Huawei P Smart (FIG-LX1) Review

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The Huawei P Smart (FIG-LX1) launched globally in 2018 as an attempt to bring a premium look down into the mid-range. Its headline feature is an 18:9 display at a low price: when it arrived it sold for around $179 on Amazon. It carries dual rear cameras, a design borrowed from Huawei’s flagships, and the compromises you would expect at this price.

Design

From the back it has a clean, rounded design; from the front, its narrow frames and 18:9 ratio give it a more current, flagship-style look. It is cut from a single sheet of aluminium with antenna lines across the rear, and the front is covered by a single piece of glass. A fingerprint scanner sits on the back, placed within easy reach.

Along the bottom edge there is a microUSB 2.0 charging port rather than USB-C, alongside a 3.5 mm headphone jack. There are no stereo speakers, only a single speaker grille on the bottom. The phone is not waterproof, so it needs to be kept away from water.

In the hand it feels compact and stable. It shares a fair amount of its design with the Honor 7X and the Mate 10 Lite; in practice it reads like a reworked Mate 10 Lite. Because of its smaller screen diagonal, it is 6 mm shorter than the Lite while being almost as wide, and it stays thin at 7.5 mm. At 143 g it is also lighter than the Lite.

Screen

The display measures 5.65 inches with an 18:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1080×2160 pixels, giving a pixel density of 427 ppi. It uses an IPS LCD panel and covers about 76.1% of the front as screen-to-body ratio. Colour, contrast, brightness and sharpness all hold up well, with colours that lean towards natural levels. The colour temperature is adjustable, so the display can be warmed or cooled to preference.

Battery life

The 3000 mAh battery generally lasts a full day before needing a recharge for the next. In everyday use, a mix of about an hour of music, web browsing, email and heavy WhatsApp use will get through the day on a single charge. Gaming and camera use draw it down faster and will require a mid-day recharge. In a standard 90-minute HD video recording test the P Smart lost 22% of its charge.

Camera

The rear pairs a 13 MP main sensor with a 2 MP depth sensor using a dual-lens setup. Together they allow wider-angle shots and a depth-of-field effect that can blur the background or foreground for a more deliberate look. Focus can be adjusted after the shot using the Bokeh effect, applied with a single tap in the camera interface. The interface itself is straightforward: swiping left reaches the camera modes, including a professional mode, while swiping right opens the general settings.

Daylight photos look good on the phone’s own screen, though they lose some of that quality when viewed on a computer monitor. Night shots are the weak point: the shutter slows noticeably in low light, which makes it hard to capture detail in dark scenes. There is a single LED flash on the back. On the front, an 8 MP camera handles selfies and can record 1080p video at 30 FPS.

Software

The P Smart shipped with Android 8.0 under Huawei’s EMUI 8.0 interface. EMUI draws on iOS-style ideas, which streamlines parts of the stock Android layout; the camera interface is one of the clearer examples of that approach. The menus and navigation can be customised, and the quick settings are reachable by swiping down the notification shade before unlocking the device.

Performance

Inside sits a HiSilicon Kirin 659 chipset, a mid-range part comparable to the Snapdragon 625 and 630. It uses eight Cortex-A53 cores: four running at 2.36 GHz and four at 1.7 GHz. In Geekbench 4 the P Smart scored 3734 in the multi-core test, in line with mid-range chips of the period. Scrolling through the interface stays fluid in everyday use.

The phone comes with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage, which can be expanded by up to 256 GB with a microSD card.

Who is it for?

The P Smart makes sense for users who want a modern, large-screen 18:9 phone without paying flagship money. It trades away some things for that price: microUSB instead of USB-C, no stereo speakers, no water resistance, weaker night photography, and modest battery endurance in video recording. Within those limits it does a solid, practical job, and at its launch price it was an easy way into the 18:9 form factor.