Bucket Tech: Huawei Y5p

With the "new norm" now being in full effect with everyone adjusting to working from home, and doing things differently, technology has played a big part in making this transition less problematic than normal. This unfortunately comes at a price, a high one most of the time but in the effort to get everyone being able to access such, Huawei has continued to its commitment of making technology more accessible to everyone with the launch of their Y5p, the most affordable phone yet. The new entry level device stems from the Y Series range has been designed to offer a large display, long-lasting battery and a good amount of storage for users. It has Huawei's EMUI's intuitive user experience, Huawei's high-quality product DNA, and their affordable pricing, the Huawei Y Series smartphones have been widely favoured by consumers around the world, including South Africa. 

Some of the key featured of the Y5p is the large 5.45  inch LCD FullView Display gives exceptional viewing experience, displays content in vibrant colours and has a screen-to-body ration of 81.2 percent. Memory wise, the Huawei Y5p comes with a standard 2GB RAM and 32GB of storage ensuring you have enough space for all your favourite apps, games and to store all the pictures and videos you will be capturing with it, speaking camera the device has an 8MP rear camera and a 5MP front facing selfie camera. The rear main camera supports HDR mode which will automatically adjust brightness when required. The battery life of the phone is quite decent as well with it featuring a 3020mAh battery which gives you an average of 17 hours of continuous video playback, or up to 21 hours of 4G calling. 

Overall, the Huawei Y5p is one of the best entry level devices on the market, powered by MediaTek's octa-core processort that includes eight Cortex-A53 cores which poweres Huawei's AI tech on the device, this all comes together to give the user a smooth and fast performing smartphone at a fraction of the price. You can purchase the Huawei Y5p for the RRP of just R1,899 from the Huawei online store of any of their partners. 

Bucket Tech: Huawei MateBook D Series

Everyone knows Huawei for their brilliant mobile devices and of recent their smart tablets have been getting more exposure but they also make laptops and quite frankly they're just as good if not better than most of their competitors on the market! The MateBook D series comprises of two models, the D15 and D14, both of which are essentially the same with the only difference being screen size. Huawei says the main selling point for the MateBook D Series is its pricing point and while they always cater for the masses by giving us value for money products, this notebook is much of the same, they have not compromised on performance or quality in these products and the price is pretty reasonable and in most cases cheaper than the competition. The D Series laptops feature some of the innovations available on the market today, its equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U processor and a Radeon Vega 8 graphics card, the system design and capabilities enable these laptops to realise the full potential of their CPUs and GPUs output. The result is machines that work hard and play hard, and will be able to deliver any task you set them. 

Huawei have made these the first Windows PC's to use fingerprint technology for log-in, which works really well when you boot up, all you do is scan your finger and it logs straight in, no need to input passwords. The laptops come with 8GB of DDR4 memory, thats enough to handle most high-load apps no the market. While these laptops are high spec'd, their main aim is for work output as well as browsing, they are capable of running games as well but not on the highest graphics setting. 

Huawei market these as lifestyle laptops, depending on your circumstances and needs, they integrate seamlessly with other Huawei devices. With Huawei share, all you have to do is touch your mobile device to the laptop and it instantly syncs the devices with a virtual screen of your phone on the laptop. You can access your phones files directly from the laptop screen and can drag & drop documents with ease. No need for cables and security settings. 

The Huawei MateBook D15 laptop measures just 16.9mm thick making it the thinnest and lightest laptop in its price bracket, with its 15.6" FullView display offers a borderless viewing experience with 1080p FHD IPS screen. The top and side bezels are only 5.3MM thick which means its a 87% screen-to-body ratio, again the highest yet on a Huawei MateBook D. The D14 laptop on the other hand has a 14" FullView display, with an 84% screen-to-body ratio and is just 15.9mm thick. The MateBook D battery life is particularly impressive as its approximate life is 9.5 hours on video playback while the D15 has a 6 hour battery life. 

Overall, its yet another great product offering from the Chinese manufacturer, pricing is on point with the both having a RRP of R13,499 and are available from the Huawei online store or other Tech outlets. 

Bucket Tech: Huawei P40 Pro

To say I'm a fan of Huawei's P series products is putting in mildly, I'm on my 4th device right now, the P30 Pro and its absolutely brilliant. Negate the phenomenal camera which allows you to zoom and take pictures of the moon and in no light at all, the phone itself is capable of multiple tasks with ease. No over heating, no stalling, no unexpected restarts and that is what you essentially want in a phone. To perform what you need it to do with out any hassles. So when Huawei sent me their new P40 Pro a couple of weeks ago to test out, I was very interested to see how different it would be given that this phone is after the US trade ban era, so the biggest thing from that would mean zero Google services present on the device. I knew it wasn't going to be a smooth transition but apart from that, what would be the major noticeable changes in terms of performance and general functioning of the device? Find out more below. 

