Huawei Mate 40 Pro Hands-On Review: How Does This Flagship 5G Smartphone Hold Up? By PhotoBite UK

Oh, hey, I'm rob welcome back to photobite. Now the mate 40 pro by Huawei has been out for a few months now. Uh, let's see what it's all about, shall we first impressions are very, very good with this phone, the overall feel and build quality in the whole thing is super, super premium, nice weight. It's very slim. It's got a huge display with very prominent curves, which actually is very nice for the grip, as it doesn't dig too much in your hand. You can feel it and get a good handle on it.

It's curved so much so that the lock and volume buttons had to be pushed back to accommodate for it uh, but they're, still just as easy to reach, but overall, a small price to pay for such a stunning looking phone, the display is just shy of 2k. It's an OLED panel obviously looks great, and it bought HDR, it's 90 hertz, which is always really nice to see. Furthermore, it really makes a phone feel really nice and snappy just feels so much nicer to scroll through a feed and displaying so quickly is really nice on the back. They have what Huawei calls the space ring, which is the camera module on this phone right in the center of the device very big, very eye-catching. Definitely one of the better looking camera bumps I've seen, and this center position is quite nice because it means it doesn't rock too much when it's on a flat surface.

Also, on the back as you can see, they went for this gorgeous rainbow frosted glass finish, which is super nice to the touch and feels really nice in the hand. Now for the specs, it's got um their Karin 9000 soc chip inside it, and it's screaming fast and supposedly very power efficient, not that that would matter because this phone allows for 66 watt fast charging, which is incredibly quick. You can go from zero to 100 in about 40 minutes, and you can get most of the way there in like 20. , along with that. It also has 50 watt wireless charging, which is faster than a lot of phones, can charge just out of a plug, socket.

Obviously, you're going to need a very specific wireless charger for that, probably one Huawei sells, but it's crazy fast, especially for wireless charging other than that it's got a 4400 William hour battery inside it, which is pretty standard for a flagship phone. It's got a fingerprint scanner underneath the screen. Uh feels nice and quick, there's also facial recognition as well. If you prefer to use that ip68, waterproof and rustproofing, which is always great to see, and finally, it has some of the best speakers. I've ever heard in a smartphone due to it, having both full-size drivers in the bottom and the top.

So it gives you full stereo sound, and they get very loud with very little to no no distortion at the top end, and they sound really great. This is one of the best speaker sets I've ever heard in a smartphone now onto one of the biggest selling points, the camera, or should I say, cameras, it's got the Lacey branding but yeah. There's four on the back and two on the front. The main camera is a 50 megapixel sensor, f, 1.9, and they call it their ultravision camera paired with that is a 20. Megapixel is what they call cine camera, but it's actually just an ultra-wide 12 megapixel telephoto.

The two front: cameras in this pillbox notch at the top uh, is a 13, megapixel, selfie camera and a depth sensor as well, which will probably be used for facial recognition. Mainly now the camera outperforms most phones on the market in almost every single way. Also, Lacey have added their own like color modes, you can add to it, so you can get that Lacey style. Look on all your pictures! If you like that kind of thing, add their filters to everything. The uh, the camera app itself is actually really, really good.

Surprisingly loads of different settings and apps and stuff you can do with it, such as a long exposure, light painting modes, HDR, full high-res 50, megapixel imagery and lots of pro controls to customize it in every single way, and the video department is still pretty good as well. It does uh 4k up to 60fps. Overall, it's a very, very stunning, looking camera one of the best on the market right now, it's right up there with the Samsung and the apples in the industry. Now it's running the emu 11 on top of android 10. It's got some nice uh features inside it, like uh, being able to hold on the side and being able to bring up a quick menu.

The Huawei app gallery and their services overall have definitely come a long way from when the event happened, where, where google services no longer come on these devices, some of the apps that you're missing from Google Huawei have made their own ones their own calendar email contacts notepad that kind of thing, and if you have a Huawei, laptop or another Huawei device, it connects pretty seamlessly throughout similar to like apple's airdrop. You can do Huawei share and all those devices. It's still far from perfect, though there is a lot of apps there that weren't there originally like you can get the normal Amazon shopping, app, Snapchat and zoom, and I think Microsoft Office is also there. It's still a far cry from Google's play store and their services overall. They try and combat this a little like if you search for a Google app like YouTube.

For example, it will add a shortcut to the web browser version of it. The web app version of it onto the background um, which isn't ideal, but I guess it's better than nothing. So at least you can access YouTube and Gmail and stuff, but there are way more than just google made apps that require google services like, for example, you can't get any adobe apps, no Spotify discord, Microsoft Teams, Disney plus Netflix, there's just so many apps that are out of arm's reach, which makes it very hard to switch to. If you need to use any apps that require google services, you can get a few more apps if you go the extra mile, and you find another store, such as Amazon's app store. If you install that on device that at least allows you to access some of those apps, you are missing, such as Facebook and Instagram.

It's also another downside for how powerful this device is, but you can't install most of the big games around nowadays. I managed to get PUBG, but the call of duty games, which is what I used to benchmark a lot of this stuff and other big titles, are non-existent on this device app store or any other app store that I can see. Also, the caveat of using the Amazon app store is some of those apps are optimized for kindle devices, not really android phones, so some may display slightly different slightly larger as if it was for a tablet, but at least you have the functionality there in the first place, but it is quite a shame because almost everything about this phone is so perfect, and then it's just the lack of google services makes it so hard to recommend so, as I said way better than it used to be, but still missing, some core apps overall, the mate 40 pro is definitely one of the most premium devices out there. Everything about the hardware is so well tuned, so thought out the display, the camera, the performance. The speakers are all excellent, but whenever you talk about a Huawei device at the moment uh this there's always this broken record effect.

Everyone always talks about the Google services, but the reason we do is that uh it is an inherent problem with these devices at the moment now, Huawei are definitely making big strides in making their own ecosystem of apps and services better and hopefully in the future, as good as google play or Apple's app store. But at the moment it's still not quite there. If all you need is an amazing shooter in the phone that you can call and text and do basic stuff on, and you don't need the Google services. This is an excellent buy, but if you need any of that Google stuff, it's such a shame, yeah I'll, be interested to know uh how many people would actually be interested in going for this phone, because it is a perfect phone and that would be willing to try and migrate away from Google's ecosystem. So let me know in the comments below.

Would you buy this phone? Would you attempt to try and drop google and free? Your life from their rain and try and be part of Huawei's services. Let me know in the comments below yeah. This has been photobite the mate 40 pro don't forget to like share and subscribe, and I'll see you next time, bye.

Source : PhotoBite UK