Bucket Tech: Huawei P Smart - First Impressions

Huawei SA this week launched it's new P Smart device, a smart phone device with all the characteristics of a high level smart phone but at half the price. Yes, you read that correctly the first time, no need to read it again. So how have they done it? Well like with most of their devices, a lot of the tech they use gets moved into lower level devices, but there is compromise in certain areas which helps lower the price for the end user. No that it's a bad thing, it's just that you wont have enough RAM or as fast of a processor as the high level smartphones. 

Looking at the P Smart, Huawei have really went all out on this one, its the first phone in its category to feature a FullView Display, and its a 2.5D curved screen design which feels more compact in your hand. It also has dual lens technology camera, with a host of personalized photography functions. Combining 13MP+2MP rear dual cameras and 16-level dual shot blurring, Hauwei say the P Smart will make your photos impressive and stereoscopic. Further, with high-precision camera sensors, high-density phase detection pixels, the 13Mp HD camera focuses on real time, accuracy and speed, thus accurately capturing exciting moments. 

The P smart comes with the new EMUI 8.0 operating system, which is based on Android 8.0, which takes usability to new levels for fast and intuitive feature use. Chipset wise, the P Smart features Kirin 659 processor made with a process for med-range and high-end chips characterized by better engery performance, this also helps with battery life. The P Smart comes with a 3,000-mAh battery, combined with the Intelligent Power saving technology 6.0, which supports background real-time detection of power-hungry apps, comprehensive power consumption test and one-key optimization to save power significantly and help extend the battery life. 

Another nice feature is the unique on-touch split screen mode which the P smart has, which means you can use and run two applications simultaneously on your screen, offering you even more possibilities of mobile operations. The P smart also is equipped with Fingerprint 4.0 solution, fingerprint recognition within 0.3 seconds to bring an enhanced user experience, apart from just unlocking your phone, Huawei has also combined fingerprint recognition with other functions to develop ground-breaking apps such as fingerprint navigation, fingerprint shot and alarm clock deactivation with fingerprint. 

"Our new P smart brings you flagship features at an affordable price. It's the first time the industry will see both dual camera and FullView display at this price range and we are excited to introduce this to the South African market" - Likun Zhao GM, Huawei Consumer Business.  The Huawei P smart is available for purchase at all operators in South Africa from 13th February 2018 and the recommended retail price is R3999. 

Bucket Tech: Nokia 6

Nokia, there's a name we haven't heard for a while in the mobile phone market. For most part of the 90's and early 2000's the Finnish cellular phone manufacturer was the market leader. They built their reputation by making great quality phones, being the leaders in technology at the time and of course make phones that were desirable to all types of people, be it the business man or the average college going kid and not to mention they were virtually indestructable. As the years went on, Nokia started to face some stiff competition from the likes of Motorola, Ericsson and Siemens, and with many of those brands teaming up with other technology companies for new ideas and functions on their devices, it was time for Nokia to do so themselves. They made a bold move by teaming up with software giants Microsoft who eventually bought them off in 2015, only for them to let go of the company the next year.

Though much like their phones of the 90's the brand is refusing to die, and have announced their comeback to the market in style with the launch of the Nokia 6. The phone is currently only available in China but it's nice to see they added quite a new twist to what we used to but keeping the standards that we know, personally I think it's great! With the rise in Chinese mobile phone manufacturers in the market, China is the ideal place to test your product out for consumer research, the Nokia 6 sold out after being put on sale online in within a minute! Yes there was limited stocks but that is pretty impressive seeing that Nokia have been out for a while and no one knew what to expect from them. The Nokia 6 is as an Android based phone, it runs on v7.0 (Nougat) and has a Qualcomm MSM8937 Snapdragon 430 chipset with a Octa-core 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 CPU, it also has a Adreno 505 GPU. Memory wise, it's packing big with 64GB internal storage as well as a MicroSD slot which can take up to 256GB card. The phone has 4GB RAM which is well sufficient for a phone of this nature. 

When Microsoft teamed up to make the Lumia range, they adopted help from Carl Ziess for the camera technology, it's a pity that partnership didn't continue with the brand but never the less the camera on the Nokia 6 doesn't seem too shabby. it comes with a 16 megapixel primary camera, key features of it include phase detection autofocus, dual-LED flash, geo-tagging, face detection, panorama and HDR. It records videos in 1080@30fps resolution. Front facing camera is an 8 megapixel with 1080 recording capabilities. 

