Huawei Mate 40 Pro Hands-On: It's Over 9000!!! By ben's gadget reviews

Hey everybody, I hope you guys are helping save. So this is the Huawei Mate 40 pro. This is almost without a doubt the most interesting and intriguing smartphone launch of the year. I say that because Huawei is launching this under ongoing major scrutiny from the US government and Huawei's consumer boss, Richard you even said that this might be the very last Huawei smartphone to run on Huawei's own Kieran chipset. That's because the US government has applied sanctions that effectively bans most of the world's chipmakers for making silicon for Huawei and that's unfortunate because Huawei's Kieran chipset has been, I would say, neck and neck of apple in terms of innovation for the past couple of years and Huawei might have climbed ahead, if not for the fact that the U. S.

government has kept attacking Huawei. Now I'm going to try to stay out of politics, but those of you who know me you know my stance on this, but the thing is even without all that political drama surrounding this phone, the mate 40 pro, will still be one of the more interesting smartphone releases of the year anyway, because for the past two or three years I would say ever since the mate 20 pro Huawei has proven that, with every smartphone flagship release, they've introduced a new camera breakthrough, whether it's a Rob sensor that can practically see in the dark or the first periscope zoom lens that could do 5x and 10x zoom better than any other phone on the market. Huawei's been proven to be an innovator in camera hardware, and this year's mate 40 pro seems like it's going in that same direction. I've only been testing this phone for a little more than a day, so this is not a review at all. On top of that, for some reason, Huawei has not been able to share a spec sheet with me, so the list of specs that I run off later, I'm pretty sure they're like 95 accurate, but there may be some inaccuracies.

I will fix that later after the launch event, because at the time I'm filming this, the launch event has not happened anyway. Let's get on to the phone, so we'll look at the hardware first, so the Huawei Mate 40 pro. I would say this look. I would call this look like an evolution of an established design. That's because ever since the Huawei Mate 20 pro Huawei has had a very distinct design language.

With the mate series, it's always had a centrally located camera module and a screen that curves on the left and right side and real 3d facing log, which is a rarity in the android space. Now this year's back continues with that circular ring camera module that was established with last year's mate 30 pro, and I like it a lot so Huawei calls this the space spring design, and it houses four cameras. So up here you have a 12 megapixel periscope zoom lens, so it's not quite as powerful as the periscope zoom and seen in the Huawei p40 pro plus. I would say this is a bottom part, with the zoom lens in the standard p40 pro, so you're still getting 5x losses, zoom and 10x zoom, that's probably cleaner than what most other phones can be so check out the sample right here I took this 10x zoom in a moving taxi and just look at how much cleaner the Huawei Mate, 40, pro's 10x shot, is compared to the iPhone 12 Pro. It's crazy, it's night and day, okay.

So moving on, we have this lens here now. This is the lens that Huawei did not explain what this does. I'm guessing! This is a 3d TOF sensor, but it may be wrong, so I'm not sure about this one, but down here I know what these two cameras are so right here on the lower left. It's a 50, megapixel, f, 1.9, rap sensor. Basically, your same camera hardware using the Huawei p40 pro.

So that means it's probably arguably the best single main camera in the market. Right now, it's going to be the best in class in low light. It's going to have excellent dynamic range superfast to focus, and finally, we have an ultra-wide angle here, which Huawei calls cine lens now. This is interesting because Huawei has done something different with ultra-wide angle: cameras. Ever since the mate 30 pro it was a 40 megapixel sensor in the mate 40 pro and the p40 pro, but this year, but this time with the May 40, it's been dropped to a 20 megapixel lens.

So on paper going by spec sheet, it's technically an inferior sensor because it has fewer pixels. Now I haven't had a chance to ask why they made this change yet, but I'm pretty sure it's to help low light performance. Now this is still technically an 18 millimeter ultra-wide angle lens. So it's not as wide as the ultra-wide lenses you'll see from a Samsung apple phone, but to my eyes they look a little wider than what we've seen in the p40 pro and the mate 40 pro. I haven't had enough time to test it thoroughly yet because, like I said, I've only had this phone for about a day, but the ultra-wide angle, camera still looks.

