Hands on with Huawei's G8 smartphone, the Chinese iPhone wannabe

San Francisco: Usually when people think of Chinese-made and designed products, words like "cheap" and "nasty" get bandied around a lot.

But the Huawei G8 proves that you can buy an affordable Chinese smartphone that is pleasant to use.

For the past four days I've been trying out the Android-powered 5.5-inch device, due to go on sale in Australia by the end of October. It's unclear yet whether it will be available outright and which telcos, if any, will offer it on plans. But to give you some idea of how much it will cost, it retails for roughly 2822 yuan outright in China, which converts to roughly $636 in Australian currency.

But is it worth paying double its estimated price to get something a lot better, like an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge?

In my view yes, especially considering smartphones are an integral part of most peoples' lives today.

Nevertheless, if you don't have the cash to shell out $1200 or more for a new smartphone, the G8 is well worth its price tag.

A cheaper wannabe iPhone 6s Plus in every sense of the word "wannabe", the G8 has the same curves as the iPhone, similar speaker holes at the bottom, same screen size, and so on and so forth.

Huawei first showcased the phone in San Francisco earlier this week to a small gathering of four Australian technology journalists, which it crammed into a hired limo for the day to tour the city while showcasing the G8's abilities. A bit over the top? Very much so.

The idea of the joyride was to experience three of its new products coming to Australia later this month (the others being its 8-inch M2 tablet and Huawei Watch), using them in an environment where we could test all of their capabilities, including camera and audio.

At first I felt the company — which flew me out for the G8, as well as a separate Google event, where its Huawei 6P Nexus smartphone was unveiled — might be compensating for something with the limo. And to some extent it was – while the G8 seems to have the same (or similar) specs to the iPhone 6s Plus, it didn't perform as well, especially when taking photos and recording sound.

Photos

While the G8 has a 13-megapixel back-facing camera (the iPhone 6s Plus has a 12-megapixel camera), its performance when compared to the iPhone 6s Plus was subpar, proving once again that more megapixels doesn't necessarily mean a better camera.

As the slider of several comparison photos below reveals, the iPhone 6s Plus out-performed the G8 many times over.
The G8 did not handle lens flare well (when light scatters on a camera lens to produce unwanted image formations), images lacked detail, and the camera didn't deal too well with getting colours correct, making photos look washed out. Skies weren't as blue as they should be in photos, shrubbery not as green, and there seemed to be a lot of grainy noise in nighttime shots. In one test photo, tiles in a public meeting area seemed as though they had conjoined. I also found the shutter speed for the G8 was fairly slow, even during daylight, resulting in many photos of my feet when I lowered the phone after thinking I had finished taking a photo.

There are a number of features within the camera app I can see young girls liking, like the beauty mode, which adds fake eyelashes and blush to your face, but these appeared like a total gimmick, especially in lowlight when the eyelashes got pinned to the wrong area on your face. Kind of cool technology, and something Snapchat is exploring too, but not a big buying factor for me personally.

Battery

An area where the G8 did exceed, however, was with its battery life.

As some readers would know, every experience I've ever had with an iPhone has been pretty terrible when it comes to battery life. Numerous times I've been left lost in a city thanks to the iPhone, with the battery going flat while out.

I've had Apple's new iPhone 6s Plus for nearly a week now, and like others — such as Wall Street Journal technology columnist Joanna Stern — I have found it remains terrible when it comes to the battery lasting a full day.

"The 4.7-inch 6s will get you through the day, but you'll struggle to make it til bedtime with moderate to heavy use," Stern wrote in her review. "And it seemed to drain even faster than my 6 when I used the new processor-intensive camera features like Live Photos."

Added Stern: "The bigger 5.5-inch 6s Plus lasted longer and is the best choice if you're a heavy user and want some juice left over at the end of the day. (Of course, battery life on any smartphone generally degrades over time.)"

The battery capacity of the iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone 6s is 2750 mAh and 1715 mAh respectively. The G8? 3000 mAh.

Now this of course means little when most battery drain issues arise due to how a smartphone deploys power management and how resource-intensive its operating system (OS) and apps are. So while the G8 might have a larger battery capacity, it all comes down to how it's used and managed by the OS when looking at how quickly it will drain.

In my experience, the G8 out-performed the iPhone and I was able to make it to the end of the day while using it.

The iPhone? It got dangerously close to dying each day. While the iPhone didn't conk out completely, its battery percentage raced towards 0 per cent far quicker than the G8.

Audio

Now one thing phone reviewers often forget to test on a phone these day is the the phone bit (like actually calling someone).

Unfortunately there was no SIM card provided with the G8, but to test how its microphone performed I recorded some sound. I got an iPhone 6 out of my bag and the G8 and laid them side by side on a table to record my voice. The 6 out-performed the G8 hands down, as you can hear for yourself below in two clips I uploaded. There was a marked difference between the two recordings.

Fingerprint scanner

Now for the unique feature of the G8: its fingerprint scanner, which is on the back of the device unlike many other models of smartphones in the market today with fingerprint scanners, which have them on the front.

The scanner — which allows you to unlock your phone like many other smartphones' fingerprint scanners — also doubles as a way to accept calls, stop an alarm clock, take photos, and toggle Android's notification centre on and off by simply swiping up and down with your index finger on the fingerprint scanner's pad. I reckon these added features are pretty neat, and not as gimmicky as they sound.

Huawei says the scanner has an accuracy rate of 94 per cent, however I found this not to be the case in my experience, especially at night when it was cold and it took multiple goes to unlock the device. No technology is perfect, but the number of times I needed to re-scan my index finger seemed excessive, often resulting in me opting to use the PIN rather than the scanner.

Performance and disc space

As a mid-range phone, the G8 delivers pretty good performance for its price. Apps launch quickly, the camera wakes up quickly, and there's even an optimise app to close unwanted apps that might be chewing up power.

The storage space, however, left me wanting more. Despite being advertised as a 32GB phone, only about 23GB was available. This is because, among many things, the operating system and a number of pre-installed apps took up a bunch of space.

User interface and design

As for the design? It's a bit sharp on the edges but bearable. The Android skin it uses — Emotion UI — I'm not a big fan of. Another home screen style looks almost identical to a Windows Phone and is much simpler, so might be good for first-time phone users.

The screen didn't work that well in sunlight, but neither do many smartphones.

Mobile broadband

The G8 is a category 4 LTE device, meaning it can theoretically achieve download speeds of up to 150 megabits per second and upload speeds of 50 megabits per second. This might not look like much, however, especially when compared to Telstra's recently unveiled category 11 mobile hotspot device from Netgear, which can achieve speeds of up to 600 megabits per second. Apple's iPhone 6s phones are category 6, meaning they can theoretically achieve download speeds of up to 300 megabits per second and upload speeds of 50 megabits per second.

Should you get it?

If a good smartphone camera is your thing then this isn't the phone for you.

But if all you need is an entry-level smartphone that's half the price of most other flagship phones out here, then this is the phone for you. It's not a nasty Chinese phone. Yes, there are some compromises on quality, but for its price it's decent and worth it.