Huawei P8 Lite 2017 SIM-Free Smartphone - Black

Product Information

In the box is a Getting Started manual a USB to micro USB lead a mains plug front and a device to allow you to eject the SIM holder. Plug in the supplied earbuds or you’re your own head phones and you have FM radio available. They added: “As a brand Huawei prides itself on creating premium devices at affordable prices and iD share this ethos of quality and value, making them the perfect partner to launch our brand new smartphone.” The phone is slimmer than the iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, and is immediately obvious as soon as you take it out of the box. Slotted in sideways, its chamfered edges and rounded corners look stunning against the subtle glistening rear finish. The camera sits flush to the chassis, creating a seamless profile that might make Apple and Samsung owners a little jealous. It’s been a while since we last took a look at Huawei’s P8 smartphone, so long in fact that a newer Lite version has since released along with its replacement, the P9. When I first put it through its paces last year, I found that its looks outweighed overall performance and battery life. Whether that outcome still holds true to this day remains to be seen. This should be just about enough to get you through the day, but it pales in comparison to the 13-odd hours we got from the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S6. Even the HTC One M9 managed to last another two hours in the same test, and that was already pretty underwhelming.

It’s easily Huawei’s best-looking phone to date, and its 5.2in 1,920×1,080 resolution display is also one of the best we’ve seen outside of Samsung’s Super AMOLED panels. Huawei’s IPS-NEO technology is supposed to deliver brighter, sharper and more vivid images, as well as being more energy efficient. One particularly fun aspect is the light painting mode. This is designed to take long-exposure shots of someone making patterns with a light source, such as a torch. As your subject loops and twirls to build up ghostly light patterns, the image builds up on your screen in real-time, so you can even direct the shoot. A simple example is to draw a heart shape around a person’s head, or you could go wild, as Huawei did when it hired artist Von Wong (below). The Huawei P8 Lite measures 14.5x7.3x.8cm and weighs 147 grams. The viewable screen is 10.9x6.6cm and this gives the notional diagonal imperial measurement of 5.2inches. Images were extremely bright and detailed, but colours often looked too over-saturated for our liking The rear-facing 13-megapixel sensor can’t match the Galaxy S6 or One M9 for resolution, but Huawei claims its ‘world’s first’ 4-colour RGBW imaging sensor cuts noise in low light conditions by 78% while providing 32% higher brightness and contrast levels. In our outdoor shots, it exposed the sky and clouds very effectively, capturing plenty of detail and putting other flagship cameras to shame. However, we noticed a tendency to overexpose certain parts of images, leaving them washed out. Colours looked natural outdoors, but became overly vivid when shooting inside.Although exclusive to the retailer until the end of the month, Carphone is offering the P8 on a variety of contracts, including those hosted by EE, Vodafone and O2. The device is also available tied to Carphone’s own iD network. We can’t criticise the level of detail on display, with all of our images showing a startling level of clarity. You’ll have to zoom in a long way before you can spot any pixelation or blurring of detail. Huawei’s 1.2-degree optical image stabilisation (twice that of Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus) also helps the P8 take clear, relatively noise-free low light images. Tesco Mobile’s sim deal is not the absolute cheapest, but it is very competitive, and the company offers the best customer service in the industry (winning accolades from Which? and scoring the best in regulator Ofcom’s complaints league table). The P8’s Mali-T268 MP4 GPU will struggle to play 3D games at their highest settings as well, as our BaseMark X 1.1 graphics benchmarks were once again a long way behind the competition. On Medium graphics settings, the P8 scored 12,681 overall, averaging just 16.2fps in the Dunes test and 21.4fps in the Hangar test. The One M9 and Galaxy S6, meanwhile, scored more respectable figures of 28,074 and 31,157 on Medium and averaged at least 30fps in each test, making them better choices for mobile gamers. STORAGE Arguably Huawei’s most accomplished phone to date, the P8 pairs a 5.2-inch, 1080p Full HD display with an octa-core Kirin 930 chipset and 3GB of RAM.

A three second push of the on/off button starts the unit and 30 seconds brings you a usable (booted) phone, switch off is 3 seconds.We are really excited to be launching our latest flagship smartphone, the Huawei P8 with iD,” the Chinese manufacturer’s UK Sales Director, Rhys Saunders stated. The P8’s battery life is even more of a disappointment when you consider the phone’s 64-bit octa-core Kirin processor uses ARM’s big.LITTLE technology. It automatically switches between its faster quad-core 2.0 Kirin 930 chip and slower quad-core 1.5GHz Kirin 935 chip for low or high-intensity tasks, supposedly saving power when you’re in the menus or browsing the web. Having a blue light adjustment means less eye strain and there is even an adjustment for bright light conditions. Boasting a 13-megapixel primary camera with impressive low-light capabilities, the Huawei Ascend P7 follow-on’s spec sheet is further enhanced by a secondary, 8-megapixel camera up front and a sizeable 2,680mAh Lithium-Polymer battery.