Huawei Y8p

HUAWEI Y8P

Huawei Y8p goes for Ksh. 24,000 – Ksh 25,000 in Kenya. Huawei has continued to offer its cycle of phones, all through the various segments. Seemingly this is a re-brand from an earlier mid-range, the Huawei Enjoy 10s. The Huawei Y8P is still a great device, with a formidable mid-range chipset, a nice triple set of camera and an AMOLED display for that great content consumption experience. Is it still worth the hype? Let’s dissect the review. Official product website.

Huawei Y8p price in Kenya and key features

Design and display

The Huawei Y8P comes with a 6.3-inch OLED display, which has the infinity u teardrop design which houses the front facing selfie camera. The screen blends into the plastic body onto the back that houses the vertical triple camera set up. The bezels and chin are visibly very narrow, helping it achieve a screen to body ratio of 83.2%. At the bottom we have the speaker grill, a USB-C connector and gladly a 3.5mm jack. The screen utilizes the under display fingerprint sensor, in addition to face unlock biometrics. 

Performance and storage

The Huawei Y8P comes with the top spec’d in-house HiSilicon Kirin 710F chipset, bundled up with an up to 2.2 GHz Cortex A73/A53 CPU combo and a Mali G51 MP4 GPU. The memory options on board is 4/6 GB for RAM and 128GB mass storage. There is also options for expandable storage of up to 256GB with the nano memory that shares a hybrid slot with the sim card. The SoC is great, competing favorably with other midranges, handling day to day apps with ease while putting up a fight in intensive tasks like graphics intensive games.

Camera

the Huawei P series have had a long standing reputation for great cameras, and the Huawei Y8P is no different. The primary camera is a 48mp wide lens, alongside an 8mp ultrawide and a 2mp depth sensor. This set up offers solid performance, with well detailed and exposed pictures. The ultrawide comes in handy or those landscape photos but it might seem to lose a little bit of detail nonetheless. There are also bokeh and portrait modes. The selfie camera is a capable 16mp shooter, with very nice selfies, which also support portrait and bokeh modes. The edge detection is usable and well exposed.

Battery

The Huawei Y8P comes with the standard 4000 mAh non removable Li-Po battery which should easily get you past the whole day, with a substantial capacity still left. Despite coming with USB type C, we don’t get any kind of fast charging and are left to work with the standard 10W charging, which will often take a little extra time to juice up.

Software

Many things about the Huawei Y8P’s hardware are very attractive. But with their recent ban by the US government and being kicked out from core Android services, Huawei has been struggling to offer an alternative with the Android 10 based EMUI 10.1 with Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) instead of GMS. It still loses the system apps common to android like YouTube, Docs, Gmail etc and location based functionality that is used by apps like Uber.

Installing Google apps on Huawei Y8p

This is certainly a big blow, but not an unmanageable one. In place of the Playstore, we now have AppGallery where most of the major apps are hosted. If need be, Android apps can be sideloaded by installing APKs from other resources on the internet. Updates might not be guaranteed but Huawei are working to bridge that particular gap. By and large, the MIUI is light and fluid, not very intrusive but with significant bloatware, largely because of needing to use their own native apps instead of Android’s.

Conclusion

The Huawei Y8P has great hardware admittedly, but the lack of Goggle support really puts it at a disadvantage. The screen is a great OLED, midrange level chipset and a nice array of cameras. The repeat Huawei user would probably overlook the inconvenience the software offers and choose to enjoy the great hardware instead.

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