Storage speed in phones often isn't heavily promoted, even in flagship handsets, but it's something which can affect how fast a device feels. As Engadget's Richard Lai reports, some Chinese Huawei P10 owners noticed slower flash memory performance in their devices — speeds in line with the older eMMC 5.1 spec, not the newer UFS 2.0/2.1. Unlucky devices with eMMC 5.1 chips would score significantly lower in storage benchmarks. In one test, P10s with the slower memory managed less than half the throughput seen by models with faster chips.

Huawei CBG (Consumer Business Group) CEO Richard Yu reached out on social network Weibo to address the issue, while also commenting on our biggest gripe with the P10, its lack of oleophobic coating on the display.

On memory speeds, Yu blamed a "serious shortage" of faster UFS 2.0 and 2.1 chips in the supply chain, which apparently led to Huawei having to fall back on slower, but more readily available eMMC 5.1 memory in some units. Now, it's true that Huawei never included UFS on the P10's spec sheet. However, customers could be forgiven for assuming the P10's specs would line up with the Mate 9, a phone which shares the same Kirin 960 platform and was promoted as using speedy UFS 2.1 storage.

Yu insists that real-world performance isn't impacted by the use of slower memory in some P10s, saying "a good real-life performance and experience" is maintained thanks to Huawei's hardware and software optimizations.