Another key feature of Nokia's of old were their build quality and it seems they didn't take any shortcuts with this one. The entire phone is a solid aluminium shell molded and chiseled into shape, it has nice clean lines with a silver bevel on the edges, the screen has the trusty Corning Gorilla Glass 3 which houses a 5.5" IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16M colours. In ratio to the phone size, the screen to body ratio is 70.7%, There is is section at the bottom of the phone that houses the key buttons as well as a finger print reader.  

Overall it looks like a pretty good device and while it might not be available worldwide, it's great to see the brand make an emergence into the market. It's not far off from the other high end business type smart phones but they seem to have everything there to take on the bigger fish in the market. For now people might be drawn to the phone due to its heritage but until we have it in our hands for testing, there's only so much we can tell from the stats. 

Bucket Tech: Huawei G8

When I attended the launch of the Huawei Mate 8 last month, they also revealed another range of devices that they were introducing to the market, the G Series. Huawei said that the G Series was aimed at the youth market with the phone offering more in terms of a playful creative nature compared to their other phones which are made more for the business individuals. It seemed to make sense seeing that kids mainly use their phones for taking pictures, listening to music, and being on the social media stream, so would they really need the hardcore processing power and the rest of the jazz that goes into the high end smart phones when they could really have their own which would cost significantly less? Well the answer is yes, although it did have me wondering, how much did Huawei compromise on their product to make the G series what it is? Well a couple weeks ago they sent me the G8, the "top of the range" if you may call it, from the lot, with the others being the G3, and G5 to test out and this was my experience with it.

Quality

Since the package arrived I tried to see where the manufacturer tried to make the device different form the others, the packaging still looking sleek and typical of their devices so no cost cutting there. Once opened, and removed the phone, I was surprised at the weight, as it was quite heavy compared to your normal phone but the reason behind this was the massive screen, unlike the P8 and P9, the G8 comes with a 5.5" screen instead of a 5.2" as found on the other 2 devices. The build quality seems great as well, just as all their other devices so definitely no cost cutting on that part of the phone. The finish is exquisite and high quality as well, really gives off that premium feel to it.

Design & Dimensions

When compared to the the P series, the G would be slightly bigger due to the screen size which see's the overall dimensions of the phone at 152 x 76.5 x 7.5mm which still is a comfortable size to fit into the palm of your hand. The beveled edges also help with this as it gives the phone a less edgy feel and therefore a better grip for the user. The 360 touch finger print recognition has improved in leaps and bounds since the P8. With it taking a full scan of your finger , thus improving scanning speeds to milliseconds upon touch.

Taken with the Huawei G8

Camera

The G8 comes with a 13 megapixel primary camera, with auto focus and dual LED flash. Huawei takes it's camera's very seriously and the quality on this one is just as great as the others. I love the features it comes with one of my favourite being the time-lapse. I even recorded my entire flight from Johannesburg to Durban which you can find below. I wish they could give you ways in which you can control the frames per second though, I mean the 50 odd minute flight only was a 1 minute video, most of it was boring but it would be nice to slow down certain aspects of the video and speed up the rest. The front facing camera is a 5 megapixel lens and has the smile detection feature which is perfect for selfies.  

       

Performance

Now many might be reading and thinking, if this phone is aimed at the youth and would be more affordable, how exactly did they do it if Huawei didn't compromise on build quality or features, well I'll tell you where they saved the cash, it was in the processing power. Whilst their top phones come with the powerful HiSilicon Kirin chipsets, the G Series opts for the Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets. While there is a significant difference between the two, the Qualcomm Snapdragon is still a quality chip with 1.5GHz Cortex - A53 & quad-core 1.2 Ghz Cortex-A53 CPU. It's more than sufficient to deal with the demands for what the phone was made for. 

Taken with the Huawei G8

Display

As mentioned before on the post, the G8 does come with a larger screen, a 5.5" ISP LCD capactivie touchscreen to be exact. It has 16 million colours to mesmerise your eyes with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 so, you have a full high definition experience. The touch screen is multi touch capable and has an Emotion UI 3.1 rating for protection, hence the added weight of the phone which is 167g in total. 

