The P10 may just be my favourite phone that Huawei has ever made.

It's the design that really struck a chord for me, an all-metal body that mixes highly polished edges with an attractive micro-etched finish on the back. My review model came in a cool blue hue, which sets it apart from the black and grey phones that usually land on my desk.

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But the best part for me is the size. With a screen measuring 5.1 inches, the P10 is much smaller than most flagship phones. That makes it fit comfortably in my hand. It doesn't bulge out my jeans when it's in my pocket and you won't need experimental surgery to extend your thumb to text one-handed.

Camera

I love the camera, too. It has the same dual-lens setup that's on last year's P9, albeit with increased resolutions. One lens takes shots in colour and the other only shoots in black and white, with both delivering great performances. Colour shots are rich, vibrant and well exposed. I'm impressed with how quickly the phone focuses and at how well it balances very bright and very dark areas in a scene.

It's the black and white mode that I like the most, though. While you can simply apply black and white effects to any photo after you shoot it, the P10's dedicated monochrome sensor delivers beautiful results with gorgeous contrast without any extra tweaking. It's great fun to head into town with the monochrome mode enabled and see how the world looks in black and white.

And the 8-megapixel front-facing camera is more than sufficient to capture your most embarrassing grinning selfies.

Performance

Beyond the camera, the P10 has a decent 64GB of storage and an octa-core processor that easily handled the demanding tasks I threw at it. For example, photo editing in Snapseed was a breeze and it tackled graphically demanding games like Asphalt Xtreme without breaking a sweat.

The battery is extremely capable too, lasting an impressive 15 hours on our rundown tests. By comparison, the Google Pixel XL managed just under 14 hours on the same test, while the OnePlus 3T almost got to 17. With reasonably careful use you'll get a day out of the P10 (keep your gaming and video streaming until you're near a plug), but you'll almost certainly want to give it a full charge overnight.