DESIGN

I'll be straight up with you, I hate the bevel sides on a phone, yes when Samsung first launched the "curved" sides it was pretty cool but for me, its a solid no. I still curse it with my P30 Pro but as the common saying goes "it is, what it is". Design on the P40 Pro is similar to the P30 Pro, the metal unibody is still the same great quality, it feels a bit more slicker and stylish. Comfortable in hand and in pocket. The actual finish feels a bit slippery but in saying that, I didn't have a scare with it and I took the phone to some interesting spots which required quite a tight grip or its gone forever, needless to say I still had it and sent it back in one piece. I think in terms of build quality there's not much to add to Huawei, they really know what they're doing, the quad camera layout on the back is pretty to look at and has a glass back plate over it to protect the lenses. With the screen being slightly bigger than the P30, it has a more prominent screen to body ration so it looks great. The "notch" has been moved to be more on the left side with the dual sensors. It doesn't really hamper your view of things so this is good. 

PERFORMANCE

There's no shortage on power when it comes to this device, powered by the Kirin 990 5G processor, the P40 Pro has an Octoa-core which is made up of 2 x Cortex -A76 based 2.86 GHz + 2 x Cortex - A76 Based 2.36 GHz + 4 x Cortex-A55 1.95Ghz. GPU is 16-Core Mali-G76. So very close or slightly better than previous chipsets we're seeing in competitor devices. The operating system is Huawei's EMUI 10.1 which is based on Android 10, so it's not completely different, as there will be similarities for you to go on from when getting the device. Memory, the phone has 8GB RAM and an internal memory of 256GB, the P40 Pro supports NM SD Card of up to 256GB. Battery life has been really great on the P40 Pro, it has a 4200mAh, it gave me roughly 2 days of usage, so 16+ hours of use which included taking pictures and videos. The SuperCharge works superbly, with a max of 40W, its considerably faster that the P30 Pro. I didn't have a 5G Sim to test the true 5G speeds and the number of 5G networks currently available are few and far between at the moment. 

CAMERA

We don't need to delve too much into this aspect, while the P40 Pro and P30 Pro cameras are pretty similar in terms of functionality, there is a difference in the quality with a much better, crisper end product on the P40. Even with the hybrid 50x zoom, the images are sharper with more detail. This is obviously thanks to the rear 50MP Ultra Vision Camera. The Image stabilization is incredible, either in video or when utilizing that mad zoom on the 12MP telephoto camera. The 3D depth sensing camera also adds levels to your pictures, giving you that real feel when looking at pictures. 4K video recording is brilliant, I'm yet to watch it on a 4K TV but so far on the phone it looks crispy and smooth. The super slow video also manages to capture so much more detail at an insanely slow frame rate. Overall, one of the best cameras on the market and this isn't even the Pro+ which I have news about at the end of the blog. 

VERDICT

You've read the brochure part of the review, now its time to talk about the hard truth. Without Google Services, it was a bit of a mission. I think it will be for anyone, most would understand this sort of issue when migrating for IOS to Android on vice versa but its not all that bad given that EMUI is based on Android in anycase. So there's a lot more familiarity with this user interface. It's about making the adjustment and finding apps which you're normally used to use on Playstore on the Huawei App Gallery. While there are app's being populated by the thousands every week on the Gallery, there's no significant ones to speak off. Huawei are still working very hard on getting this right, most of the major banking apps are there, funnily enough FNB wasn't one of them but they do say they are in the process of releasing one soon. For more Gmail, I used to just log on via the browser, same goes for some social media applications. The lack of notifications was actually a blessing and also aided to not draining the battery. Being still based on Android software, there are always hacks and ways to get around this There's tonnes of videos online on how to get Google Playstore on the device and get all your favourite apps. Like I said previously, something has go to give, either guys like Facebook and Twitter will come to the party and release versions for the device or the US may take a u-turn on their decision.  While there is a learning process, its not something that will cripple your use of the phone and once you get into it, you will soon realise what a masterful piece of tech this is. 

Huawei have announced that the Huawei P40 Pro+ will be available to purchase locally from tomorrow, August 1st 2020. Check their online store for more. 

