Although many consumers are not familiar with Huawei, they are a company that has been selling smartphones for quite some time now. In the earliest days of the smaller Canadian carriers Huawei was one of the few companies that had smartphones available on their networks due to their use of the AWS band for HSPA which was uncommon in other devices here at the time. While Huawei has always had one or two flagship devices and makes some phablets, to me their core market was always mid range devices. Often these mid range devices are a downsized version of their flagship devices, and the smartphone being reviewed today is no exception. It's the Huawei P8 Lite, and it's the little brother of the Huawei P8.

The P8 Lite is Huawei's device to compete in the mid $200 market. At $249, it's more expensive than a device like the Zenfone 2, but not as expensive as something like the OnePlus One. There are actually two versions of the P8 Lite depending on your market. The first uses HiSilicon's Kirin 620 SoC which has eight Cortex A53 cores at 1.2GHz, while the second uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 SoC. The version being examined during this review is the Qualcomm edition, and you can check out the rest of its specifications in the chart below.

Huawei P8 Lite
SoC	Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 4x ARM Cortex A53 at 1.5 GHz 4x ARM Cortex A53 at 1.11 GHz Adreno 405 at 550 MHz
Memory and Storage	2GB LPDDR3 RAM, 16GB NAND + MicroSDXC
Display	5.0" 1280x720 IPS LCD
Cellular Connectivity	2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 IP UE Category 4 LTE)
Dimensions	143 x 70.6 x 7.7 mm, 131g
Cameras	13MP Rear Facing w/ 1.12 µm pixels, 1/3.06" CMOS size, F/2.0, 28mm (35mm effective) 5MP Front Facing, F/2.4, 22mm (35mm effective)
Battery	2200 mAh (8.36Wh)
Other Connectivity	802.11b/g/n + BT 4.0, GNSS, microUSB 2.0
Operating System	Android 4.4 KitKat With Emotion UI 3.0
SIM	MicroSIM
Price	$249

On paper, the P8 Lite sits right in the mid range segment of the market. Inside it has Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 SoC, with two clusters of four Cortex A53 cores and their Adreno 405 GPU. Other internal specs include 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, an 8.36Wh battery, and 802.11n WiFi. On the outside is the 5" 1280x720 IPS display, and a pair of rear and front cameras with 13MP and 5MP resolutions respectively.

On the software side we see that the P8 Lite is only shipping with Android KitKat skinned with Huawei's Emotion UI. Andrei has already taken a look at the iterations of this interface on a number of occasions, and there's not much I can add to his evaluation of Emotion UI 3.0 from his review of the Ascend Mate 7 so I'll simply link that here for interested readers. The underlying version of Android being KitKat is definitely disappointing when the P8 Lite is being sold in July of 2015 with Android M on the horizon, and it means that the Snapdragon 615 SoC has to run in AArch32 mode. The P8 Lite and all its hardware and software comes together in a 7.7mm thick package that costs $249.

The design of the P8 Lite definitely takes some cues from the larger high end Huawei P8. The front of the phone is remarkably similar, with the same outer white bezel surrounding a black bezel around the display. On the top bezel we have the earpiece, front-facing camera, and the proximity sensor. On the bottom is nothing but Huawei's name, as the P8 Lite uses onscreen navigation buttons. As far as differences from the P8 go, the black bezel around the display is thicker on the left and right sides, and the camera and earpiece have more spacing between them and the earpiece.

While the Huawei P8 has an aluminum chassis, the P8 Lite is very clearly made of plastic. The sides and rear of the phone are significantly different from the P8. To add a bit of flare to the plastic chassis Huawei has added a plastic band that attempts to mimic the appearance of metal. From the side it kind of reminds me of an ice cream sandwich due to the two outer layers of the same color and a different inner layer. Huawei has also put their power button, SIM slot, and microSD slots on the right side in the same fashion as the P8. While some people might like the metal appearance of the outer band, I'm not really a big fan. When making a plastic device you either need to own it and use it to your advantage like Nokia/Microsoft does with their Lumia devices, or you need to make it look very convincing like the back cover of the Zenfone 2. In the P8 Lite's case it still looks very much like plastic, and reminds me of the fake chrome on the bezel of my Galaxy S i9000.

The back of the P8 Lite has two segments. At the top is a glossy thin strip which holds the rear-facing camera and LED flash on the left side. Everything below is a more textured plastic, with horizontal lines running across it. As far as construction goes, there's not really any flex or give to the back cover, and the texture created by the lines makes it feel different in the hand than a device like the Moto E or Moto G.

