My Huawei Mate 40 Pro First Impressions! | The Tech Chap By The Tech Chap

Hey guys, I'm tom, the tech chap- and this is the new Huawei Mate 40 pro, which was just unveiled alongside the standard, mate 40 and also the mate 40 pro plus. But this is the one you'd probably want to buy, and it'll set you back a cool 1200 euros which is about 1100 pounds or so it's in the same ballpark as the note 20 ultra or the new iPhone 12 Pro max, so definitely not cheap and also, unfortunately, it's also banned in the US. So for my American friends uh, you won't be able to get your hands on this. So for some context, the mate 40 is to the p40. Like the Galaxy Note.20 is to the s20 a slightly bigger slightly better, all the bells and whistles flagship phone, and with this we've got a new design, faster processor, a 90 hertz screen, 5g, a new camera setup and the usual android 10. But without Google Play Services.

So no Google Maps, no YouTube Gmail play store again we're limited to using Huawei's app gallery cloning apps from your old phone or just downloading APKs, definitely not ideal, but we'll come back to that. It genuinely is a gorgeous looking phone though, and a big one too, with its 6.76 inch flex, OLED display. It feels like a real refinement of last year's mate 30 pro it's a little bigger. What they call the halo ring is now the space ring, and we've got this new mystic silver color, which has this lovely adolescent effect to it. So as it catches the light differently, it changes color.

Honestly, I think it's one of the best looking phones of the year. However, if you're not a fan of curved screens, then you're- probably not going to love this with its 88 degree curve, but it's certainly eye-catching and personally, I do quite like it side by side. With the Galaxy Note, 20 ultra, you can see it's just a tiny bit smaller, and we also get rounded corners, which makes it really comfortable to hold. Now, if I put the mate 40 pro alongside the p40 pro and also last year's mate 30 pro, you can see the differences in size and design and like the p40, we get this double hole: punch cutout, which houses the dual selfie lenses with a main and a wide lens, plus we still get the 3d face, unlocking so like the iPhone. This works really well in low light, and it's still one of my favorite features.

Plus we still get an in-screen fingerprint reader. We also get stereo speakers, improved haptic feedback, dual sim card support, 5g, of course, and ip68 water resistance. I am quite glad that they didn't carry over this virtual volume rocker that we got on the mate 30 pro last year, and I wasn't a massive fan of uh. The good news is that we do get a traditional volume rocker on the mate 40. , so my first impression of the mate 40 pro was that it kind of felt like just a big brother to the p40 pro I had kind of hoped, we'd get a 120 hertz screen on this, but it's still 90, just like the p40 pro, which is absolutely fine and obviously coming just on the heels of the iPhone 12 launch still better than that.

But you could argue that Huawei's been quite smart, as the resolution on this is kind of like a halfway house between full HD and quality, and also that 90 hertz is kind of like midway between 60 and 120. So you could say that maybe it doesn't quite keep up with some other android flagship competition, but then again, Huawei is being quite smart. Balancing battery life with the smoothness and sharpness of the screen. Now speaking of apple, I've got the iPhone 12 Pro with me here, and one of the big upgrades on this guy is their new Apple A14 chip, which is a 5 nanometer chip. If you want to get technical, as is the new Karin 9000, that we get in the mate 40 pro, although this actually has the modem the 5g part of it built into it.

So while we can say it's the world's first 5 nanometer 5g chip, but it's all a little bittersweet because as impressive as the Karin 9000 is, and actually historically, the Karin processors have always been quite good. Unfortunately, they're not able to make anymore, they just simply can't source the components they need to make them. Not only that, but we also know Huawei's phones will come with their own harmony, OS next year, fully replacing android so last Karin, last flagship and even last android phone, perhaps, but we'll come back to that next year. For now the mate 40 pro with the Karin 9000 and its 8 gigs of ram is incredibly fast. Sadly, this isn't shipping with android 11 we're still on 10, but we do get Huawei's own emu 11 skin.

