Huawei P40 Long-Term Review - P is for Photography By Tech Travel Geeks

Hi there I'm Matteo the chief mobile opinions here at the tech travel geeks, and this is the tech travel geeks review of the Huawei p40. If you haven't already, please do subscribe to the tech travel geeks here on YouTube. The Huawei p40 is Huawei's entry level device within the Huawei p40 series. It has a lot of the main features you see on the Huawei p40 pro and the Huawei p40 pro plus, plus having a more manageable size and some surprisingly good value for money in terms of what it offers for the price. The Huawei p40 is a glass sandwich and has a glass front as well as back with an aluminum frame. This is not a fully waterproof device, it is an ip53 rated for dust and splash resistant, so don't go swimming with this device.

If you do purchase one, as I said, the device is extremely manageable, but within the relatively small body there is a 6.1 inch OLED display that's a full high definition, plus display, which is really, really nice. To use. Not only is the device more manageable to hold, but the overall ergonomics are excellent. I really enjoy using this smartphone and in a way wish more smartphones nowadays had this handle ability. The Huawei p40 is powered by the same chipset in the Huawei p40 pro and its bigger brother, the Huawei p40 pro plus it's the new Huawei Karin 990 5g chipset, which has an outscore processor and a powerful GPU as well as a tricorn CPU.

That's a dedicated AI chip, which comes in handy throughout use of the device but is particularly noticeable in the camera features. The review device that Huawei provided us with has eight gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of storage. For most people. This will be way more than they'll ever need, and when we're talking about storage, this isn't limited to that. You can expand the storage in the Huawei p40 using NATO memory cards.

The tape travel geeks previously did a video on NATO memory cards which you can check out on our channel, but it's the standard of memory that has been used since the Huawei Mate 20 pro and Lukas, and I have been using NATO memory cards in our Huawei p30 pros. So it's a tried and tested memory card format which works well with Huawei devices having the Karin chipset is all great, but that's really closely integrated and paired with new mew Huawei's version of android, based on the android open source project, is a consistent overall experience with improvements over the basic android 10 version, there's slightly more refined, animations the battery life and drain has been consistently improved and there's even more ways to customize your experience. Now, let's focus on the camera. This is a Huawei p series device and whenever you see p, that usually stands for photography. The Huawei p40, just by the logos, looks like a snap and shoot camera.

The Huawei logo itself and the Lacey logos are placed horizontally because that's how you're expected to be seen using this smartphone horizontally in landscape as a camera. The cameras on this device are very, very good and definitely class beating in this price range of smartphones. If you were to buy an equivalent Samsung or Apple device, the Huawei p40s camera blows them out of the water. The main sensor in the Huawei p40 is a 50 megapixel Rob one. That means that, unlike your traditional sensors, which are red, green, blue or RGB, the green element is replaced by yellow.

This is Huawei's special feature which, in terms of camera performance, means that the sensor is picking up to 40 extra light. That's really, really noticeable when using the camera in low light in night modes or even doing long exposure shots with a tripod. It is very, very good and in day-to-day use, the way I've noticed this in lockdown is when I take pictures of my smaller rescue cat gala is black and her black fur is notoriously quite a challenge for camera smartphones to take decent pictures of if the sensor and the lens and the lighting is not perfect, most smartphones topple over, whereas the Huawei p40 really performs well even in low light. You get nice detail in the fur, and you can actually see her whiskers, in contrast to the black fur. So this is a really impressive main 50 megapixel sensor, which I've been using as my main camera.

Quite a lot, I've been leaving my Panasonic gx80 at home and using the Huawei p40. Instead, if you check out my adobe stock profile, the pictures I've published there, the majority of them are shot on the Huawei p40. Now the main sensor, as excellent as it is, is not enough. Nowadays, you have to have more of a mix of lenses and sensors. The Huawei p40 is paired up with a perfect telephoto lens, which gives you the equivalent of three times optical zoom, and just as with the primary lens, it has optical image stabilization, so when using it handheld or if on a moving vehicle or walking yourself.

That makes it really, really stable and gives you less blurry pictures now the other lens on the device. The third one is an ultra-wide angle lens. This one in particular, is a 16 megapixel sensor, similar to the one we saw last year on the Huawei P30 Pro. Overall, the three cameras performed great and in terms of hybrid zoom, you get five times lossless zoom, but I've been using this lens in up to ten times digital zoom, with practically no loss of image, and if you just check out this image of a heron that I shot in the water of lath here in Edinburgh crossed in lockdown, that was shot at 10 times, zoom, so really very little loss of image there. When it comes to selfie cameras, you have a 32 megapixel, selfie camera, it's the same sensor on the bigger Huawei p40 pro, but this one doesn't have autofocus.

Despite that, you have a perfect selfie camera that performs well in low light as well, and it does all the usual tricks in regard to portrait. Now earlier we're talking about mew and that's the software that runs the phone but also includes all the extra camera features that Huawei has developed in partnership with Lacey. There's a lot of extra features here that you will be able to use not only for photo but for video as well. So, as we saw last year on the Huawei P30 Pro there's dual view for footage when you can have one lens, focusing on an item and the other being the wide angle lens and giving you more of a context side by side, our chief aperture officer would love to see this output as two separate videos. So when he's editing, he can put things together in a more creative manner, but for most users this is a mind-blowing feature which really will be taking off.

In my view, in the coming years on social media channels, especially the ones focused on video, I'm looking at you tick-tock. So dual view is just one of the many features, but the core feature, in my view, is the AI that Huawei have built into their camera software, the NHS we were talking about earlier. They power the AI image recognition and implementing some preset settings for those things. For example, if I take a picture of my cat, I'm mostly recognizing the images of my cats as cats and cat mode enables itself food landscape flowers. All sorts of scenarios are recognized even the type of greenery you're, pointing your camera, and it adjusts white balance, color saturation and even focus or focal length in softer.