My opinion of the P8 Lite's design and build quality is somewhat divided. It has a good feel in your hand, and there's no flex or anything that would suggest weakness. On the other hand, I really don't like the faux-metal band around the edge of the phone. Trying to mimic brushed aluminum with plastic is always going to backfire, and I think Huawei would have been better off just making the sides white like the rest of the chassis.

System Performance

The P8 Lite is the first device with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 that we've reviewed. The Snapdragon 615 implementation in the P8 lite has two clusters with 4 Cortex A53 cores. With this bin the first cluster has a peak frequency of 1.5GHz, while the second has a peak frequency of 1.11GHz. This is slightly slower than the 1.7GHz implementation in the HTC One M8s, but it still represents a 25% improvement in clock speeds on the big cluster over Snapdragon 410. In theory since there's support for HMP the OS could schedule threads to use all 8 cores at once, but in essentially every user workload it will act as a quad core Cortex A53 CPU.

The P8 Lite shows good improvement over devices that use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400 and 410 SoCs. In both versions of WebXPRT and in Mozilla Kraken we see improvements of about 20%, with Google Octane improving by over 30%. This is in line with what one would expect from the 25% clock speed improvement on the big cluster when compared to Snapdragon 410.

PCMark is a benchmark that focuses more on real-world scenarios where race to sleep speed is paramount, but the user workload also increases with faster CPUs. Software can also be as important to the test as hardware, and we've seen gains on devices running Android Lollipop over those running KitKat. In it we see that the Huawei P8 Lite doesn't do very well overall. The main cause of this is its score in the writing sub test. This is not a new situation for Huawei, as all of their KitKat devices score somewhere around 500 points in that test due to problems with Dalvik. If that test were to be removed, the P8 Lite would perform slightly better overall than the Moto E. Ultimately the result in PCMark is just an example of how performance is hardly software agnostic, and demonstrates why devices should not be launching with KitKat this far into 2015.

In BaseMark OS II we again see the P8 Lite holding a lead over Snapdragon 400 and 410 devices, with the largest improvement being in the graphics sub test.

Overall the P8 Lite shows significant improvements over the performance of lower end Snapdragon 400 and 410 based devices. CPU improvements are right in line with the 25% greater clock speed than Snapdragon 410 on the big cluster of Cortex A53 cores, and BaseMark OS II shows us that there are substantial GPU improvements which will be detailed on the next page.

GPU Performance

The Adreno 405 GPU is an interesting part. Because Snapdragon 615 is approaching upon Qualcomm's high end SoCs there's significantly more power on the GPU side of things than you'll get with SoCs meant for more low end devices like Snapdragon 410.

In 3DMark's graphics test we see that Adreno 405 holds a large lead over Adreno 305/306. The score achieved is more than twice as high. The physics test has a poor showing, lagging behind even the Snapdragon 400 based Moto G. Since the CPU side of Snapdragon 615 is certainly faster it's clear that this slowness is due to problems with Dalvik, which in turn is due to the P8 Lite shipping with KitKat. In the end the overall score isn't quite twice that of the Moto E, but it's still a significant improvement.

I don't have results for BaseMark X on the 2015 Moto E as the benchmark crashes before it completes. Unfortunately this means there's no Snapdragon 410 device to be used as a reference in this test. In the on screen results the P8 Lite doesn't come in last, but the only slower device is the LG G3 with its relatively unbalanced combination of an Adreno 330 GPU and a 2560x1440 display. In the off screen tests the P8 Lite falls behind the other devices tested, but it's not an unexpected result given the flagship status of the other devices on the chart.

The last GPU test is GFXBench 3.0. In both T-Rex HD and Manhattan, the offscreen performance of Adreno 405 shows a large improvement over the performance of the 2015 Moto E. In fact, both tests have the P8 Lite achieving almost three times the performance of the Moto E. While the Moto E is obviously a cheaper device, the results show the significant GPU gains that Snapdragon 615 devices have compared to Snapdragon 410 devices.

Overall, the GPU performance of the Huawei P8 Lite is actually very good for a $249 device. One should definitely note that the ASUS Zenfone 2 is significantly faster and only costs $199, but that's quite an edge case and there really aren't many other devices at this price point that offer the GPU performance that the P8 Lite does.

