Huawei P10 review: The Mini-Mate

Gallery with Quik

The Huawei P10 comes with an updated Gallery app as part of the EMUI 5.1. GoPro has partnered with Huawei to bring the Quik video editing app into EMUI's Gallery. With the newly announced EMUI 5.1, Quik will be responsible for all Highlights and custom video edits.

The gallery defaults to a timeline, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. The pinch gesture is available for setting thumbnail size. You can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums, and you can also have hidden albums, though that's more of an organizational tool than a privacy one - they are there when you hit hidden albums.

Gallery

Highlights is a new gallery feature, which isn't new for Android, but is now making its way to EMUI's default gallery app. While your phone is idle, the gallery will index your photos and sort them by places and people. GoPro's Quik integration generates video highlights from your best moments. It can detect faces and frame the picture accordingly, or it can even sync the whole video with music's beat. All of these new features are available in the new Discovery tab.

Highlights with Quik editing options

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you a host of sharing options. The info icon up top gives some pretty detailed information about the image, including a histogram.

Viewing a single image

You can also go into a very capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), levels, filters (more than Instagram and Prisma combined) and beauty enhancements.

The image editor is quite capable

Video player

The P10's video player is pretty basic, much like the one on the P9 - its sole option is playback speed. What Huawei has added on this model is floating window video playback.

Simplistic video player with few options

Music player

The P10 has quite stylish Music app pre-installed. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your playlists, too. The background of the app changes dynamically to match the album art, which is a nice little touch.

The music player

The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. If you're especially into lyrics, you can have them overlayed on top the homescreen.

Audio output is decently clear, but disappointingly quiet

When plugged into an active external amplifier, the Huawei P10 posted excellent scores top to bottom as you would expect from any expensive modern day smartphone. When handsets are that good we can only rate them by their output loudness and the P10 was among the quietest we've seen.

Plugging in a pair of headphones causes moderate damage to stereo quality and introduces a tiny bit of extra distortion. All in all, the output is still nicely clear and tracks will sound the way they were meant to, but once again, the volume is well below the average, which is hard to excuse at this price point.

And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Huawei P10	+0.01, -0.04	-93.0	94.8	0.0019	0.0080	-93.5
Huawei P10 (headphones attached)	+0.25, -0.02	-92.7	93.0	0.192	0.175	-59.5
Google Pixel	+0.02, -0.03	-93.0	93.0	0.0045	0.0086	-92.6
Google Pixel (headphones attached)	+0.22, -0.03	-92.7	92.7	0.0054	0.129	-50.9
Apple iPhone 7	+0.06, -0.10	-92.4	92.3	0.0015	0.0093	-80.9
Apple iPhone 7 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.11	-92.3	92.3	0.0011	0.012	-77.0
Samsung Galaxy S7	+0.01, -0.04	-92.5	92.6	0.0027	0.0078	-92.7
Samsung Galaxy S7 (headphones)	+0.05, -0.05	-91.9	92.1	0.0044	0.063	-73.4
LG G5	+0.01, -0.04	-92.6	92.6	0.0051	0.0096	-93.3
LG G5 (headphones)	+0.05, -0.01	-92.2	92.3	0.0029	0.037	-50.7

Huawei P10 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.