A full week ago we saw Huawei start to tease EMUI 5.1 on their official Weibo account. They didn't give many details about the update other than telling us it would be launched with the Huawei P10 and the Huawei P10 Plus.
Though now, the Huawei P10 and it's larger counterpart are both official and you can find our coverage of the MWC 2017 launch right here. Furthermore, EMUI 5.1 is officially debuting on both of these devices and since then we've learned about some of the new changes that are going into the update. We can see there are two big changes that directly impact performance, there's a new navigation key feature, and then there are some changes happening to their first-party stock applications.
First off, we have a new feature in EMUI 5.1 that Huawei is calling Ultra Memory. This is a newly developed algorithm that will focus on recycling the RAM the system feels should be used right now. Much like what Android already does, it learns application habits and should keep your most used applications in memory more often than not. It's unclear exactly how this algorithm works or what it is based off of, but it's not likely that Huawei will share specific details of this seemingly proprietary algorithm.
Then there's a new feature called Ultra Response which is said to allow for faster touch response thanks to a new driver. Not only should the new driver improve touch latency, but it also adds support for predictive finger tracking. In our view, this sounds similar to what Android 7.1 is offering, but it isn't yet clear if EMUI 5.1 builds will ship with Android 7.1 on all Huawei/Honor devices so we can't say for sure that these two are related.
On the UX improvements, there's also now a way to use the hardware home key as a multi-functional navigation tool. With this feature, you can tap for Back, hold for Home, or swipe for Recent Tasks. Of course, this feature won't work on some of their devices like the Huawei Mate 9, given that it doesn't have a hardware home key.
Highlights is what Huawei is calling their new feature in their Gallery application. This feature will index your photos and sort them by places and people while you aren't using your phone. Huawei says they've also made some improvements to the stock Calendar application and have added some new sharing options. Finally, we have learned the default wallpaper of EMUI will match the phone's color SKU, a very subtle, yet personal change to the UI.