NAND Performance

NAND performance is another important aspect of mobile devices. Poor NAND can be a serious bottleneck of system performance whenever something is being loaded from the internal storage, or when a background app is doing reads and writes or downloading updates.

The P8 Lite comes in last for both random read and random write speeds. In the case of random read speeds the gap between it and the next device is fairly significant as well.

Sequential reads and writes on the P8 Lite are in a much better situation than random reads and writes, with the P8 Lite being faster than both the Moto E and Moto G in both cases. While it's not as fast as the latest flagship devices, I don't think it's at a point where it will cause any problems for the type of users who will purchase a phone like the P8 Lite.

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.

Camera

Since the Huawei P8 Lite is positioned as a mid range device rather than a low end one, it brings along significant improvements to the camera system when compared with devices in the sub-$200 range. The basic specs on paper show a rear-facing camera with a 13MP resolution, and a front-facing camera with a 5MP resolution. Both these sensors are made by OmniVision, and you can see some further information about the P8 Lite's cameras in the chart below.

Camera Specifications
	Huawei P8 Lite
Front Camera	5MP (2592x1944)
Front Camera - Sensor	OV5648 (1.4 µm, 1/4")
Front Camera - Focal Length	2.4mm (22mm eff)
Front Camera - Max Aperture	F/2.4
Rear Camera	13.0MP (4208x3120)
Rear Camera - Sensor	OV13850 (1.12 µm, 1/3.06")
Rear Camera - Focal Length	3.8mm (27mm eff)
Rear Camera - Max Aperture	F/2.0

The Huawei P8 Lite buys you a lot of camera for a $250 smartphone. With a 13MP resolution and a 1/3.06" sensor size, the P8 Lite's rear camera is in the same league as phones like the Nexus 6. The F/2 aperture is also quite large, and from my testing Huawei appears to have kept distortion under control while reaping the benefits of the additional light collected with the wider aperture.

It seems that OmniVision gets a bad reputation in the mobile space. However, I think the P8 Lite is a testament to how much of a difference good photo processing can make, and how many of the perceived issues with OmniVision sensors are really just the result of poor ISPs (image signal processor) and image processing. As far as image quality goes, I have absolutely no major complaints about the P8 Lite's rear camera when taking photos during the day. There's good detail preservation and sharpness, without the harsh shadows and over sharpening that I often see with cameras on less expensive devices. My only complaint is that the P8 Lite skewed the white balance of this scene toward blue, which made all of the colors seem colder than they actually were. Despite this, the color saturation, sharpness, and detail are all great for a $249 device.

In low light the P8 Lite seems to stumble a bit. This doesn't appear to be any fault of the sensor, although a 13MP camera with 1.1 micron pixels won't exactly be a master of low light photography. Rather, it's clear that Huawei's heavy noise reduction is having a negative impact on image quality. The entire photo is fairly devoid of detail, and has an appearance that looks somewhat like an oil painting. This has done a great job of removing the noise in the photo, even in the sky, but it has also smeared away all of the detail. It's clear from the exposure and white balance that you could actually take some decent low light photos with the P8 Lite if the noise reduction wasn't so heavy, and I hope Huawei can address that in the future.

Overall I'm fairly happy with the P8 Lite's photo quality considering its $249 price. It's definitely the best camera I've seen at this price point due to its well balanced processing during the day. Noise reduction in low light definitely needs to be toned down, but even then the photos end up being better than many other low or mid range devices simply due to the more accurate exposure.

Video Quality

While still images are the product of both the camera sensor's quality and the quality of the processing performed by the ISP, videos skew even more heavily toward the abilities of the ISP as there needs to be a sufficient level of processing done to each frame in a timespan measured in milliseconds. The P8 Lite uses the ISP built into Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 SoC. While ISPs are still pretty much black boxes, Qualcomm has noted in the past that the feature set for S615's ISP is more closely related to the ISP in the Snapdragon 800 series SoCs than the Snapdragon 400 SoCs.

The Huawei P8 Lite has a maximum video resolution of 1920x1080, and it records at 30 frames per second. Video is encoded at 20Mbps using the H.264 baseline profile. Unfortunately, the video quality of the Huawei P8 just isn't near as good as still images in the same lighting, highlighting either some limitation of the ISP or an issue with what processing is being applied. There's a general blurriness across the frame, with very little detail on the grass or the sidewalk. The camera's focus locks at the beginning of the video which means turning to look at a different area for a moment is often out of focus, and this is made very evident when turning to look at the red bushes. There's also some sort of issue with the audio where the right channel starts and stops working as it pleases. While the daytime image quality of the P8 Lite is very good, the video quality is definitely not something I would consider to be a selling point.

