Audio, Display and Camera Quality

Although many budget phones are shipping with 1080p displays, we really don’t mind seeing a 720p display on a 5-incher. With a pixel density of 294ppi, few people will complain about the sharpness. Plus, with an underpowered GPU and a relatively slow battery, having to deal with fewer pixels is not a bad idea.

Brightness and viewing angles are average, and we expected a bit more. We have another complaint about the display: it’s just too cool, giving whites a blue tint. Overall, we expected a better display, especially considering the excellent display used on the flagship P8. The P8 Lite does not feature a class-leading display, and we’d say it’s below average for this price range.

Audio quality is average as well. The phone has a noise cancelling microphone and reception is good. However, the earpiece could have been a bit more powerful.

The rear-facing camera is relatively good. The OmniVision sensor can capture some nice shots, and the f2.0 aperture helps as well. The P8 Lite might not have the best camera among mainstream phones, but it’s very good in the imaging department.

Daylight snaps are good, focus is fast, and a lot of detail is preserved.

Indoor low-light shots aren't as good, mainly due to aggressive post-processing.

HDR does a nice job as well, and there’s not a lot of ghosting. In default auto mode, the camera will analyse the scene and activate HDR automatically, if it feels it will make a difference.

The 100% also reveals that a lot of detail is preserved in HDR mode, and that there's virtually no ghosting in most situations.

In low-light situations, the camera can still snap decent images, but we feel Huawei’s noise reduction is a tad too aggressive. This can be an issue in low-light shots.

The front-facing selfie cam isn’t as good. The f2.4 aperture doesn’t help, so the camera captures below average shots and video in low-light conditions. We’ve seen better, but we’ve also seen worse.

The camera user interface is very good and you really get the feeling that Huawei went the extra mile when it designed the camera app. In fact, we like it more than camera apps on certain flagship Android phones (let’s not name names).