day to day usage with smooth UI animations, apps opening and closing quickly, along with multi-tasking being a breeze. Gaming is handled very well too, with the device not showing any signs of slowdown whatsoever. This kind of performance isn’t surprising, and the P8 can certainly hold its own against the other powerhouses released this year.
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The usual set of sensors and connectivity options are available, including support for 4G LTE across a wide variety of bands, which allowed for access to high-speed internet on the T-Mobile network. The device also supports LTE Cat 6 connectivity for even faster data speeds, if you live in an area where you can take advantage of it. 16 GB of on-board storage is available with the base model of the P8, with 64 GB at your disposal with the premium iteration. Both versions also come with expandable storage up to 128 GB via microSD card.
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meizu mobile phone
The bottom mounted single speaker surprisingly makes for a great audio experience. The speaker gets very loud, and more importantly, maintains a crisp and clean sound without any signs of distortion at high volumes. It may not match up to the standard of those devices featuring front-facing speakers, but is certainly far better than any device out there with a rear speaker setup. Its placement does make it quite easy to muffle the sound with the palm of your hand though, while playing a game or watching a video with the device in the landscape orientation.

What we’ve seen with a lot of devices is the compromise in battery capacity in favor of a slim design, and that trend continues with the P8, with its 2,680 mAh battery. Battery life proves to be just about average, with basic use that includes texting and browsing social media resulting in 14 to 16 hours of use, with up to 4 hours of screen-on time. Light users can definitely comfortably get a full day of use out of this device, but you can expect the numbers to drop fairly quickly if a lot of gaming and watching videos is done. On the bright side, the P8 does come with fast charging capabilities, a feature that is becoming more and more prevalent in smartphones to compensate for average battery life that we’re otherwise seeing.
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The Huawei P8 features a 13 MP rear camera with OIS, and managed to pack it in a chassis that is 6.4 mm thick without creating a bulge, something that you can’t say about some of the more recent flagships out there. Huawei also claims that this the world’s first four color RGBW sensor, which is supposed to provide for better brightness in high contrast scenes and increase low light performance. The shutter speed is reasonably quick, and you can also launch directly into the camera and take a photo in roughly a second, by simply double tapping the volume down key when the phone is asleep.
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