WiFi Performance

802.11ac adoption isn't that widespread yet, and buyers of devices like the P8 Lite are unlikely to have 802.11ac routers unless it's built into the modem provided by their ISP. Despite that, devices like the ASUS Zenfone 2 have spoiled us a bit by delivering 802.11ac support in a $200 device. The Zenfone 2 is often an exception to the rule though, and the P8 Lite only ships with support for 802.11n on the 2.4GHz band.

With a peak speed over UDP of 59Mbps, the P8 Lite falls in line with the other 802.11n devices on the chart. Since the P8 Lite costs $250 and is positioned as a mid range device I'm disappointed that there's no support for 5GHz networks, as it leaves users on the increasingly crowded 2.4GHz band. Even so, I doubt that buyers of the P8 Lite will be doing anything that requires faster speeds than 802.11n provides.

Battery Life

A phone is only good to the user when it's charged, so having sufficient battery life to last throughout the day is of the utmost importance. Due to various factors of both hardware and software, it's impossible to determine how long a device will last based solely on the battery capacity. Even still, a device's battery capacity can provide some degree of insight into how long a device should last when also considering the hardware it has to power. In the case of the P8 Lite, the hardware runs off of an 8.36Wh battery, which is actually smaller than a phone like the 2015 Moto E with a smaller display. This is due to the more limited space afforded by the P8 Lite's 7.7mm thick chassis.

In order to characterize the P8 Lite's battery life in various scenarios I've run it through our standard battery tests. First up is the WiFi web browsing test to test battery life in a more display bound workflow, followed by BaseMark OS II, GFXBench 3.0 to test a GPU heavy workflow, and ending with PCMark which is a fairly balanced test of all components.

In our WiFi web browsing test the P8 Lite falls somewhat short of the median. It's surrounded by the Lumia 640 and the Google Nexus 6, with the ASUS Zenfone 2 sitting further below it but not by that much. In my view OEMs should really be targeting somewhere around 9 to 10 hours of battery life for web browsing at 200 nits, and at 7.8 hours the P8 Lite doesn't make that mark. What concerns me is that the Zenfone 2 isn't that far behind, and it's both $50 cheaper, significantly faster, and has a much sharper display. Better web browsing battery life definitely would have given the P8 Lite a much needed advantage over the competition.

In BaseMark OS II's battery test the P8 Lite does not perform well at all. Not only is the battery life the shortest device on the chart, but sustained performance throughout the test is much lower than many other devices which leads to it also receiving the lowest battery score of our listed devices.

With its smaller battery and much higher sustained performance than devices like the Moto G, Moto E, and Lumia 640, it's not a surprise that the P8 Lite lasts a significantly shorter time in the GFXBench battery life test. However, the result doesn't sit far behind many other devices on the chart, and the P8 Lite achieves similar performance at its native resolution. What I can say about battery life in GPU intensive scenarios on the P8 Lite is that it's decent, and it's not at all unexpected given the device's hardware and battery capacity.

The P8 Lite demonstrates disappointing battery life in PCMark's battery benchmark. This benchmark consists of running through all of PCMark's standard tests in a loop, which gives a good idea of what battery life will be when the phone is subject to various different use cases over a period of time. At 4.68 hours, the P8 Lite falls well behind our other smartphones, and considerably far behind the 2015 Moto E which is a less expensive device.

It's clear from our battery tests that the battery life of the P8 Lite is quite short. This was fairly evident when using the device throughout the day. Something that isn't explicitly shown here is that there appears to be a large amount of battery drain when the device is idle. I often found the battery in need of a charge even during times when the device had only been laying on my desk for the night after minimal use during the day. As far as both active and idle battery life is concerned, the P8 Lite is disappointing.

Charge Time

Charge time isn't often thought of when considering what device to buy, but it can have a substantial impact on the user experience. If a phone lasts a short time and takes a long time to charge then a user can be without a usable device for a much longer period than the battery life alone would imply. On the flip side, a short charge time can improve the experience on a device with shorter than desired battery life by making it quick to get it back to a usable state.

