Report: Huawei P10's Memory Performance Varies Across Models

Huawei’s newly released P10 and P10 Plus flagships were recently put through Androbench 5.0, and the results seem to indicate that some units boast faster storage read and write speeds than others, possibly indicating that there are different types of memory being used. The Huawei P10 and P10 Plus come in versions with either 64GB or 128GB of storage, but the benchmarks shown seem to fall into three different groups based on where the speeds tend to hover, and users have yet to find a correlation. The benchmarks turned in thus far are all over the place in regards to the amount of storage and how they stack up speed-wise.

Users who dove a bit deeper concluded that the most likely scenario is that Huawei used UFS 2.1, UFS 2.0, and eMMC 5.1 storage chips for its latest flagship duo. Devices that bench read speeds over 700MB/s are thought to be using UFS 2.1. Devices hitting closer to the 500MB/s mark, meanwhile, seem to be using UFS 2.0. Finally, suspected eMMC 5.1 customers round things out with speeds around the 300MB/s, roughly half the average speed of the test groups as a whole. Some consumers already took online to express some disappointment about these fluctuations in storage speeds across units, especially in light of the fact that both the P10 and the P10 Plus are premium devices. Huawei has yet to release any sort of official statement on the matter.

Thanks to Huawei’s Kirin 960 processor and the 4GB/6GB of RAM that serve as the baseline for it’s new devices, it’s not hard to see storage speeds below the 500MB/s mark as a bottleneck. One of the phones’ main selling points is a dual camera system made with help from Leica, with a pair of 20-megapixel cameras on the back. This means that slow storage not only affects day to day operation but could possibly affect the photo and video experience, especially since the device is capable of shooting extremely large 4K videos. The addition of a MicroSD slot is no remedy to the situation; most of the fastest cards on the market can’t even manage to hit the 300MB/s speeds being seen by users of the low-end storage variants of Huawei’s new smartphones.