After over four months with the Huawei P10, I can confirm the phone has aged very well. The 3200mAh battery hasn’t seriously deteriorated and continues to easily last a full day with average use.

The Kirin 960 CPU has also worn well and I still don’t have any issues with the P10’s performance. Using it as my main work and personal phone, the P10 still deals with multiple-tab web browsing, 3D gaming and video streaming chug- and stutter-free.

I can also personally attest to the P10’s durability. Despite experiencing more accidental drops than I’d care to admit, on a variety of different surfaces, ranging from carpets to pavements, the phone is without a dent. The only noticeable damage is a minor chip in my black unit’s top, which is only visible up close.

But, despite its continuing solid performance, I stand by my original opinion – the P10 is a capable smartphone, but it’s overshadowed and outdone by competing 2017 flagships.

When the P10 was originally released, its hefty price tag was already a sticking point, as it placed the handset in direct competition with stellar handsets such as the LG G6,  Samsung Galaxy S8 and HTC U11. Both those rival phones offered more advanced feature sets, better cameras and a variety of other perks. The only minor downside was that both are marginally more expensive.

Since then, however, the P10’s value has been further damaged thanks to the arrival of the OnePlus 5, which costs £50 less than the P10. The OnePlus also offers a pretty impressive array of features normally seen on much more expensive phones.

These include a powerful Snapdragon 835 CPU and nifty dual-camera system that pairs a regular Sony IMX 398 sensor with a telephoto lens. Though it’s not perfect, this setup is a noticeable step up from the P10’s – which takes an alternative route, pairing a regular RGB sensor with a monochrome one to mixed effect.

The end result is that, for now, I’d still recommend buyers either consider shelling out a little more for the larger P10 Plus, which has better specs, or consider a non-Huawei phone such as the OnePlus 5.

The P10 is the successor to Huawei’s P9 flagship, which in my mind was the firm’s finest handset to date.

It continues the company’s push to dominate the camera market and features a refined version of the “designed by Leica” dual-camera setup seen on its predecessor. This, plus a few subtle but important design and hardware improvements, makes the P10 look like it could be a valid rival to Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8 and the excellent LG G6.

With its retail price set at £550 in the UK, however, the P10 is one of the most expensive phones ever made by Huawei. Couple this with the fact that for only €50 more it’s possible to pick up the better-specced “Plus” variant of the P10 (UK pricing yet to be confirmed), and the P10’s overall appeal is hampered, making it a good as opposed to perfect choice for premium buyers.

Design-wise, the P10 looks more like an iPhone 7 than a Huawei phone. Some of the coloured variants, such as the blue version, differentiate themselves by sporting a textured finish. Overall, though, were it not for the appearance of a USB Type-C – not Lightning – port at the bottom of the handset and the Leica and Huawei branding on its rear, you could easily mistake the P10 for an Apple phone.

Some will bemoan the lack of originality; for me, this isn’t too much of an issue since the P10 ticks all the right boxes when it comes to functionality.

The metal exterior feels suitably solid, and the use of Gorilla Glass 5 on the front screen should offer reasonable scratch-resistance – although I’d still refrain from dropping it in a pocket with your keys.

The P10’s 7mm thickness and 142g weight make it super-comfortable to hold, even for folk with small hands. I’m also pleased to see the phone has a microSD card slot, which will enable users to add a further 256GB of space to the basic 64GB built-in storage.

My only slight quibble is that Huawei has opted to position the fingerprint scanner on the P10’s front, as I’ve always found a rear placement more intuitive in use. The scanner on the P9 was a particularly fine example, with placement exactly where my index finger naturally fell when holding it.

Huawei has partially made up for this by adding some advanced control options to the P10’s scanner. A short press acts as the standard Back button, while a long press brings you back to the homescreen. Swiping left or right will bring up the apps Overview screen.

Huawei has loaded the P10 with a 5.1-inch, 1080p resolution display. On paper, this is a marked step down from the P10 Plus, which comes with a 5.5-inch with a 2K resolution display. However, in real-world use I didn’t encounter any issues with the P10’s display.

