Huawei’s P10 has had a rocky launch with customers discovering that the company is using slower eMMC 5.1 memory chips in certain units. Additionally, the lack of an oleophobic coating on the display has been another bummer for many.
Now, the company’s CEO Richard Yu has addressed these issues in a post on Weibo. On the use of slower eMMC 5.1 chips inside some models of the P10, Yu says that the company had to take this decision due to a serious shortage of UFS 2.0/2.1 chips. As benchmarks show, the eMMC 5.1 NAND used in some P10 units is significantly slower than the UFS 2.0/2.1 NAND used on other units. This angered many customers as they thought Huawei was trying to cheat them. The CEO says that the company never advertised using UFS 2.1 memory on the P10, and that despite the slower benchmark scores, the slower NAND on some P10 units does not affect their performance due to the optimisations done by the company. As for the lack of an oleophobic coating, Yu says that the combination of Gorilla Glass 5 and oleophobic coating led to static electricity buildup that would interfere with the touch sensor of the device. This led Huawei to ship the initial batch of the P10 without any oleophobic coating. However, since then, the company has figured out a different technique of applying the oleophobic coating that does not lead to any issues. So, newer units of the P10 will now come with the oleophobic coating. For existing users, Yu recommends them to take their handset to their nearest service center to apply the coating, though this is only applicable for P10 owners in China. It’s unclear what P10 owners in Europe have to do to get the same oleophobic coating applied on the screen of their device.
