China's best phone yet: Huawei P8 5.2-inch money-saving Android smartie

Sleepless in South Korea

iPhone impersonator

What I did wonder about was the wisdom of the devotion to incorporating Apple designs. For example, app folders exactly mimic Apple’s in iOS 8 – it’s a paginated popup – but with room for only nine icons at any time. For more than nine, you need to swipe again. Most of the screen is not being used, so that’s a completely unnecessary homage.

Navigation options – TouchPlus is an additional feature that's not out yet

Another iOS-inspired feature is the ability to reach the top of the screen quickly. In theory, anyway. If you swipe left on the (soft) navigation bar, the entire image is reduced by about two thirds, and you carry on interacting with the miniaturised version. Unfortunately, I found that it was still too large, so I still couldn’t reach the top.

Further iOS-inspired larceny is evident in the Camera app, a straight rip of iOS 8’s Camera UI. And perhaps most blatant of all, Huawei has a home screen search that looks and works exactly like iOS’s Spotlight – the gesture is the same, and even the background blurring is identical. No complaints from me for such a useful feature, mind.

The EmotionUI skin has a powerful theming engine, but unfortunately I was left with the stock bundle of themes, as the Themes store still hasn’t been launched for European punters. And it wouldn’t recognise any other fonts than Huawei’s own – yet.

I do appreciate the extras that come with phones from Chinese manufacturers. The domestic market is something of a Wild West, so punters there demand far more privacy and security features than you find on a standard Western model, to guard them against nasty surprises.

Camera app looks familiar

Out of the box on the P8 you get call blocking, a permissions manager, and partitioning for apps and content (you can set a second guest password that blocks people from specific applications or photo albums). The harassment filter supports both blacklists and whitelists. There’s also a per-app power management option. You get a running readout of memory used. Some of these are platform-level features in Android Lollipop or M, but they’ve been in Huawei’s for ages.

I found last year’s P7 marred by over-intrusive nagging. It was forever “inviting” me to close something down, or warning me that it was running efficiently and hogging memory. Hey, it’s Android. It’s Java. I know. But Huawei has listened I didn’t get that here.

The only major niggle was the Huawei keyboard that's intended for global use but rather fiddly. It's easily replaced, though. More minor niggles included include a cumbersome “Add widget” process – it gives you only a poky horizontally scrolling window with only room for four widgets at a time.

And I’m not a fan of dual-purpose pull downs – here, as with Sony, divided into Notifications and Settings. Overall, though, it’s an excellent experience. There are fewer nags here than the persistent invitation to enter Split Screen mode on the Samsung Galaxy.

Storage remainder, but there's a microSD option too and additional gesture controls

Huawei integrates the Dialer and Messaging apps into one. It offers a few gestures of its own, one of which (a circle drawn with your knuckle, really) takes a screenshot. In the initial firmware it was a little oversensitive, in later firmware, less sensitive but less co-operative.