The state of the Huawei P8 - the review

My first experience with Huawei was when the Ideos phones were released. They had been a major hit in Kenya as a cheap workable smart phone. At the beginning of 2012, while I worked for Google, I, alongside other techies in Ghana, were looking for the Ideos phone. They had literally run out in Ghana. I normally associated Huawei with cheap smart phones that aren't of top of the shelf quality. Enter Huawei P8. It comes from a line of Huawei phones that has effectively put that notion I had to rest.

The Huawei P8 comes in 4 great colours! Prestige Gold is cool, maybe I love the gold plated colour because I am from Ghana (and am golden). The Mystic Champagne model is more elegant though, I love this one. Very sleek! The new metal bodies that many new smart phones have lose some of the elegance. Not this P8, the elegance does not “dissip8” (dissipate) in spite of the durability features it comes with. The Prestige Gold and Carbon Black models come with 64 GB storage while the Titanium Grey and Mystic Champagne models come with 16 GB storage.

It is very easy to use and has a lot of innovative features. Do you ask people to call your phone when you can't find it? What if the phone is on silent or vibrate like I tend to do for mine?

What if you could shout for your phone to do something and just show itself? Well, an even better feature is available for you with the Huawei P8, A voice command feature. Think of how much fun you could have with such a feature. Are you not psyched?

Many people like me want the phones we use to take the best pictures. Even rivaling the Canon cameras our friends carry around. Many people are taking photography as a hobby and a side business. It's cool and dandy but some of us want to maintain our phones as our primary photo taking device. The Huawei P8 serves those purposes very well. The rear camera is a 13 mega pixel camera which gives you some of the best photos around. If you're a selfie addict like me, an 8 mega pixel front camera will serve you very well. So many times I have had to keep my phone in my pocket when my friends need to choose a camera to take our groufie. Groufie means group selfie. Credit my and my GhanaThink folks next time you use the word. The iPhones and iPads are normally the devices of choice for the groufie. With the Huawei P8, I can also rep! Here's another kicker, the camera records video at 1080p@30fps, quality!

I tried a couple of tricks in the book to take a screenshot. Until I discovered there was a button I just click to take a screenshot as part of the Android pull-down menu. Xixie! (Huawei phones are from China, no?) I am particular about how phones present the contacts for use. For the P8, it gives me the option while looking at a group of contacts to choose some contacts to send an email to! Sorry, I haven't seen this on any other phone so pardon my excitement! I can send a mass text too! These Huawei P8 phones #makeitpossible.

I've been a single SIM guy until recently where my line of work requires me to work with multiple SIM cards. I don't need to get a new awesome device because the P8 can take care of my double needs just fine. Whew! In these parts of the world, a major selling is a dual SIM phone. This is a phone built for Africa, which is where I find myself. Sold.