Taken with the Huawei G8

Verdict

While the manufacturer has compromised on performance for this device, it's acceptable when looking at the overall phone and what it's purpose is meant for. Certainly everything else is up to scratch with other devices in the market with some aspects being even better than their competitors flagship devices. The phone still offers the same great UI with a host of themes and settings to make yours unique and there are 3 colours for you to chose from. I quite enjoyed my time with the G8, more so because I used it for all my social media activities and capturing pictures and video with it and it did that perfectly, battery life was surprisingly great as I thought with the larger display it would drain it quite quickly. It's certainly a great phone if you're looking at getting one for those specific purposes or something you want to get for your kid.

Taken with the Huawei G8

Bucket Tech: Huawei Mate 8 - First Impressions

Last week I was finally able to attend a Huawei launch as the previous times I had to decline due to various reasons, mostly due to my day job but I was looking forward to it as I've heard much about these famed launch parties that the cell phone giant hosts. Huawei are really pushing all the boundaries and attacking the market aggressively, with good reason too. Their products are great and most of which are a fraction of the cost compared to its competitors, it's taken the consumer some time to become accustom to the brand but I think they're making strides into warming into most of them. They certainly convinced me with the previous devices I've had to test from them. 

The Mate 8 that was being launched is the flagship model from the Chinese brand and with the Mate S being around for about a year, it was interesting to see what major improvements were made to the device. The media were invited to a special presentation where we got to see and find out more about the device first hand from the Hauwei team. After an impressive promo video, Charlene Munilall, General Manager for Huawei Consumer Business Group SA addressed us, speaking about the Mate 8, she had this to say, "The Mate 8 represents the pinnacle of style, innovation and ground-breaking technology that introduces a new style of business. The Mate 8 has set a new standard in style that transcends its beautifully crafted exterior to deliver a mobile companion that meets the needs fo today's always-connected and sharing user"

The phone itself doesn't look much different to the Mate 7 or Mate S, it retains it's 6-inch Full HD screen while the screen size remains the same, the actual phone size has reduced to fit comfortably in your hand. It's encased in a super-slim metallic uni-body, which means no removable battery but one of the key features that grabbed my attention on the Mate 8 was it's SmartPower technology which optimises the allocation of the Mate 8's resources. It monitors and scans the devices apps and reduces the power consumption to background apps by half, thus pro-longing your battery life. I was really impressed with the Mate 7's battery life, as I am almost constantly on mine and the 7 used to give me just over a day of battery life. With the Mate 8, Huawei say it's impressive 4000mAh high-capacity battery will give you 1 and half days of heavy phone use, or 17 hours of continuous HD video, that it mighty impressive and something I have to test for myself. For regular uses, you can get much more battery life as regular use is said to be in the region of 2 and half days before you have to plug it into charge again. The Mate 8 will be available in two versions, the 32gig and 64gig both with dual 4G sim slots. 

Camera wise, the Mate 8 has a 16MP Sony camera with a proprietary image sensor processor for faster focusing, higher clarity and more accurate colours. The front facing camera is a 8MP wide-angel camera that introduces new dimensions in high-quality selfies. The Mate 8 processing power is quite impressive as well as it's the worlds first smartphone to use the latest Cortex-A72 CPU and high-performance Mali-T880 GPU. The revolutionary i5 intelligent processor is the most powerful coprocessor currently available and supports all the functions of a sensor hub as well as speech recognition, low-power consumption, MP3 playback, Fused Location Provider navigation and reduced location-based power consumption by nearly 70%. Which in essence makes this phone one of the fastest processing units available on the market, so the chances of your Mate 8 slowing down or freezing are extremely slim. The Mate 8 really seems to be the real deal when it comes to business smart phones, as they say it gives new meaning to "Doing Business". I've always been a fan of their build quality and features and even though they spending a lot of cash on marketing and improving their presence in the market, their products speak for themselves. 

Huawei also used this opportunity to announce the launch of their G Series of phones to the market. Aimed at the youth, these phones will be much more affordable than the Mate and P series and features on them will be directly targeted at the younger tech savvy generation. Hauwei have 3 models in the range, the G8, GR5 and GR3, all of which are currently available in SA.