The Huawei P8 Lite Review

Final Words

Mid range devices in the $200-300 range are more interesting than devices at the low end of the smartphone market because there's more room for OEMs to prioritize some features over others in order to differentiate their device. With low end devices it's often the same story of a Snapdragon 400/410 SoC with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of NAND, a 5MP or possibly an 8MP camera, and a qHD display. In the mid range market OEMs can choose to spend more money on certain areas to improve the experience, whether that be a faster SoC, a better display, better build quality, or better cameras. The P8 Lite represent's Huawei's view on what features are most important in a mid range device.

Build quality is definitely an area of focus on the P8 Lite. The chassis feels sturdy, and it feels fairly good in the hand. At 7.7mm thick it's also much thinner than many other low end and mid range devices, although this results in a compromise on battery capacity. As for the design side of things, I'm personally not the biggest fan due to the metal band around the edges. While I don't know how many people will share this view, I'm disappointed that a single design element ends up ruining the appearance of the phone for me.

The 5.0" 1280x720 display on the P8 Lite is definitely one of its weaker aspects. The calibration is just not near as good as it should be, especially with devices in the sub-$200 bracket becoming very accurate. At 5" the 720p resolution has decent sharpness, but I find myself longing for the 5.5" 1080p panel on the Zenfone 2 which is only $199. Since the display is something you look at all day, Huawei really needs to improve in this area by eliminating the blue shift in the greyscale and improving general color accuracy.

As for performance, Snapdragon 615 is really the best you're going to get at this price point unless you go with the Zenfone 2 which is something of an anomaly in many ways. Huawei is using the bin with the big cluster of A53 cores clocking up to 1.5GHz rather than 1.7GHz like in the HTC One M8s, but it still has significant performance improvements over Snapdragon 400 and 410 in low end devices. There would be even greater gains on the CPU side if it was operating in AArch64 mode, but with the P8 Lite shipping with KitKat it's forced to operate in AArch32 mode. I really don't feel it's acceptable to be shipping any devices with KitKat this late into 2015, as it has performance issues and uses Android's older Dalvik runtime.

The GPU shows even more substantial improvements than the CPU, with performance being anywhere from 1.5x to 3x faster than Adreno 305/306. As far as memory goes, the additional gigabyte of RAM also helps to keep things running smoothly, but NAND quality is definitely an area Huawei needs to continue to improve on. Both random and sequential reads and writes are as slow or slower than the Moto E which at times sells for less than half the price of the P8 Lite. It's hard to say how much of an impact this will have with the workload of a typical P8 Lite buyer, but there's certainly no reason not to improve on areas where devices fall short.

The 13MP rear-facing camera is where the P8 Lite really shines. Shots that aren't taken in the middle of the night end up being better than any other device I've seen at this price point. Much of this is owed to the well balanced processing that Huawei applies to images. Once you get into extreme low light there tends to be a dramatic loss of detail due to excessive noise reduction, and I think image quality would be substantially improved if Huawei would tone it down a few notches when taking photos in the dark.

The quality of videos recorded on the P8 ends up falling short compared to the still image quality. Even with a fairly high bitrate for 1080p video, there's just an overall lack of detail in every frame. Fixed focus also means that there's often blurriness when pointing the camera to new areas, and Huawei needs to work out whatever issues are occurring with the right channel audio recording.

The last important aspect to cover is battery life, and unfortunately this is where the P8 Lite really let me down. The P8 Lite's battery life is unimpressive in our web browsing benchmark, and the very short time in PCMark's battery test just confirms something I continually noticed when using the phone which is that the battery life is too short during general use. This problem is made worse by a very long charge time, which means that the phone dies quickly and takes a long time to be back up and running. Since the P8 Lite doesn't deliver on battery life, I don't know why users wouldn't instead purchase something like the ASUS Zenfone 2 unless they really want the P8's camera quality or smaller size.

Ultimately, there are no bad phones, just bad prices. The P8 Lite wouldn't be a bad recommendation if it was priced a bit lower and received an update to Lollipop. While I don't know if it would be possible for Huawei to reach a price of $150, I would need the P8 Lite to be priced somewhere below $200 before I could really recommend it. At this time there are simply better options in the $200-300 range, and so at its current price point the P8 Lite is a phone I find difficult to recommend.