Huawei Mate 20 Pro China Version
TechRadar Verdict
The Huawei Mate forty Pro is 1 of the best phones effectually in terms of hardware – its cameras take incredible pictures, its screen looks great, and it feels wonderful in the hand thanks to its curved display and slender build. Information technology's just a shame that the software lets the phone downward so badly. The lack of Google apps, particularly the Play Shop, means there'south lots y'all tin't do on this device – you can't use almost social media platforms, or play many of the games you'd like, or handily navigate around a city. The price is a niggling loftier too.
Pros
- +
Fantastic cameras
- +
Not bad design
- +
Long-lasting battery
Cons
- -
Limited apps list
- -
High price
- -
Large selfie photographic camera cut-out
Ii-minute review
Ane day we'll be able to begin a Huawei phone review without bringing upwards the 'app problem' – but this Huawei Mate 40 Pro review doesn't mark that twenty-four hours.
The Huawei ban of mid-2019, which resulted in Google apps – most significantly the Play Shop, where you get your apps – being unavailable on future phones from the visitor, has hung like a nighttime deject over every Huawei phone launch since.
A yr and a half since the ban was imposed, Huawei has made strides with its own AppGallery, just it'due south certainly non enough – and our time with the Mate 40 Pro testifies to this fact.
The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is second to none when information technology comes to hardware, but yous'll have a hard time using it as your twenty-four hours-to-day smartphone given the lack of useful apps the AppGallery offers – there are nigh none of the social media platforms you're used to, the bulk of the acme games are absent, and instead of the household-name services many of us use all the time – Netflix, Spotify, Adobe editing apps, and more – you get Huawei'due south less-useful alternatives.
Huawei's AppGallery does take a fair few apps, and some you might even recognize – Tiktok, Snapchat, Amazon Shopping, Tinder and Telegram among them – but information technology doesn't come close to matching the vastness of the Play Shop. In that location are some attempts at replacements – TomTom GO is the recommended mapping app, for example, just it merely has driving navigation, costs coin after a gratuitous trial, and is but really tiresome to use.
If you can expect past the big app problem with the phone, you might reach the second stumbling block: its price. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro costs the same as the smallest-storage iPhone 12 Pro Max or highest-storage Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, even so the lack of apps makes it much less enticing than either.
It's a shame the phone has these two issues, because if you were able to wait past both, you'd detect possibly the best telephone of the year in terms of straight-upwardly hardware.
The Huawei Mate 40 Pro feels dandy in the mitt. Its drinking glass-sandwich-with-aluminum-filling blueprint feels premium to the affect, and the feeling is enhanced by the smooth curve of the screen at its edges. The side buttons are in like shooting fish in a barrel-to-reach positions, and given the size of its screen, the telephone feels lighter and thinner than we'd await (though information technology'south certainly not a meaty phone).
In terms of processing, it'due south a beast, and it handled games (the ones nosotros could play), and photo and video editing, very well.
Given that this is a Huawei phone, there'due south probably something you're particularly interested in: and yeah, the camera performance hither is fantastic. Head on downward to our 'Cameras' section for a more detailed breakdown, only, long story short, the phone takes not bad pictures, specially portrait shots, zoomed-in images and depression-lite snaps. If this camera performance came from a telephone with a bigger and better selection of apps, it would be a five-star device.
Merely that fantasy Huawei Mate 40 Pro isn't the ane nosotros got; instead, we've got more than of a mixed bag, where the strong hardware and troubled software disharmonism on multiple fronts.
Huawei Mate twoscore Pro price and availability
After an October 22 launch, the Huawei Mate forty Pro release date was November 13. That put it every bit one of the last major phones released in 2020.
The Huawei Mate 40 Pro price is £1,099 / AU$ane,999 (roughly $i,400), and that gets you 8GB RAM and 256GB storage.
