It seems pretty obvious to me that many of the gushing reviews and hard sell on the net is from people who have received a free phone from Huawei, and don't want to jeopardise that position for future releases. I paid for mine, so I can provide an honest overview. I'm reasonably familiar with Huawei stuff, having used a P20 Pro since release.
Hardware:
Simply stunning. Little more to say. I agree with everyone who says that it's beautifully designed and clearly innovative in places. Downside to this is that it feels incredibly fragile. I'm pretty confident in predicting that it will not survive a drop onto any hard surface of more than a few centimetres without cracking or chipping. This is nothing that couldn't be said of pretty much any other manufacturer, though.
Comfort is subjective. I found the rounded edges unpleasantly sharp, but if you invest in a case that'll solve the problem. You will, however, be taking a big phone and making it bigger.
The fingerprint scanner is a neat idea, but stopped recognising my fingers within 12 hours of purchase. The face scanner worked as described, and I didn't have any issues with high contrast environments.
Speakers tinny as expected.
Fast charging very cool, definitely as fast as described. In face, the whole phone is lightning fast in most places.
Software:
"Unfinished" is perhaps the kindest way to describe it. "A bit ****", "lazy", "derivative", are other words, and "what the hell were you thinking" is a phrase you might find yourself applying. Dialog boxes where someone has forgotten to add padding around buttons, strange font size choices, notifications that run off the side of the screen etc etc.
It's as if it's been designed by someone with absolutely no sense of aesthetics, which is even stranger when you consider the simply sterling job that Huawei did on the hardware. It's very similar to iOS of a few years ago, which to be fair you might expect when you buy it. What's unforgivable though is that these lazy design choices conflict with Google's own standards, and it leaves a very conflicted operating system on the phone.
Backing up? Should I use Google or Huawei Cloud? I would use HC, but it experiences exactly the same problem that it does on the EMUI 9 beta on my P20 Pro, where it massively over-calculates the size of the photo gallery and just tries to sell you an upgrade. This is a £1000 phone. It deserves more than 2GB of cloud storage, Huawei. Huawei Calendar will conflict with Google Calendar. OK Google doesn't work. The whole EMUI launcher starts lagging after an hour or two of phone uptime, with elements "popping in" and frame rate drops when returning from an app.
Oh, and the gesture navigation. Jesus. Don't even go there. If you can get it to work, it'll just make you increasingly angry as your palm accidentally sends "back" commands, and the next moment inhibits the one you wanted to do.
Huawei still beholden to the operators with updates. Interestingly it downloaded a small network operator update when I got it, but it never installed, just hanging at 100%. Remember, this is supposed to be a premium device.
Camera:
I've seen a lot of criticism of the camera UI, and I don't really understand why. It works for me, and the Master AI thing was very good at picking out the correct scene. It's suffering from the lack of a monochrome sensor in the dark though, as my P20 Pro is consistently beating it in night shots. All phones should have a wide angle lens, and this is the bit I'll miss most.
Conclusion:
I'm returning mine to EE, and will be getting a Pixel 3 instead. The hardware will feel like a year back in time, but I just want the phone to work and not be beholden to Huawei to apathetically fix bugs. I feel quite sad about this, as it actually feels like huge potential squandered by extremely poor decision making. Had this hardware been fastened to a vanilla Android OS like the Pixel, they wouldn't be able to make enough to keep up with demand.
Hope this helps. It's a really shame and I'm a bit sad to be sending it back, but the software drawbacks outweigh the hardware advances.
Hardware:
Simply stunning. Little more to say. I agree with everyone who says that it's beautifully designed and clearly innovative in places. Downside to this is that it feels incredibly fragile. I'm pretty confident in predicting that it will not survive a drop onto any hard surface of more than a few centimetres without cracking or chipping. This is nothing that couldn't be said of pretty much any other manufacturer, though.
Comfort is subjective. I found the rounded edges unpleasantly sharp, but if you invest in a case that'll solve the problem. You will, however, be taking a big phone and making it bigger.
The fingerprint scanner is a neat idea, but stopped recognising my fingers within 12 hours of purchase. The face scanner worked as described, and I didn't have any issues with high contrast environments.
Speakers tinny as expected.
Fast charging very cool, definitely as fast as described. In face, the whole phone is lightning fast in most places.
Software:
"Unfinished" is perhaps the kindest way to describe it. "A bit ****", "lazy", "derivative", are other words, and "what the hell were you thinking" is a phrase you might find yourself applying. Dialog boxes where someone has forgotten to add padding around buttons, strange font size choices, notifications that run off the side of the screen etc etc.
It's as if it's been designed by someone with absolutely no sense of aesthetics, which is even stranger when you consider the simply sterling job that Huawei did on the hardware. It's very similar to iOS of a few years ago, which to be fair you might expect when you buy it. What's unforgivable though is that these lazy design choices conflict with Google's own standards, and it leaves a very conflicted operating system on the phone.
Backing up? Should I use Google or Huawei Cloud? I would use HC, but it experiences exactly the same problem that it does on the EMUI 9 beta on my P20 Pro, where it massively over-calculates the size of the photo gallery and just tries to sell you an upgrade. This is a £1000 phone. It deserves more than 2GB of cloud storage, Huawei. Huawei Calendar will conflict with Google Calendar. OK Google doesn't work. The whole EMUI launcher starts lagging after an hour or two of phone uptime, with elements "popping in" and frame rate drops when returning from an app.
Oh, and the gesture navigation. Jesus. Don't even go there. If you can get it to work, it'll just make you increasingly angry as your palm accidentally sends "back" commands, and the next moment inhibits the one you wanted to do.
Huawei still beholden to the operators with updates. Interestingly it downloaded a small network operator update when I got it, but it never installed, just hanging at 100%. Remember, this is supposed to be a premium device.
Camera:
I've seen a lot of criticism of the camera UI, and I don't really understand why. It works for me, and the Master AI thing was very good at picking out the correct scene. It's suffering from the lack of a monochrome sensor in the dark though, as my P20 Pro is consistently beating it in night shots. All phones should have a wide angle lens, and this is the bit I'll miss most.
Conclusion:
I'm returning mine to EE, and will be getting a Pixel 3 instead. The hardware will feel like a year back in time, but I just want the phone to work and not be beholden to Huawei to apathetically fix bugs. I feel quite sad about this, as it actually feels like huge potential squandered by extremely poor decision making. Had this hardware been fastened to a vanilla Android OS like the Pixel, they wouldn't be able to make enough to keep up with demand.
Hope this helps. It's a really shame and I'm a bit sad to be sending it back, but the software drawbacks outweigh the hardware advances.
