Huawei P10 and P10 Plus: Incremental improvements but a few annoyances Another year, another Huawei flagship phone. This time it is the 5.1" P10 (€649) and the 5.5" P10 Plus (from €699), following a similar pattern to the 2016 P9 and P9 Plus. The key feature of the P9 phones was the company’s partnership with Leica to create a device interesting for photographers. The P9s had two 12MP lenses – …
Methinks this is probably a temporary 'toggle' feature allowing you to access the screen parts that one hand otherwise could not reach.
Likely the same thing that Apple does with a double-tap of the home button to bring the entire display down to the bottom of the phone, only with the whole screen still visible.
I have reasonably sized man hands but can't reach to the top right of my iPhone's without adjusting my grip.
Do I want a smaller phone because of this?
Nope.
I don't own any pants/jeans/shorts with pockets so small I can't get my 6S plus into them...
But I'm sure eventually we'll get a phone that folds in half. The problem is it will be 2x as thick, and probably it won't get a whole lot smaller I'll bet it gets used to allow unfolding to the size of a small tablet.
Why not have an array of lenses on the back covering, say, the top half of the phone back? You'd have to hold it at the bottom. With processing, you could then get a similar amount of photons as with a dSLR, but it would be nice and flat. Tiny lenses are incredibly cheap, this would only add a few £ to the phone overall and would make photography so much better.
I'm guessing because it's not that easy a task to usefully combine the output from an array of lenses into a single image. I have read papers on doing that (Googles for PiCam [PDF]), looks like a good read. Certainly looks possible, but no idea how close that kind of thing is to being a commercial option.
Lenses/sensors also take up a lot of space - that's why many phones have a bump where the camera is, or a section that's thicker to try to hide the fact they need more depth for the camera. If you have a big array you are going to lose battery.
I doubt the processing is that difficult, it will take more cycles but I should think it is linear with the number of lenses, not exponential. The question is whether it will deliver an improvement large enough that anyone would want it even if the cost, reduced battery life, increased processing and so on could be overcome.
Phones are already more than good enough for most people - we've all seen those "shot on iPhone" photos that are way better than anything 99% of us could take even with a $10,000 camera. All the technology in the world isn't going to make an average person rival a professional photographer. I think we've already passed the point of "good enough" for most of us.
I have an Honor 5X as a spare phone. It pretty good hardware for the money and some of the tweaks and tools Huawei include are useful but I grew to hate it.
Every Huawei app is different for the sake of being different, or more likely for the sake of trying to look like iOS and not android. Really annoying when you use other android devices as is the Huawei crap you can't remove. Wouldn't buy another.
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