Super sharp and low light performance is excellent, and it actually excels in low light. Naturally, it doesn't need to rely on night mode like what the iPhone 12 is doing now this backplate is made of glass, but there's a soft matte finish to it that really fights off fingerprint really well, and it's soft to the touch. I really like its look all right. Let's move to the front, so you have a 6.67 inch OLED panel with a resolution of 2772x1344. It is still a waterfall display, just like the mate 30 pro meaning the screen curves on the left and right side drastically at an 88-degree angle.

Now some of you guys are going to complain, but trust me try this phone before you complain because Huawei has done a really great job, fixing uh accidental palm touches, meaning there's virtually none. You see right now. My palm is completely rubbing against the side of the phone, but I can still open apps completely fine. You cannot do this with many others curved screen. Phones like on the Samsung Galaxy.

If your palm is rubbing the side of the screen, you might not be able to register touches elsewhere. So don't complain until you tried it now. You see the selfie camera cut out, it's a little wider than usual, but that's because it houses a real 3d depth. Sensing face unlock system just like on the iPhone. So in the android space, almost all your face unlock it's a 2d version.

That's not that secure! You might be able to trick it with just a photo on your face. This is a real 3d face, unlock almost on par. What apple is doing. To be honest, I think it's amazing that Huawei's able to fit a whole 3d facial scanning system into a cutout. That's so much smaller than the iPhone notch.

Now we know this 3d face scanning system is legit because a new feature that Huawei has developed this year. It's an always-on display, that's technically, not always on meaning. The always-on display will only turn on when you look at the phone. So when you have the phone flat on a desk, and you're not looking at it, the screen is black, but when you move your head towards the phone a little the screen lights up and now let me tell you man: it's been working like magic, I'm kind of amazed by how well it works. Okay, I got sidetracked a little back to the screen, so this is a 90 hertz panel and animation is really smooth.

I mean, I guess you can nitpick and argue that the 120hz panel in an OnePlus 8t it's technically a little faster. You see animations, zip around a little faster, but to my eyes this is still very buttery smooth. Now one interesting to note last year's mate 30 pro. While I took away the volume rocker because the screen curved around so much has brought it back this year, the volume mark is right here on top of this red power button. But despite that, you still have this same software trick to adjust volume by double tapping on the screen.

Now another major improvement that Huawei has made with this flagship. Although this one is long overdue, is the main 40 pro has stereo speakers. So you have a speaker grille down here and at the top. So the fact that the speaker grill is up here instead of just coming off from this tiny sliver means you're getting equally loud, sound outputs from both sides for a true stereo experience: okay, so inside the phone, it's 8 gigs of ram or 256 gigs of UFS 3.1, internal storage and the soc in here it's the Karin 9000. So this is the newest chip from Kieran, which is Huawei's own in-house company, and it's a 5 nanometer chipset.

So in soc and silicon technology, the smaller the nanometer the better because the nanometer refers to transistors. So to think of it like little brain cells that all make up a part of the brain, so the smaller the transistors, the more of them you can pack into a tiny little chip, so koala is either the first or second company in the world right now to put out a five nanometer silicon chip, the other being apple, apple's a14, is also five nanometers. So that means these are way more powerful than the snapdragon 865, because that still runs on seven nanometers. Now, because this phone is running pre-production software, many of the benchmark apps that I usually use like geek bench and PC bench they're not able to install on this phone. So I can't give you numbers for those areas yet, but surprisingly, 3d mark was able to install, and I ran a 3dmark Vulcan test, and it completely wiped the floor of the snapdragon 865 in the Samsung Galaxy as short DFV, as you can see by these screenshots right here, all right.

Let's look at the camera, so we're now wearing the main camera viewfinder app. It's a very similar experience as the Huawei p40 pro. So if you've seen that phone, this will look very familiar so photo at one. Next photo you're getting excellent dynamic range, as you can already see here, and the camera will adjust dynamic range in real time. You see I'm bringing up to an overcast day, and it immediately changes the sky to a blue color.

Here, I'm going to shoot directly into the sun, which is a really tough shot. You see, my camera is struggling too, but I'm going to do it with the mate 40 pro, and I can see that dynamic range is excellent. Its insane look at all the details in the clouds the sky is blue, and then the greens down below are also properly exposed. Then you go to the ultra-wide angle, camera. So you see it's still not as wide as you get from many other phones, but dynamic range is excellent and ultra-wide angle, cameras typically struggles with dynamic range and also in dim light setting, as you can see here from these samples even at night, this ultra-wide angle, camera excels, and again I'm not using night mode or any trickery.

