Huawei may not be a household name in the West (at least not yet), but the Chinese company is quickly carving out a sizable piece of the global smartphone pie, with its flagships that combine mid-range prices with premium designs. Its latest pair, the Huawei P8 and P8max, continue that trend.
The Huawei P8 and P8max have all-metal designs. It looks like it might take a design cue or two from the iPhone 6, but it's also hard to argue that this is anything but a snazzy-looking phone.
It's also a ridiculously thin phone. The standard-sized P8 measures 6.4 mm (0.25-in) thick, while the giganto-phone P8max measure 6.8 mm (0.27-in) thick. That makes the smaller model 6 percent thinner than the razor-thin Galaxy S6, with the bigger model tied up with Samsung's thinnest handset.
With Huawei's mid-ranged pricing, though, the company has to cut some corners somewhere, and the P8's display resolution reveals its not-quite-cutting-edge nature. Both phones have 1080p resolution, well off the pace of the Quad HD screens that several high-end Android flagships have shifted to of late. That comes out to a 423 pixels per inch (PPI) density for the 5.2-in P8 and a somewhat underwhelming (by today's standards) 319 PPI for the 6.8-in Max.
The P8 and P8max are essentially the same phone, apart from screen size (the Max's display is 71 percent bigger) and battery size. The P8 has a 2,680 mAh battery, while the Max's jumps up to 4,360 mAh. Both run Android 5.0 Lollipop with Huawei's custom skin ("Emotion UI") on top.
Both phones have 13 MP main cameras, with ƒ/2.0 aperture and OIS.
The phones use 64-bit octa-core Hisilicon Kirin 930 processors (Hisilicon is a Huawei-owned company), clocked at 2 GHz. They each have 3 GB of RAM.
The Huawei P8 will start at €499 (about US$534) for 16 GB storage, and that jumps up to €599 for 64 GB. The P8max, meanwhile, runs €549 for 16 GB and €649 for 64 GB. The handsets will be sold in more than 30 countries, including China, Colombia, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, UAE and the UK. There are no plans for a US launch.
