Huawei P8 and its huge brother P8max know all sorts of photo tricks

Huawei launched a new flagship smartphone, the Huawei P8, in London Wednesday, and by the looks of it, it's a very solid competitor amongst high-end Android smartphones.

The Huawei P8 is a 5.2-inch, 1080p device, with an octa-core, 64-bit chipset, 3GB of RAM, dual-SIM LTE and a 2,680mAh battery.

The rear camera has a 13-megapixel sensor (paired with an 8-megapixel one on the front), and while that sounds like every other Android smartphone camera out there, Huawei puts a lot of emphasis on the phone's photo capabilities (see video below).

The Light Painting mode lets you capture light tracks in the dark; the Beauty enhancement mode makes sure you always look your best in photos; and the Director mode of video shooting lets you link 3 phones and get multi-angle video.

All of this is stuffed into a very slim, 6.4mm package (for comparison, the iPhone 6 is 6.9mm thin) and a somewhat generic but definitely elegant, simple design.

Aware that there are people who crave an even bigger phone, Huawei launched an enormous, 6.8-inch variant of the device called the P8max.

Besides the screen, whose size definitely crosses from phablet to pure tablet territory, the P8max has a 4,360mAh battery. The rest of the internals are very similar to the smaller P8, but there are some differences, notably the 5-megapixel camera on the front (instead of an 8-megapixel one).

Huawei P8max

IMAGE: HUAWEI

Incredibly, while much taller than the P8 (182.7mm vs 144.9mm) the P8max remains extremely thin — 6.8mm.

Both devices will be available in four colors (silver, gray, black, and gold) and two variants — standard and premium, with the premiums having more internal memory (64GB compared to 16GB). The phones are available now in more than 30 countries including China, Columbia, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, UAE and the UK. There's no word on when either device might become available in the U.S.

The standard version of the P8 will cost €499 (£360 or $531), while the premium will go for €599 (£430 or $637). In the case of P8max, the pricing is €549 (£393 or $583) for the standard and €649 (£465 or $690) for the premium version.

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