It's just point and shoot, and now let's check out the zoom, so we have 5x right here and now, let's go 10x. You see how sharp this is at 10x, and now we'll go all the way up to 50x. So I can get the license plate of this car. That's all the way out there and as usual, if you go all the way up to 50x, then yeah shots are a little blurry. But really, if you lower it down to even say 25, then the shots become very clean.

Like very usable. This is a 25 extra zoom check out how fast autofocus is right. Now, the know the flowers moving very fast, I'm just going to take a couple of shots, and then you see the flower came out perfectly sharp in both shots. Okay, now switching to the selfie camera. So what's interesting, the selfie camera this year is there's actually three focal lengths.

So by default it stays at this point 0.8 x, focal length, which is a little wider than a 1x. So this is good for taking selfies. If you have a second person in you- or you want to show someone your background, but you can also go wider if you like, and this field of vision is 100 degrees. So now you get a lot more into the frame, and you can take selfies with like a group of three or four friends. I'm sure there are a lot more camera features I haven't even touched on yet because, like I said, I've only had this phone for 24 hours and I haven't seen the launch event yet, so I don't know all the newest stuff, that's in this phone, but as for right now, I can show you some of these photo samples, I've taken during the last 24 hours, and I think you can agree that these photos look really damn good.

Now, video performance is excellent, I'm tempted to say this might be the second-best performer in video behind the iPhone 12 Pro right now. Just look at stabilization, dynamic range is on point, and I really like that. You can vlog with this phone now, because the selfie camera can go relatively wide all right. Now, it's for battery life. I've only been using the phone for a day, but from that first day battery life seems to be perfect like I was shooting heavily yesterday and at the end of the day I still have like 60 battery life.

Now I'm going to test this phone a little more, but, as you probably already know, this phone software does not come with Google's core mobile services installed, and you probably cannot side load them easily. You probably have to do a hack before you can get any google stuff on there. Now it's easy for a US reviewer to just say: oh, that makes a phone usable to write it off because I've already said in multiple videos. That's not necessarily true. Now it's never going to be ideal for me that I can't run YouTube on this, but I don't think the phone is unusable.

Let me explain all the apps that most of us use day-to-day really heavily like Instagram Twitter, Facebook, all that still work on the Huawei Mate 4 pro and on quality devices in general. Now, as for Gmail, so the Gmail app cannot run in here, but you can actually load Gmail onto Microsoft Outlook. I have Gmail running here perfectly fine, I'm getting push notifications on my new emails. Just fine Google Maps actually still runs on here. As you can see, Google Maps is running.

I can get turned by turn navigation in here, too, Google Chrome still works, so you can log into Google Chrome via your Google account and still have access to all your Google data right there. Now some services just will not work. Like Google Drive, you can't upload anything to google drive, no matter what you do with this phone. So that's going to be a bummer, but there is alternative like Microsoft, OneDrive or Dropbox, or you know, 15 other cloud services on the phone Huawei has its own cloud services too. So, ultimately, unless you're heavily reliant on Google Drive Google Docs and Google Pay, you should be able to use this phone um without major issues.

Like I said, it's not going to be ideal like you're, always going to wish. You can watch YouTube on this natively, but it's not a dealbreaker for me, and you can still watch YouTube on the web browser. So I'm going to try to make this phone, and you can still watch YouTube on the web browser. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my sim card in this phone as soon as I'm done testing the iPhone 12 Pro. I'm going to make this my daily driver, so in about a week or maybe 10 days, I'll be back with full review, but so far my early impressions is that this is yet another hardware beast by Huawei, with arguably the best camera system in android and potentially all smartphones like.

I said, though, it's still early days, so, if you're interested in learning more about the May 40 pro please subscribe to my channel or follow me on Instagram, I'm going to have a lot more content coming up. If there's anything about this phone that you want to know, I haven't addressed, leave a comment below or come at me on Twitter. I try my best to respond to everybody that at me, even the ones that are talking trash man. I respond to all of you guys, so that's it for now, thanks for watching.

Source : ben's gadget reviews