Many flagships, such as the Galaxy S7, may have made the jump to Quad-HD, but the truth is, most people won’t notice the difference in pixel count. The P10’s 432ppi (pixels per inch) mean that it’s all but impossible to discern individual pixels and icons, and text looks universally sharp.

The use of an IPS-NEO panel results in blacks that are better than those on regular IPS screens – and improved viewing angles – although they’re not as deep and inky as they are on phones with AMOLED screens. In addition, whites are clean and colours are neither overcooked nor too cool.  Maximum brightness levels are excessively high, to the point I generally found myself having to set the phone to between 30-40% brightness to use it comfortably.

The P10 comes loaded with Android 7.0 Nougat overlaid with Huawei’s Emotion UI 5.1. While I’m happy to see Nougat, which is by far the best iteration of Android to date, I’m less enamoured with Huawei’s Emotion software.

Android skins made sense back in the day, when the OS was young and missing key features. But since Android Lollipop, which was a turning point for the OS, I’ve felt they’re generally detrimental to the user experience for a couple of reasons.

First, because most of the additions are either superfluous, or duplicate services to ones already included on Android. This issue remains true on the P10, whose menu system has been completely rejigged and comes with numerous duplicate services for items such as music, photos and calendar.

I wish more companies would follow Moto’s example and put a clean install of Android on their phones, or at the very least do what HTC has with its One series and stop adding duplicate apps.

The second issue is that the skin’s code always delays how quickly handsets can be upgraded to new versions of Android. The appearance of Emotion is likely to be a key reason the P10 isn’t running on the latest Android 7.1 version of Nougat.

Being fair to Huawei, the version of Emotion on the P10 is the best I’ve tested. The company has made some changes that show it’s listening to customer feedback. These include small tweaks, like the ability to re-add Android’s app tray to the UI and unistall some of the unwanted apps; in terms of usability, they make a huge difference.

Huawei’ has also done some interesting work to improve the OS under the hood, using Ultra Memory. Ultra Memory is a background feature designed to let the phone run more smoothly by recycling memory faster.

The P10 uses the same Kirin 960 chipset as the Huawei Mate 9phablet, and it’s paired with a Mali G71 MP8 GPU and 4GB of RAM. The specs are a step up on the P9, which used an older Kirin 955 CPU and, on paper, put the device on a par with competing flagships. Both remain slightly behind the Plus version, however, which comes with 6GB of memory – although, to be perfectly honest, this amount of memory on a smartphone is complete overkill.

With regular use I didn’t have any serious problems with the P10’s performance. Apps opened in milliseconds and the phone dealt with multiple tab web browsing without any signs of stuttering. The only time I noticed any performance disparity between it and competing flagships was when gaming.

Playing demanding titles such as Riptide GP2, Star Cindy andBanner Saga 2, the phone took a fraction of a second longer to load than phones such as the Google Pixel. The games did run smoothly once up, but the P10 became noticeably hotter than rival phones during prolonged play sessions – although not to the point I was worrying about CPU throttling.

The P10’s performance during TrustedReviews’ standard suite of synthetic benchmarks mirrored my real-world findings. In the CPU-focused Geekbench 4 test, the P10 ran in with impressive 1,933 single-core and 6,145 multi-core scores. The Pixel finished with lower 1,562 single-core and 4,072 multi-core scores, by comparison.

The P10 performed less well in the GPU-focused 3DMark: Slingshot test. Here it scored 2,604, placing it well below the Pixel and its 3,463 score.

Call quality is also solid. The speakers and microphone are more than good enough to make and take calls, even on busy London streets. The speakers are also powerful enough to take calls on loudspeaker in non-noisy environments, though I really wouldn’t recommend using them to listen to music.

The P10 is the second phone to carry Leica’s branding on its camera. The dual-lens system pairs a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor with a 12-megapixel RGB sensor. Huawei claims the dual-lens system will offer buyers a variety of benefits, including better low-light performance, the ability to create a more realistic bokeh effects, and improved black-and-white photography.

