It's been a month now since Huawei launched its new smartphone flagship, the P8. Huawei started Ascend P-line of smartphones back in 2012 with the launch of the Ascend P1, and has since iterated every year with the follow up P6, P7, and this year's P8. A notable deviation from the standard naming scheme is that Huawei chose to drop the Ascend brand and this year's official name is simply the ?Huawei P8?. The P-series targets the higher-end market through more robust and premium build quality, while the separate Honor brand is targeted at mainly the Chinese and other budget markets. The Mate family covers the phablet form-factor, although Huawei now also offers a super-sized P8max with 6.8? screen that kind of blurs the size segmentation.

In trying to broaden our coverage of emerging players in the mobile space, we had the pleasure of extensively covering two of Huawei's devices over the last year ? the Honor 6 and the Mate 7, so be sure to read those articles to have a good overview of Huawei's previous efforts in terms of Emotion UI software implementations and specifics of the HiSilicon Kirin SoCs.