Huawei guns for OnePlus with the P10 Lite
Don't let the name put you off - this is a well-specced and well-priced smartphone
The P10 Lite? What’s with the spelling there?
That, my orthographer friend, is a marketing ploy to make Huawei seem down with the kids. Something that by its nature is always doomed to failure because the very act of trying to be down with the kids instantly means you can never be anything like down with the kids. Capiche?
So it’s street spelling for ‘light’. OK then, so presumably this is a cheapo phone…
Well yes – and indeed no. The P10 lite – there’s no capital L either – is cheap in terms of money but decidedly not so in terms of specs and build. It takes much of what we loved so much about the recent Huawei P10, cuts a few corners here and there and bundles the whole thing up in a nicely affordable package.
So what’s the difference between the Lite – sorry, lite – and the standard P10? I’m all ears…
Aren’t you just, Mr Lineker. Well the major omissions here are around the camera: whereas the P10 (and the bigger P10 Plus) both got lovely Leica-made dual lenses round the back, the P10 lite has just the one 12MP effort. And it’s not packing Leica glass either. The lack of the second sensor means no clever zoom or expertly blurred backgrounds and presumably a reduction in image quality. Still, it’s quite possible that it’ll take lovely pictures anyway, and there’s still an 8MP selfie cam round the front.
I can live without all that camera trickery. What else is missing?
The P10 is one of the fastest phones around thanks to its super-charged Kirin 960 processor, but the lite version only gets the Kirin 658 chipset. However it is still an octa-core chip, and paired with 4GB of RAM we’d expect it to be pretty nippy anyway. The screen is actually bigger than the P10’s – 5.2in and full HD rather than 5.1in. The 3000mAh battery, meanwhile, is slightly smaller than the 3200mAh one in the P10 and storage space has similarly been hacked back a little from 64GB to 32GB – albeit still with the option of adding more via microSD card.
Is there a crazy green version like with the P10 and P10 Plus?
Nope – we’re back in far more sedate black or gold territory here, although Huawei does say more colour options will be coming soon. Otherwise it looks much the same as the larger models and has a similarly premium feel, with a mostly metal build. The main design difference is one that some people will doubtless like – the moving of the fingerprint sensor from the front, where it sits on the P10, to the back where it’s been on previous Huawei phones such as the Mate 9.
Alright, so it’s a mildly stripped back version of the P10 – does it only have a mildly stripped-back price too?
Not at all – because the P10 lite is priced really well at just £299. That’s half of what the P10 will set you back, which is really quite the bargain considering how much phone you get here. The £400 OnePlus 3T ought to be looking over its shoulder with some trepidation. If it had a shoulder. What’s more, it’s available for pre-order right now – yes NOW – and will be on general sale from March 31. Look out for a review here soon.
Marc McLaren
Contributor 
