We’re really taken by the new Huawei P10, but if it’s slightly more than you want to pay for a new smartphone, Huawei wants to tempt you with its P10 Lite. Rumored ahead of the P10’s launch, the Lite version has now been made official, and while it does include several of the great features that make the P10 so tempting, it’s far from the full package. Here’s what you need to know.
The P10 is defined by the dual rear cameras co-developed by Leica, which is missing from the P10 Lite. Instead the rear camera has a single lens with 12-megapixels and a large 1.25 micron pixel size for better low-light performance. There will be no monochrome or blurred background photos with the P10 Lite, at least using the rear camera. The good news is the 8-megapixel selfie camera does have Huawei’s “portrait shot” technology, generating the blurred background effect when you take pictures using the front camera.
Huawei has kept a very similar design to the P10 on the Lite. The fingerprint sensor is on the rear though, rather than the newly relocated front sensor on the P10, but the screen is still underneath a curved 2.5D piece of glass, and the body has a slim bezel around the 5.2-inch screen. The resolution is 1920 x 1080 pixels, just like the P10. Also brought over from the P10 is Knuckle Sense, the unusual touchscreen technology that recognizes knuckles and not just fingertips, to activate additional features such as app shortcuts or taking a screenshot.
It’s not the powerhouse Kirin 960 processor inside the P10 Lite, but the Kirin 658 along with 4GB of RAM, and a 3,000mAh battery with fast charging. We’ve sung the praises of Huawei’s new EMUI 5.0 user interface over Android 7.0 Nougat already — see the Mate 9 for evidence — and it’s EMUI 5.1 on board the P10 Lite, which refines version 5.0 further.
At the moment, Huawei has announced the P10 Lite for release in the United Kingdom on March 31, where it’ll be sold through Carphone Warehouse, Vodafone, and EE for 300 British pounds, which is about $370. Pre-orders for the phone begin on March 17, in either black or gold colors, with others to follow in the future. A wider international launch hasn’t been confirmed yet.
