The recently announced Huawei P10 and P10 Plus smartphones will arrive in South Africa next month. The devices will offer users new software features such as studio-like re-lighting and 3D facial detection technology.
The Huawei P10 and P10 Plus smartphone will arrive on South Africa shores in May. The much-anticipated handsets were unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February, and are expected to make a major impact on Huawei’s smartphone market share in 2017.
They are regarded as the culmination of a four-year sequence of ever-improving devices that have brought the brand to consumer prominence from previously being known only in the network infrastructure space.
“Huawei’s P series sets the foundation for Huawei as a lifestyle brand that can inspire and encourage consumers through technology,” the company said in a statment. “Believing that the smartphone has become an extension of ourselves, Huawei developed the P series with the aim to provide consumers with a stylish device that caters to their lifestyle and communicates their personality.”
In 2016 Huawei partnered with Leica to equip the P9 series smartphones with a dual-camera co-engineered with Leica, offering a powerful imagery experience – and shipping more than 12 million units around the world.
Huawei is now launching the Huawei P10 and Huawei P10 Plus, which it describes as “revolutionary masterpieces that offer users a compelling experience like no other while allowing them to capture and document their moments, while telling their stories better”.
For the first time on a smartphone, the P10 and P10 Plus both boast the world’s first front camera co-engineered with Leica to complement the Leica Dual rear camera.
They also offer new software features, such as studio-like re-lighting and 3D facial detection technology, thus providing key tools for portrait photography. The new front camera helps to produce portrait photography in Leica image style, while the rear camera captures detailed facial features, potentially bringing photos vividly to life.
The cameras use a 12-megapixel RGB sensor, a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and enhanced fusion algorithms. When paired with the dual camera Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) solution and the industry’s first dual camera pixel binning technology, the Huawei P10 and Huawei P10 Plus offer enhanced night shot capabilities. Additional studio-level portrait tools and illumination effects were also developed, based on extensive research.
Huawei’s portrait features create more natural-looking photos, thanks to the devices’ smart imaging algorithm, which is based on extensive research of various different face shapes and skin colors. By understanding the relative position of each facial feature and the uniqueness of skin type, portrait enhancements can be applied in a customised and more natural way.
In 2016, Huawei’s annual spending on research and development reached CNY76.4 billion (US$11 billion). This has driven increasingly innovative products and a growing global recognition as a premium device brand.