Huawei Ascend P8 Lite product reviews

I have never written a review for a cellphone before, so I apologize in advance if this does not really cut the mustard for any tech savvy folk out there lol I have been a Samsung girl for as long as I have been using a smart phone. My teen son has been an Apple iPhone user is entire phone life....until this year!

This year saw my sons trusty iPhone 5c reach its demise, and because he had his money at the time he popped out and spent a couple hundred dollars on a brand new phone - a Samsung something arather. He seemed happy with his purchase, until the phone fell onto our carpet a week later, and the screen shattered! It did not even fall far, nor onto concrete or a similar hard surface. The screen shattered instantly, although the phone still worked, for about 60 seconds, and then it went black. You could still hear it working though.

He decided he did not want another phone, however, he is a teen parent, and reality is he needs a phone in order for day care and the like to contact him. I remembered last year when I broke my own phone, I came on here and searched phones and discovered the review for the P8 lite. I never ended up buying it, but thought it would be the ideal phone for my son. So we got him one!

Man I am glad we did. What a fantastic phone. Its surprisingly fast, packed full of features, and even assists you in taking some pretty snazzy photos haha it has front and back camera, which is apparently a must these days if you are a teenager. And the awesome protective cover it came with is amazing. I just can't see him ever breaking a phone again in his life lol well as long as he has this one anyway.

I do not know anything about operating systems, or speeds, or mega pixels or anything like that unfortunately, but I can tell you, that this handy phone is a great size, so if you have poor eye sight, it is perfect for you. As I said earlier, it is fast. It seems faster than any of the other brand of phones we have ever used. He was playing with the camera while driving through town at night, and you could actually see the subject of the photo. We've never had a phone that does this at night haha low light shooting is amazing!

It takes super cool selfies, well we assume it does because it takes you through the steps for taking the 'perfect' selfie. We haven't taken a perfect selfie yet, but we have had a laugh at the selfies this feature has produced so far. Porcelain skin, bright eyes, every little detail of hair high lighted - ok the pics we have taken have looked a little alienated lol but its all in fun as he gets to know this little phone.

Priced at just over $200 at the Warehouse, we are seriously super impressed. The battery appears to last well, it charges quickly, and as stated above all those other awesome features. We are still yet to discover a lot about this phone, but what we have managed to play with and discover so far has been amazing. Seriously for a cheap (by todays market) phone, this one is definitely one to buy and would highly recommend it, especially for teens, as it seems really robust!

Dear me, where do I begin... How do I love this phone, let me count the ways! I was fortunate enough to be offered this phone to review recently, and to be blunt I wasn't expecting much from it. Anything with "Lite" in the name makes me think there is something fundamentally under-powered about it. as well as that, I am not a big fan of high-middle range handsets because they usually strike me as having more attitude than ability when you consider their price tag. As it turned out, nothing could be further from the truth.

When it arrived, my first impression was that it was a scale miniature of the "Big Black Monolith" from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" - I half expected to put it on the table and suddenly have tiny primates appear and start to worship it, or see stars moving around in it. After using it for a few weeks, my final thoughts are that the designers made a smart choice going for that squared-off slab look, because just like the Monolith, this handset has an amazing amount of power hidden away in an unassuming and understated chassis.

Because there is just so much packed into this device, to avoid writing a small novel, I'll focus my review on the key elements that are most important in a modern smartphone for me. This starts with the feel of it - it doesn't matter what bells, whistles and jetpacks it has under the hood, if it feels uncomfortable I won't enjoy using it. While I don't have huge hands, they aren't tiny either and this phone fits beautifully in my hand. It is small enough that I don't feel I am having to stretch my grip to keep a hold of it, but big enough to feel like it will show me all I want to see and can use my fingers instead of a stylus to click the icons I want and nothing else.

Battery life - astounding. Depending on how long I spent talking on the phone during the day, I found myself getting anywhere from a full 24 hour day right up to nearly a week without needing to recharge. Unlike my previous phone - which demanded to be plugged in every night at the very least - this phone seems to have almost no concept of 'waste power on trivia, just because..." the way most phones these days do. Even with "background consumption alerts" firing away due to resource-hungry downloaded apps, I was constantly surprised when my habit made me plug the phone in every night and see that the battery was still above 50%, more often not still in the high-80's!

The cameras are stunning. I'm used to using my phone as a point'n'shoot camera and snapping off shots at 5MP. That's plenty big enough for almost all the photos I need to take as part of reviewing, as well as covering the bases for holiday and travel shots. But to be able to snap off selfies at that resolution, and do point'n'shoot photos at a whopping 13MP is staggering. The image quality is also remarkable, but to be honest it's just too much data for my needs, so I chose to downgrade the resolution a notch to a 'mere' 10MP. Add to that the huge range of built-in filters and effects, as well as video mode, beauty mode and time-lapse on fast-dial... it's all you will need for anything short of DSLR-grade photos.

The video display is brilliant - streaming movies from my office server to watch on the phone was simple and smooth, with great quality and rich detail clearly visible. The onboard sound is quite tolerable considering the small form factor, and using earbuds to get good sound was also quite pleasing, but pairing it with a Bluetooth speaker with some good bass to it gave me a mini-theatre experience that really impressed me. Sure, it's not 4k, but so what? On a 5" phone screen, you really do NOT need anything better than 1080p. Heck, even 720p was good enough for me, but then I am no purist or phone-snob, so... yeah.

This phone really did take everything I threw at it and either shrugged it off, or ran with it and showed me it could handle the load just fine. The EMUI software overlaying the basic Android functionality is intuitive, beautiful and highly functional despite the steeper learning curve I experienced. I found some of the UI design decisions to be just inspired, especially in some of the more 'vital' apps like the daily planner and the combined phone/contacts/messaging app. The ease of use and extra layers of information brought a new level of pleasure in using this handset. I also experienced many, many "Oh wow!" moments as a swipe gesture made in error brought up more hidden functions, instead of my stress levels.

But, as with all things, there was a slight sour note. Thankfully, it is so small as to almost be irrelevant, and knowing my luck there is a setting somewhere to remedy this: Having notifications show on the lock screen is great, but I really would like the ability to dismiss them with a swipe WITHOUT having the phone then demand I unlock it to make the dismissal permanent. If I swipe away a note, and refuse to unlock the phone, the note is sitting there again next time I turn the screen on - They aren't boomerangs, if I swipe it away, I don't want the infernal thing to keep coming back. That's it, my one tiny -grr- note.

Overall, I just wish I had known this phone was this good when it first came out, because I would have enjoyed many, many extra months of happy phone use instead of suffering through the agonising death-throws of my old phone. For the price tag, this phone is simply amazing and should be a serious consideration for anyone looking to upgrade a mid-range phone.