Today Huawei is unwrapping their latest mainstream device, evolving from the P8 and P9 into the P10. The yearly cadence regularly brings high…
Today Huawei is unwrapping their latest mainstream device, evolving from the P8 and P9 into the P10. The yearly cadence regularly brings high-level design features from their Mate series into the P-series several months later, and so naturally the P10 gets the latest HiSilicon Kirin 960 SoC with an integrated Cat12/11 modem. As with the last versions, the P8 had the P8 Plus, the P9 had the P9 Plus, the P10 will also be paired with the P10 Plus, featuring near-same internals but with a larger screen and a few extra premium features.
To address today’s headline, Huawei is working with Pantone for the material design of the new P-series devices. Under the heading of ‘style’ and matching ‘fashion’, through collaborating with Pantone Huawei is offering the P10 and P10 Plus in Dazzling Blue (similar but slightly different to the Honor 8 design) and ‘Greenery’. It makes for a very striking and green device. Apparently this is the color of the upcoming season, although as Huawei stated at our pre-briefing, much like previous colors they’ve used, they know that they get a polarized reaction to some of the more esoteric color implementations.
Aside from the color, the P10/P10P both use the Kirin 960 silicon, which we saw in the Mate 9/Mate 9 Pro. We’ve done a review of the Mate 9, and are putting some finishing touches to a Kirin 960 deep dive with some back and forth with HiSilicon on a few of the numbers. Under the hood Kirin 960 is the first mobile SoC to use ARM Cortex A73 cores, which the SoC combines four of in a big. Little with a set of ARM Cortex A53s. The Kirin 960 is also the first SoC to use ARM’s latest Mali ‘Bifrost’ architecture, under the G71 heading, and the 960 uses an MP8 configuration. This is all with TSMC’s 16FF+ node. Huawei also integrates its own modem, suitable for Cat 12 download and Cat 11 upload speeds. The P10 and P10P will mirror each other on the pure SoC, however the P10P will also support 4×4 MU-MIMO support on the DL link due to a couple of additional antenna in the larger device.
The main obvious difference between the P10 and P10P will be the size of the device, the display, and the battery.
