Huawei P Smart

VERDICT

The P Smart isn’t a bad phone, but the Honor 9 Lite offers more and costs less

- Christopher Minasians

THE P SMART is Huawei’s latest budget phone, finally making its way to the UK after being announced in December 2017.

Budget phones have come a long way in terms of design. Long gone are the days of ugly bricks; the Huawei P Smart looks as elegant as any flagship handset, with its rounded edges reminiscent of its older sibling, the Huawei P10 (Shopper 361). Although antenna lines are visible, they smartly complement the phone’s design.

The P Smart comes in a range of four colours (black, blue, gold and rose gold), but right now only black is available in the UK. It looks tasteful enough, although it does tend to pick up fingerprints.

On that note, Huawei has gone for a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, which we found perfectly responsive and easy to use. Keeping up with recent trends, there’s also a dual-lens camera at the back, with dual-LED flash. At the front, a single selfie camera sits atop the elongated 5.65in display.

On the left-hand side, there’s a dual-SIM slot, which will alternatively take a single SIM and a microSD card, to add up to 256GB of storage. At the bottom, there’s a Micro USB port, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a single downward-firing speaker.

TALL, BRIGHT AND HANDSOME

The P Smart’s IPS display has a resolution of 2,160x1,080, for an aspect ratio of 18:9. This is becoming a popular shape, and it’s good that you don’t have to pay a premium to get it, as was the case when handsets such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 first adopted it.