There is some truth to the first claim, but the P10 still isn’t perfect in low light or at creating a true-to-life bokeh – a cool-looking effect where the camera creates heavily out-of-focus areas of the frame.

The P10 isn’t the worst performing camera I’ve tested in low light, but it’s far from the best at this price. Photos taken at night or in dim conditions can suffer from noise and look overprocessed, particularly when there are bright lights – such as street lamps – around.

Even photos in moderately dark placess, such as bars, don’t display quite as much detail as competing top-end phones such as the iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S7. This is likely due to the P10’s f/2.2 aperture, which is sub-par for a £500-plus phone. By comparison, the Galaxy S7’s rear camera has an f/1.7 aperture, the iPhone 7 an f/1.8, and the Pixel an f/2.0.

The lower aperture also affects the camera’s ability to create a realistic-looking bokeh. No phone camera has managed to create an authentic-looking bokeh and the P10, too, falls short; you can definitely see blemishes and slight distortions around the subject when viewing the image on a larger screen.

With this in mind, I can’t help but think that Huawei fans looking for a decent camera would be better off shelling out the extra cash for a Huawei P10 Plus, which has improved f/1.8 lenses.

Outside of this, the camera is pretty good. The camera app is nicely reactive and I didn’t notice any significant lag when shooting. Photos taken on the P10 in decent light didn’t appear over-sharpened and colours weren’t distorted. All in all, the phone’s camera is more than good enough for taking a few holiday snaps for sharing on social media.

The rear camera can also record 4K resolution video at 30fps or standard FHD footage at 60fps. Recordings generally look decent, albeit shaky if you don’t have a tripod, though again, low light performance is an issue.

he addition of manual controls for the camera’s settings, custom monochrome portrait mode, and special “impact” filter, can be used to create nicely atmospheric black-and-white images.

The 8-megapixel, f/1.9 front camera also performs well in low light and is more than good enough for selfies – although, again, its low-light performance isn’t great.

The P10 is powered by a 3,200mAh, non-removable battery, which is pretty big for a 5-inch phone. By comparison, the Pixel  is powered by a 2,770mAh cell.

Taking the phone off charge at 9am and using it as my primary work and personal phone, the P10 had more than 50% of its charge left at 10pm with regular use. Regular use entailed listening to music on the commute to and from work, an hour of gaming, making and taking a couple of calls, and constantly checking my social media and email accounts.

The phone also dealt with TrustedReviews‘ video-streaming test fairly well. Streaming Netflix with the screen set at 50% brightness, the P10 lost an average of 8-12% of its battery per hour, which is pretty decent. Competing phones I’ve tested generally lost between 10-15% of their charge running the same test.

Gaming put a bigger drain on the battery. An hour of Banner Saga cost the P10 an average of 15-22% of its charge.

My only real concern about the P10’s battery is that Android Doze doesn’t appear to be working correctly. Doze is a useful background feature that reduces power consumption by turning off anything but critical processes when the phone or tablet isn’t being used. The new version in Nougat is, in theory, able to save power when the device is on the move, by making it access data only in intervals.

The feature is a great addition that lets other Nougat phones I’ve tested retain as much as 97% of their charge when left off the mains overnight. The P10 regularly loses as much of 20% of its charge when left alone overnight.

For fans of the P9, the P10 is an excellent phone. Huawei has tweaked the design and added nearly all the right upgrades to make it feel like a step up. The phone has an excellent screen, offers top performance and ticks all the right boxes design-wise.

My only major concern is that its rear camera’s aperture is a little on the low side considering the handset’s price and can’t match the performance of key rivals, such as the Pixel.

I’m also not convinced about its price. The Huawei P10 Plus is only €50 more than the regular P10 and comes with a better camera, a larger higher-resolution screen, and 128GB of storage. Although I can’t comment definitively until I get to test the P10 Plus, this combination of factors adds up to make it appear the better option for those who can afford it.