Huawei launches the 2019 P Smart, with teardrop notch and AI features

Huawei’s original P Smart was a surprising hit, offering an excellent blend of features and performance, with affordable pricing.

Now the company is hoping to repeat the success with the announcement of the updated P Smart for 2019.

The original P Smart introduced the taller display that was becoming the norm at the end of 2017, complete with reduced bezels top and bottom, but the 2019 update now has a 6.21-inch, 19.5:9 ratio display (with 2340×1080 pixels – 415PPI), and a teardrop notch (which Huawei refers to as Huawei Dewdrop Display) to eliminate the top bezel completely, while the bottom ‘chin’ has also been reduced to the bare minimum.

The phone retains a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor to aid that chin reduction, as it’s a little too soon to expect in-screen fingerprint sensor technology to make it into a budget offering (but it will eventually, I have no doubt).

Like many other handsets from Huawei and Honor released at the tail end of 2018, the new P Smart comes with the new 14nm process Kirin 710 chipset, a powerful SoC that offers a great combination of performance and power management.

There’s also 3GB of RAM and 64GB storage, with a new file system (EROFS; Extendable Read-Only File System) that boasts greater disk performance and speed, as well as file compression.

During my time testing the Huawei Mate 20 Lite, I was stunned at how good the battery life was. While the battery is slightly smaller on the P Smart (3,400mAh instead of 3,750mAh), Huawei still claims the phone should easily last a full day, including ten hours of 4G Internet browsing or up to 18 hours of continuous video playback.

For music the specs get even better still, with Huawei claiming the new phone can run for 96 hours continuously playing music.

There’s still a heap of power management options as with any Huawei phone, along with performance modes to boost graphical performance (GPU Turbo 2.0) if you’re willing to give up a little bit of standby time. The phone also comes with Android Pie and Emotion UI (EMUI) 9.0.

Camera update

The P Smart (2019) camera has been given the obligatory AI updates, allowing for photo parameters to be optimised for over 500 recognisable scenes.

The camera itself consists of a 13-megapixel, f/1.8, main camera and a secondary 2-megapixel secondary camera for depth measurement. On the front is a 8-megapixel camera.

Modes like the awesome AI Image Stabilisation (AIS) night mode, which allows long exposures without a tripod (as first launched on the flagship Huawei P20 Pro), also feature – along with other fun features like adjustable portrait mode effects and selfie backgrounds for the front camera.

On sale soon

Retailers selling the phone from 10th January 2019 will include: A1, Amazon, AO.com, Argos, Carphone Warehouse, Clove, EE (11th January), Fonehouse, JLP, Jersey Telecom, SDG, Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone. O2 and Three will sell the phone from mid-January.

The P Smart (2019) will come in three colour options; midnight black, aurora blue and turquoise blue, each with a ceramic-like finish on the back.

• Pricing is still to be announced and will be updated as soon as known.