It's really, really impressive, and as with previous versions of mew, I'm still amused the few times. It's now a lot less than it used to be. My cat Rodney is recognized as a panda go panda mode. So software and mew we've touched on great overall experience and much more consistent than it used to be. The refinements in mew.10.1 are great, and that is something that Huawei were almost forced to do, because a lot of the software on the device is now all up to them. Huawei can't rely on Google to provide them with Google Play Services and the Google apps, so Huawei need to rely on their direct developer partners to release apps and services on Huawei's smartphones and as well as that, you can use third-party app stores, such as the Amazon app store to set up your smartphone and get the apps and services you need.

If you haven't already, please do watch the tech travel geeks video we released about how I set up my smartphone using the Huawei app gallery and the third-party Amazon app store. We also recently released a video about petal search which enables you to find apps from multiple sources and that's provided by Huawei. This is something you have to be aware of: don't expect any google services to work on this device unless you try really hard and break multiple types of licenses and user agreements by trying to side load the services yourself during the course of the review. I made a point of not doing that. I have been using the Huawei p40 full time without the use of google services to see if this was possible, and it is a perfectly good experience.

Whilst you don't get google services directly, you can use the Amazon app store to install all the Facebook apps, so Instagram, messenger, WhatsApp and so forth, as well as Facebook actual. You can get Netflix Amazon, prime video, on all the Amazon services and, if you didn't know this already, Amazon do offer some great services, such as Amazon photos, Amazon drive, which replace the equivalent of google photos in Google Drive if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber you get loads of free storage or unlimited storage for your photos in the Amazon equivalent apps. So overall, the software experience wasn't either lacking because as far as email is concerned, even though we use g suite at tech travel gates and my personal email is a Gmail address, the email client handles that because it's just a standard. It's IMAP, there are no issues with notifications in those apps, and I haven't seen any issues with notifications in telegram: WhatsApp, messenger or Snapchat. So I don't know why people hate on the Google list experience so much if you're not too invested in Google's actual experience.

It's a perfectly livable and usable experience, which in some ways is actually better because the battery life on the Huawei p40 is very good. So the battery in the device itself is a 3 800 William hour unit, and it supports fast charging or Huawei supercharging, which is really, really useful. There is no wireless charging on this device, which is something you might want to be aware of before purchasing one, but with the supercharged feature, that's less and less needed, because you can top up really quickly in day-to-day use, whilst in lockdown the Huawei p40 gave me up to a day's use, depending on how heavily I was using the camera and how much I was using it to stream video on Netflix or Amazon Prime video that could vary. But overall, I would say this is a solid device that will get most people through and not day of normal usage. One of the other things that's really quite good about the Huawei p40 is the cut-out for the selfie camera.

Now we talked about the selfie camera earlier. This is a pill-shaped selfie camera because it has extra sensors for face unlock. It's a more secure face, unlock from Huawei on this device. This is a perfect way of unlocking your phone, but if, like me, during lockdown and afterwards, you're wearing a face mask that becomes a problem face, unlock, isn't as reliable as it used to be or potentially could be, causing risks. By having to get you to take your face mask off to unlock your device, the Huawei p40 has probably the fastest in-screen fingerprint reader that I've ever used.

It is really, really fast and responsive, not only that in the Huawei mew 10.1 update, you also get the option to change the animation of the finger unlock animation on screen as well as that the device has the usual connectivity in terms of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and so on. It has NFC, but bear in mind that, because you have no Google Pay services or no google services whatsoever on the device, you won't be able to use Google Pay, as you do with most other smartphones on the market. At the moment in terms of connectivity, as we said at the beginning, the Huawei p40 is using the new Karin 990 5g chipset. That means it is a 5g capable device. Now we haven't really had much opportunity to use 5g in lockdown in Edinburgh.

At the moment we have been promised it's coming from multiple networks, and it's been very nice of our friends at the three network to temporarily switch on a mask in my postcode, not far from my apartment for me to test this, and so I took my Huawei p40 to the park and filmed this sample footage of me using 5g on the device it does work. The download speed is really impressive compared to the equivalent 4g speed, the upload speed's, not all there yet, but considering that the network hasn't fully rolled out 5g. Yet it's a perfect early sign of it. I look forward to 5g being the upcoming thing of 2021, but for now I'll keep my hopes up and not really commit to it, because it's a bit too early for 5g. If you haven't already, please also check out our music video DJ Mukesh plus myself as a vocalist really do think.5G is the thing that's coming, and we quite enjoy five guys as well. Okay, then so we've talked about all the main features, but this is ultimately a phone.

How are phone calls they're great? They work really well the sound just as on the Huawei. P30 Pro comes from an acoustic display, which means that when you hold it up to your ear, the whole screen acts as a speaker and that works well. For me, apart from that, overall for music video, all the services I was using were non-google related, and they worked fine and for my YouTube needs, I have a bookmark on the home screen for the web version. So overall, my experience with the Huawei p40 has been excellent, and I'll continue using this after the review, as my main smartphone and, more importantly, as my main camera, the Huawei p40 at under 700 pounds is excellent value for money and delivers so much value. It's really beating its competition.

There is a big but- and that is the lack of google services- be aware of that, but if you're ready to maybe adapt and use the device using third-party services from Amazon and others, the Huawei p40 is a definite recommendation from the tech travel geeks, and we'd like to thank you for watching this video. If you haven't already, please do subscribe to the tech travel geeks here on YouTube, but for now, thanks for watching and goodbye.

Source : Tech Travel Geeks