SAMPLE PICS FROM THE P40 PRO

 

Bucket Tech: Huawei P40 Series in SA

After a delay yesterday, Huawei South Africa launched the rest of the P40 range in the country today, via a live online stream. As always celebrity partnerships were announced with the brand, bringing in the likes of Minni Dlamini, DJ Tira, Nay Maps, Anga Makubalo and Nasty C. Now there's not much about the device we didn't already know about since the global launch, it was just how the devices ecosystem will affect local uses, and obviously which devices from the range we would be getting. Well lets get the latter out of the way first, SA market will get the P40 and P40 Pro, no P40 Pro +, no mention if it would be considered in the future. As we all know Huaweis's devices are no longer supported by Google, so the ecosystem will be entirely different on the P40, with the Huawei App Gallery being your app store. Huawei have invested a lot in this over the past few years, getting developers to create more apps for the gallery, making it the third largest app ecosystem in the world. You will find most of your favourite apps on there, like Facebook, TikTok, etc and Huawei are throwing in freebies such as online shopping vouchers and other gifts that you just have to keep your eyes peeled for. 

Huawei's camera's have been their trademark feature for the P series from the P9 with its dual lens Leica camera. Huawei works with photographers to develop their cameras, so much so that the phone often becomes a camera with a phone. The trick to Huawei's camera is not the size of the lens but rather their sensor that they use. It allows more natural light in all your pictures, perfect for low light pictures. Then again with the AI capabilities of Huawei P40, it automatically enhances the pictures it captures but the AI doesn't stop there, it even helps you with editing unwanted objects or people in your shots. The video capabilities has been enhanced, especially the audio recording which was a major issue in the past, Huawei now has Audio zoom where you can select a subject and the audio recording will be enhanced for that particular subject. 

Huawei SA CTO Akhram Mohammed was pretty honest about the hurdles that the company faced after facing US restrictions but made note of the advancements Huawei has made to overcome these, there's still a long way to go but with Huawei using other forms of their research to help out in the medical, environmental and now local business fields. Pricing on the P40 and P40 Pro has been released, while its not cheap, Huawei is giving customers the chance to get a free P40 Lite with your purchase of either the P40 or P40 Pro. P40 is currently going for R16,999 with the Pro being R20,999. 

Bucket Tech: Huawei Y-Series

Huawei Consumer Business Group South Africa has made available its newest phone in its Y-Series range. The Y6II comes with stunning features including the 5.5 screen HD – Bigger screen, broader world, a 13MP Front /8MP Rear Camera. Consumers can expect a wonderful photography experience with built in photography features such as cosmetic mode, panoramic mode, food mode and perfect smile.

Consumers can pre order online from www. hi-online.co.za starting from the 06 – 14 April and they will receive a free Selfie Combo Pack + Powerbank and Free Back Cover with Screen Guard. This will be for the first 100 pre- order consumers. The Y6II will be available from the 15th of April in store at The Foshini Group (TFG) at a RRP of R 2999 and will be exclusive until June 2017

“We continue to offer consumers options in a variety of price points and our entry levels phones play a critical part in our business growth. As Huawei we believe that we produce phones of high quality, with our Y-series, we have a camera that allows consumers at entry level to experience our phones ,” said Mr Zhao Likun, GM Huawei Consumer Business Group South Africa.

Make Life Bolder, Brighter, More Colorful

Huawei Y6II’s new larger dynamic 1280x720 resolution display is crystal clear and rivals top digital

screens, immersing you in the vivid colors and vibrancy of life in a whole new way. The durable GFF

transparent lamination protects the display from scratches to ensure long-lasting brightness.

Rear Camera

Take the best pictures of your life with the Huawei Y6II’s super-powered 13-megapixel camera. The wide-angle, 28mm lens with a 2.0 aperture is made of scratch resistant, state-of- the-art glass. And the customized dynamic range is perfect in any light and any setting, putting a professional-grade camera in the palm of your hand. Never miss a moment.

Front Camera

Selfies have never looked so good. The Y6II comes with an enormous 8-megapixel camera—Huawei’s largest front-facing camera to date. The 2.0 aperture offers a huge, 77-degree range letting you take panorama selfies for the first time. Bigger background, bigger story, bigger you.

Auto Face Enhancement and Make-up Mode

Always put your best face forward with Huawei’s 10-level face enhancement option on the Y6II. The 10-millisecond face recognition creates beautification in real time, and can enhance personal photos as well as group shots. The Y6II also comes equipped with 8 beautification presets and customizable options, offering a range of natural effects and highlights including lip gloss and eye shadow.

Elegant Design Style

You can make a big statement with a simple gesture when using the Huawei Y6II. Metallic cross-stripes create 5,176 facets that not only catch and reflect the light, but also catch people’s attention. Other textures include: high-gloss black, or more fun options in yellow, pink and blue. The molded mirror polish and 60c-micro texture complete the device’s superior design.

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