Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Huawei Mate 40 Pro review: The full hardware package”.
Huawei’S mate 40 pro is out to compete with the best of the best from samsung oppo and apple. At 1099. Pounds can huawei’s latest flagship, prove itself in the premium flagship market. Let’S find out the mate 40 pro looks and feels very much like a hybrid between the p40 pro and the mate 30 pro. It’S got a big punch hole in the top left of the screen, rounded glass on both sides and a big, unique ring shaped camera housing on the back.
I’M personally glad that huawei took this approach, because there are so many smartphones out there that use the same cookie cutter design with the same domino shaped camera housing on the back and having something unique on the back might not be to everyone’s taste. But it is going to help the phone stand out against the rest. It’S not all for looks either the mate 40 pro is ip68 rated has crisp haptics and sports solid physical buttons. This time around. Thank you. Huawei last year’s software volume up and down wasn’t very good. It was quite gimmicky actually, so i’m glad they went back to a traditional way of doing things this year. The only thing to really complain about in the build quality department is the ergonomic setup.
The frosted glass is pretty slippery and the curved rear glass was pretty definitely the easiest to hold on to, and that brings us on to the 6.76 inch flex oled display, which probably stands out as not really standing out compared to the rest of the specs. It’S not quite quad hd plus, but the resolution is pretty much there at 2772 by 1344 and it’s only 90 hertz instead of the 120 hertz that we’re used to seeing in smartphones at this price point in 2020.. That said, it does have a touch sensing rate of 240 hertz which helps it in being really responsive, and from my time with it, it’s been bright, relatively color, accurate and plenty sharp and in our testing it got 476 knits sustained peak brightness. So it’s not topping any charts by any means, but it’s definitely more than viewable outdoors in direct sunlight.
I personally set the device to what we call the ultra mode or the 90 hertz, always on setting just to give me the best and the most fluid experience possible. Even then, i was getting tremendous battery life out of the 4 400 milliamp hour cell, which is slightly smaller than last year’s 500 milliamp power cell on the quieter days and the days where i’m sat at my computer all the time i was easily getting two days Of battery life and for the more strenuous ones where maybe we’re running product testing, maybe we’re playing a few games. Things like that that brought it to around a day a day and a half, so power users can expect great battery life. Out of this thing, and not so power users can expect tremendous battery life when you consider as well that there’s super fast 66 watt charging and 50 watt wireless charging. That’S a great battery package, only really being bested by the xiaomi mi 10 ultra’s 120 watt charging. The battery life does seem to have been helped by using huawei’s own silicon. The kirin 9000 is the first five nanometer chipset with an integrated 5g modem, and whilst i wasn’t lucky enough to try out the 5g capabilities, the power and efficiency of the chipset were mighty. Impressive, comparing geekbench 4 scores to devices with the kirin 990, the snapdragon 865 and the 865 plus the mate 40 pro shines in cpu performance, though it does fall a little to the snapdragon counterparts in gpu performance, and for this we use the 3d mark in real World usage, the mate 40 pro doesn’t disappoint either.
I played a handful of games and found them to run just fine with very few stutters, despite the drop in benchmark points compared to the competition. All skus come with 8 gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of storage, which is definitely enough. Given the price point. Mui 11, based on android 10, is unfortunately just outdated out of the box. It doesn’t seem to be all that different from emui 10, but there are a few changes. Firstly and most obviously the new always-on display options. There are new graphics, new layouts and new colors. Additionally, you can use floating menus as a multitasking tool. Other than that, though, there’s really not too big of a change on the surface. Of course, the mate 40 pro doesn’t come with google services, and i’m not going to go on about this. You guys know the story. They don’t come with.
Google services they’re no official way of putting google services on the huawei devices. However, instead of using huawei’s app gallery, i’ve been using huawei’s petal search to get the bulk of my apps on this device. Now it’s not as intuitive as saying all in one store. However, what you do is you search for the app you want and petal search will curate a bunch of links and and different abk sites to give you the best option from there.
You click the open and download it automatically gives you the download starts downloading you. Just click install and you’re done, it’s pretty seamless and it works pretty. Well, however, it’s not foolproof, and there are a lot of apps out there, especially third-party ones that you wouldn’t expect to use the google services. But i actually do one of those is need for speed, no limits that i tried to install and it installed just fine, but when running it, it would refuse to run because there weren’t any google play services.
However, if you don’t really care too much about google play services, you’re, not too fussed about it. App gallery and puzzle search have come a long way in the past six months and i feel like they are on track to do quite well in the future. I mentioned that this thing is the complete package. Here’S where huawei devices of the past have really shown the cameras.
The setup is pretty similar to the p40 pro from earlier this year, but huawei has have the ultrawide camera resolution to 20 megapixels and upped both the resolution and focal length of the optical zoom lens. It’S now a 12 megapixel five times periscope unit, similar to the one found in the p40 pro the selfie camera has dropped to a 13 megapixel affair and slow motion has been halved in frame rate 2 to 3 840 fps at 720p. What does this mean in the real world? Well that just like the p40 pro the mate 40 pro is a fantastic camera system. Its processing might not be for everyone, as huawei phones do tend to lean towards heavier contrast and almost moody looking photos.
However, despite this there’s plenty of dynamic range plenty of color and crisp sharpness, this goes for all three of the mate 40 pro’s rear cameras at night. This camera system can just see in the dark thanks to its use of huge sensors. There is definitely a quality discrepancy between all three cameras on the back in night mode, as is the case with the majority of smartphone camera setups. However, the ultrawide is pretty good when things get dark.
The main trouble i had was actually holding the phone steady enough to take the photos sometimes, but when i did get that right, the photos came out surprisingly crisp huawei’s portrait and aperture mode still give you heaps of options for different blur effects and lens aperture emulations Edge detection isn’t always the best, but when you give it plenty of light, it does pretty well, i wouldn’t depend on the portrait mode like you might be able to with a pixel device, but it does give you some fantastic images when, in the best conditions, the Mate 40 pro selfies are sharp, vibrant and detailed, and now there are night mode selfies which provide extra dynamic range and clarity. Since the selfie shooter is an ultra wide sensor that crops in for a more traditional field of view, normally huawei allows you to take selfies in crazy, wide modes as well, and because it’s the same camera, you actually get the same quality. The mate 40 pro’s 4k. 60Fps video is pretty good, its stabilization is solid.
There is a large field of view and it performs well in low light situations, however, whipping the camera around to the selfie video. Does this weird beauty smoothing even with the setting off and that’s super strange because we didn’t have this problem with selfie photos, so why should this apply to selfie video? Who knows, but it’s an issue and it needs to be fixed. The 3804 fps slow motion is half the frame rate of the previous device in slow motion. This is 720p footage.
So it’s not going to look the sharpest. However, it does get very slow compared to competition’s 960 fps average. I don’t think it matters all that much because it’s something that you’ll probably use rather rarely compared to the main video modes, but it’s worth mentioning that it’s been cut in half conclusion time, then at 1099 pounds the huawei mate 40 pro is up there with the Big boys as a high-end premium flagship smartphone compared to the find x2 pro and galaxy note 20 ultra. This thing holds its own sure.
It doesn’t have google services and that will limit its buyers largely in the west, not so much in china. But if you’re fine with that, the mate 40 pro is the full package. Okay, guys that just about covers our review for the mate 40 pro. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments and you’re down there.
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