The P8 Lite ships with a 5W charger in the box. Unfortunately, with its stock charger the P8 Lite has the longest charge time of all recent devices. This is a problem when coupled with the P8 Lite's short battery life, as it means the device will run out of power quickly and then take a long time to get back to a 100% charge again.

Final Words

Mid range devices in the $200-300 range are more interesting than devices at the low end of the smartphone market because there's more room for OEMs to prioritize some features over others in order to differentiate their device. With low end devices it's often the same story of a Snapdragon 400/410 SoC with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of NAND, a 5MP or possibly an 8MP camera, and a qHD display. In the mid range market OEMs can choose to spend more money on certain areas to improve the experience, whether that be a faster SoC, a better display, better build quality, or better cameras. The P8 Lite represent's Huawei's view on what features are most important in a mid range device.

Build quality is definitely an area of focus on the P8 Lite. The chassis feels sturdy, and it feels fairly good in the hand. At 7.7mm thick it's also much thinner than many other low end and mid range devices, although this results in a compromise on battery capacity. As for the design side of things, I'm personally not the biggest fan due to the metal band around the edges. While I don't know how many people will share this view, I'm disappointed that a single design element ends up ruining the appearance of the phone for me.

The 5.0" 1280x720 display on the P8 Lite is definitely one of its weaker aspects. The calibration is just not near as good as it should be, especially with devices in the sub-$200 bracket becoming very accurate. At 5" the 720p resolution has decent sharpness, but I find myself longing for the 5.5" 1080p panel on the Zenfone 2 which is only $199. Since the display is something you look at all day, Huawei really needs to improve in this area by eliminating the blue shift in the greyscale and improving general color accuracy.

As for performance, Snapdragon 615 is really the best you're going to get at this price point unless you go with the Zenfone 2 which is something of an anomaly in many ways. Huawei is using the bin with the big cluster of A53 cores clocking up to 1.5GHz rather than 1.7GHz like in the HTC One M8s, but it still has significant performance improvements over Snapdragon 400 and 410 in low end devices. There would be even greater gains on the CPU side if it was operating in AArch64 mode, but with the P8 Lite shipping with KitKat it's forced to operate in AArch32 mode. I really don't feel it's acceptable to be shipping any devices with KitKat this late into 2015, as it has performance issues and uses Android's older Dalvik runtime.

The GPU shows even more substantial improvements than the CPU, with performance being anywhere from 1.5x to 3x faster than Adreno 305/306. As far as memory goes, the additional gigabyte of RAM also helps to keep things running smoothly, but NAND quality is definitely an area Huawei needs to continue to improve on. Both random and sequential reads and writes are as slow or slower than the Moto E which at times sells for less than half the price of the P8 Lite. It's hard to say how much of an impact this will have with the workload of a typical P8 Lite buyer, but there's certainly no reason not to improve on areas where devices fall short.

The 13MP rear-facing camera is where the P8 Lite really shines. Shots that aren't taken in the middle of the night end up being better than any other device I've seen at this price point. Much of this is owed to the well balanced processing that Huawei applies to images. Once you get into extreme low light there tends to be a dramatic loss of detail due to excessive noise reduction, and I think image quality would be substantially improved if Huawei would tone it down a few notches when taking photos in the dark.

The quality of videos recorded on the P8 ends up falling short compared to the still image quality. Even with a fairly high bitrate for 1080p video, there's just an overall lack of detail in every frame. Fixed focus also means that there's often blurriness when pointing the camera to new areas, and Huawei needs to work out whatever issues are occurring with the right channel audio recording.

The last important aspect to cover is battery life, and unfortunately this is where the P8 Lite really let me down. The P8 Lite's battery life is unimpressive in our web browsing benchmark, and the very short time in PCMark's battery test just confirms something I continually noticed when using the phone which is that the battery life is too short during general use. This problem is made worse by a very long charge time, which means that the phone dies quickly and takes a long time to be back up and running. Since the P8 Lite doesn't deliver on battery life, I don't know why users wouldn't instead purchase something like the ASUS Zenfone 2 unless they really want the P8's camera quality or smaller size.

Ultimately, there are no bad phones, just bad prices. The P8 Lite wouldn't be a bad recommendation if it was priced a bit lower and received an update to Lollipop. While I don't know if it would be possible for Huawei to reach a price of $150, I would need the P8 Lite to be priced somewhere below $200 before I could really recommend it. At this time there are simply better options in the $200-300 range, and so at its current price point the P8 Lite is a phone I find difficult to recommend.