The Huawei P8 Lite Review
by Brandon Chester on July 27, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
Display
The Huawei P8 Lite has a 5.0" 1280x720 IPS display. We've seen great improvements to both display resolution and color accuracy in recent years, and you can now get highly accurate 720p panels in devices that cost only $150-$200. Some devices even manage to squeeze a 1080p panel onto a $200 device. Since competing on resolution has become difficult, targeting greater color accuracy has become the next step of display improvements. To evaluate the accuracy of the P8 Lite's display we turn to our standard smartphone display workflow. As always, measurements are performed with X-Rite's i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer and SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software, with the exception of contrast measurements which are done with an i1Display Pro colorimeter.
At 361 nits, the P8 Lite's display isn't quite as bright as I would expect. Despite this, the black level is fairly high, which leads to one of the lower contrast ratios on record. At this point having your brightness far below 400 nits is really not acceptable, as it makes the device very difficult to use in the sun or with other unforgiving lighting. The high black level also means that the wash out from external lighting is even more noticable.
Greyscale results from the P8 Lite also end up being less than optimal. With a price point of $249, Huawei is within the mid-range segment of the market. Devices like the Lumia 640 have shown that it's completely possible to ship an accurate display even with price constraints. The P8 Lite's display is far too blue, and there's a high degree of error in shades of grey which increases as they move toward complete white.
The P8 Lite again performs poorly in the saturation sweep test. Blue shows some saturation compression, with slight oversaturation until it hits 80% and then undersaturation for the deepest shades of blue. Magenta misses the mark severely, with 20% magenta actually being what would be a very accurate 20% blue. The level of inaccuracy is high enough to be fairly evident throughout the UI, which is very disappointing.
In the ColorChecker test the P8 Lite again doesn't do very well. The inaccuracy with both the greyscale and the primary and secondary colors means there's not much hope of rendering color mixtures accurately. As you can see in the color comparator image, there's a high level of error in everything except the greens and cyan. It's fairly clear when looking at images or videos that they don't look quite right.
Overall, the P8 Lites display is fairly disappointing. We've seen great improvement in display quality in the low end and mid range parts of the market, with $149 devices like the Lumia 640 providing very high accuracy and good sharpness, and the ASUS Zenfone 2 providing decent accuracy and a very high resolution. The 5.0" 720p display on the P8 Lite is decently sharp, but the inaccuracy is significant.
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ileben - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Again, please, post a graph of performance over time for a 20 minute intensive run (ala T-Rex).Also, performance degradation should be expressed as a ratio of [final run] / [cold run].
NAdeera - Wednesday, August 26, 2015 - link
Can anybody tell me about the battery timestampede84 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Is it possible to charge Huawei with 2A chargers ? Will it break my phone or does the charging time will remain the same ?KilonBerlin - Friday, August 21, 2020 - link
how the flock can the P8 be last in fps with only 8.71 fps and the P8 lite (a lot cheaper version) has 23.40? That would be like my current P30 Lite would kick the P30 Pro heavy in GPU testing?! People who said Huawei has no chance, maybe in the US where it was stopped early (most companies were not allowed to offer it with contracts and contracts made up over 80% of sales in 2017 when I did read about first US sanctions on Huawei)KilonBerlin - Friday, August 21, 2020 - link
It sold so well in Eurasia that the first sanctions they (Apple, US industry in this business and trump, for him every deal is unfair if america has no large advantage or has to compete with countries like china) hoped its done with, than that google thing, people like me and millions others still buyed the phones, now we know "they" were the last huawei with google services, P40 and other news (Mate 30?! or 40?) come without and I only play 1 game right now on my phone, its the well known Asphalt 9: Legends, I downloaded it somehow via AppGallery from Huawei and I because of that dont play with my google account but with huawei account but have no problem with that, most players come from China, India and some asian countries and than russia/europe and the rest of the world^^its very unfair and I never ever will buy the apple...but I knew that already before they released smartphones, apple just suck, next phone wont be huawei except the appgallery continue to grow and most new games will also be available there (china/asia is a huge market and Huawei was just the largest smartphone company in the world due to corona weak sales in the US/"West" from Apple and Samsung also weakened a bit, this wont hold but I dont think Google and the companies want to give up all that possible customers with growing income and in china but also (at least before the P40 or other non-google phones were released) in countries like russia huawei really had large shares, P20 lite was the best selling phone of the month (by numbers ofc) in June or July 2018 in Germany,
offering always lite, normal and pro versions, and maybe they use other names in india or vietnam but the lite version should be affordable for most, especially if its subsidied by a 1 or 2 year internet contract which doesn't cost a fortune there like in Germany where already in 2000 the mobile data frequencies were sold for unbelievable 100 billion D-Mark to the 6 leading mobile companies (16.66 billion DM each!), in the UK a comparable auction only brought a few billion by the 4 largest companies also around that time,
lets hope when trump is removed the relations between Europe and the US get better and maybe they even see that its a cheap way to destroy Huawei who was/is standing for the success of the chinese state, but the producers of ARM-SoC's are in US hands and even the only alternative from Taiwan had been told if they deliver chips to huawei they can forget all contracts with US companies or to the US... thats trumps "fair trade", like they threat small companies finishing the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline...it gives Russia and Germany another advantage in gas, which in this 2nd offshore pipeline would be for exports only from Germany that trump wants to use for exporting the flood of shale gas, the boom started in 2011, planing even a while before but trump becoming president in 2017 said it were his great actions...