On top now I do like emu. It doesn't feel quite as fast as say, an OnePlus with oxygen OS or, of course, stock android. But it's still fast and nice to use they've, also upgraded the always on display which they're now calling EOD or eyes on display, which saves battery by popping up only when it detects you're actually looking at it, and it genuinely works quite well. I really like this kind of innovations. Air gestures have made a return as well, although I can't say I ever particularly use them, although multi-window mode does come in useful, I really wish the iPhone has something like this.

As for battery life. Well again, this is something the mate series have always been uh known for and inside. We have a 44 William hour battery, which actually is the same size as last year's mate, 30 pro and also 200 William hours bigger than the p40 pro. So on the one hand, the 90 hertz screen will probably drain a little quicker than last year, but then we also have that more efficient, Karin 9000, so it'll, probably even out, and so far it's actually been perfect. I tend to end up with about 35 of my battery left at the end of a normal day, and then the best bit is you can charge it incredibly fast.

This comes with a new 66 watt supercharger and also now supports pretty ridiculous.50 watt wireless charging wireless supercharging, although you're willing to buy Huawei's specific wireless supercharger to get the most out of it and like before. It also supports reverse, while it's charging, so you can top up other devices on top okay, so I've left the best until last, because when you think of Huawei phones, what's the first thing that comes to mind other than the android app store issues. It's the camera because consistently Huawei offers some of the best cameras you can get on any phone and I actually said back in March April time earlier in the year, which feels like a million years ago, the p40 pro here, I said, had the best photography, camera you could get, and so here we're getting a very similar setup with a 50 megapixel main lens, a 20 megapixel ultra-wide 12, megapixel periscope lens, which gives us five times: optical zoom and finally, a timer flight, 3d dev sensor and as you'd expect with the big sensor, the Rob, color and pixel binning quality is top-notch and this goes toe to toe with the iPhone 12 Pro and in some cases, comes out on top for pure image, quality and detail. Although I do feel like the competition has caught up a little when it comes to night mode. But it still does a perfect job, although I think the iPhone just about beats it and then here's a few shots with the front camera, where we also get an ultra-wide lens.

Although ideally you'd use it to get selfies with a bunch of your mates, but you know these days and social distancing and all that now. This is the point in the video where we have to address the elephant in the room, and you may even see here on my home screen that the YouTube app actually has a little web icon in the corner. And that's because you can't get a YouTube app. You can't even install the APK. It requires the Google Play Store, so I basically had to make a web shortcut of YouTube, which isn't ideal so Huawei's app gallery is growing fast, like over 300 year and year, but I'm still not finding most of the apps that I want.

So most of the time I still have to download APKs, which isn't really ideal for updates and security. Things are slowly getting better, though their petal search and new petal maps are filling the gap. But the bigger issue is that, even if the ecosystem and the Huawei app gallery get a lot better with the problems around the new Karin processor and the fact that right now, there isn't one and the questions over what harmony OS will look like compared to these android phones, there's a lot of unknowns, and so, if you're looking to spend 1200 euros on a new phone for the next two or three years, there are no guarantees what the situation's going to be like and if it's even going to be worth investing in their ecosystem as hard as they are genuinely trying to improve it and make it the big third option to you know apple's iOS, app store and Google's play store. So it's a confusing phone. I genuinely love it.

The hardware is fantastic. I really do appreciate that, despite all the setbacks, while we continue to innovate and bring out these fantastic devices, but the app situation, the uncertainty and also the pretty high price tag. As I say, you could get a note, 20 ultra or iPhone 12 Pro max for similar money. It's making it a little hard to recommend, but this is just a first impression, video and who knows uh what could happen over the next six twelve months politically and also uh in terms of their app store. So stay tuned lots more videos to come, but in the meantime, what do you think of the mate 40 pro? Would you be tempted to buy it and is the app situation, a big concern for you, or can you get pretty much everything you need on here already? Let me know in the comments below and if you did enjoy this video, and you don't mind helping me get to that.

One million subscriber mark and I'll keep banging on about this in every video now, but I'm trying to get there before Christmas uh then it'd be amazing. If you could hit that little subscribe button down below bash that, like icon all those horrible, YouTuber, clich?s, and I'll, see you guys next time right here on the tech chat.

Source : The Tech Chap