MWC 2017: Huawei P10 and P10+ are the first steps towards achieving a dream

Chinese hardware giant Huawei had made its intentions very clear last year—it was determined to overtake Samsung and Apple and become the numero uno smartphone brand in the world. And one way of doing that by the year 2021, Huawei felt, was to focus on making an artificially intelligent smartphone. While we are yet to reach that stage completely, the company has taken its first step towards achieving that very dream. At the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, the company has unveiled the P10 and the P10+ smartphones.

Both phones come across as an improvement in terms of the design, with slick elements and flowing lines. The design isn’t entirely different from last year’s P9, and there seems to be a bit of inspiration taken from the Apple iPhone 7 (though that may not necessarily be a bad thing). How these two phones feel in the real world, in terms of the visual appeal and ease of use, we will only know in due course of time. But in terms of colour, there is something genuinely different. While we are quite used to the black, silver, grey and variations of gold colours, Huawei has brightened things up with the “greenery" option too, apart from the dazzling blue.

The biggest difference between the two, visually, is in terms of the screen size. The smaller P10 gets a 5.1-inch display with Full HD resolution, while the bigger P10+ gets a 5.5-inch screen with Quad HD resolution.

In terms of the hardware, the P10 and the P10+ are both running Huawei’s own Kirin 960 processor, the difference being that the former gets 4GB RAM, while the latter gets 6GB RAM. Both phones run Android 7.0 (Nougat), but you wouldn’t know because the heavy customization with the EMUI 5.1 interface will add its own visual elements and features. In terms of the storage, the P10 gets 64GB storage, while the P10+ will get the 128GB option—there will be the microSD expansion slot in both phones.

Huawei continues to partner with photography giant Leica, for the Leica Dual Camera 2.0. Huawei phones have been one of the better dual camera options in the Android ecosystem, thus far. Both phones have a dual rear camera set-up—one 12-megapixel colour sensor and a secondary 20-megapixel monochrome camera. You will have the option of using each separately for photography, or can combine both for a rich depth of focus effect.

What is interesting to note is that Huawei has also announced a collaboration with camera maker GoPro, for the camera software that’ll run in the P10 and the P10+. The feature is called Highlights, which will be a part of the image gallery—it will organize your photos and videos into albums.

Pricing details and India availability specifics are awaited.