For some comparison, equally nosotros've mentioned, in the UK that's the same cost as the lowest-spec iPhone 12 Pro Max (undisclosed RAM, 128GB storage) or the top-spec Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus (12GB RAM, 512GB storage), while in Australia both those phones are at least AU$100 cheaper than the Mate 40 Pro.
The Huawei Mate forty Pro price is actually quite a flake more than than the Mate xxx Pro, which sold for £899.99 / AU$1,599 (around $1,200) – if you're wondering why we're non comparing information technology to other Mate 40 phones, information technology's because equally with the Mate 30 line, the Pro is the only version that Huawei has released in most countries outside China.
Blueprint
- Curved-border screen feels great to hold
- Side buttons are easily reachable
- Distinctive round camera bump
The Huawei Mate xl Pro feels great in the hand, with- its drinking glass back and glass screen sandwiching an aluminum frame. The dimensions are 162.nine x 75.5 x 9.1mm and it weighs 212g, and while those measurements make it seem pretty big, for a phone of its screen size, the Mate forty Pro doesn't feel overly huge; the curved-border display, which helps the phone fit snugly in your palm, adds to this impression.
Nosotros plant the power push button and volume rocker, both on the right edge of the phone, easy to reach – people with smaller hands might discover it a piddling trickier to hit the higher-upward rocker, just about will be able to reach the power push button easily enough. The Mate xxx Pro didn't actually take a volume rocker, as on that phone Huawei debuted tech that allowed you to slide your finger upwards and down the curved screen edge to change the book – given that the rocker has returned here, we'd guess that particular novelty didn't catch on.
There'due south no 3.5mm headphone jack here, so fans of wired audio volition take to utilise a converter with the USB-C port in order to utilise their existing wired headphones, or expect for USB-C wired headphones, although there are few options around at the moment.
The back of the telephone feels sleek, only you might find that its appearance detracts from the overall impression of elegance, as our review unit apace became a canvas of fingerprint marks. This was on the black version of the telephone, and information technology'due south as well available in silvery, which might not show off finger smudges as much. At launch light-green, yellow and white versions of the Mate 40 Pro were also unveiled, and we'd say these await a lot more hitting than the black model, although we haven't seen them on sale anywhere still.
You might find the camera crash-land pretty eye-communicable – it's a large circumvolve, with the lenses mounted within, as well as the flash module. It doesn't stick out too much, and gives the phone a distinct and commanding look, equally if telling the subject of your photo 'you're being snapped by one of the best camera phones out there'.
Display
- 6.76-inch OLED display
- Colors look great
- 90Hz refresh rate lags behind competition
The Huawei Mate 40 Pro brandish looks pretty slap-up, though the paucity of streaming service apps means that opportunities for enoying it are somewhat limited.
This screen is 6.76 inches diagonally, which is pretty big, only as nosotros've mentioned the design goes some style in mitigating any issues with this. It has a 2772 x 1344 resolution, which is higher than that of many other phones (most stick with 1080p) and as a result images look sharp.
The OLED HDR10 tech makes colors pop – Huawei claims that the brandish shows off 16.seven million colors, although nosotros didn't finish to count. The high max brightness helps with this besides.
Fast screen refresh rates are the latest battlefield in the smartphone spec wars, merely the Huawei Mate 40 Pro caps out at 90Hz, which some might find a lilliputian low for a premium smartphone (others hitting 120Hz or 144Hz). Y'all can dial this downward to 60Hz if you like, which saves battery, but we went with the dynamic mode pick, which automatically switched between the 2 depending on what yous're doing.
If we take 1 event with the Mate twoscore Pro display, it'south the pill-shaped cutting-out that houses the 2 forepart-facing cameras at the top-left of the screen. It's not exactly small, with quite some distance between the two lenses, so information technology cuts a fair amount out of your viewable surface area.
Cameras
- 50MP main, 20MP ultra-wide, 12MP telephoto cameras
- Takes incredible pictures
- Range of useful tools like moon photography, Light Painting and more
The Huawei Mate forty Pro is one of the best camera phones out there – while its snaps are roughly on par with its tiptop-tier competition, and which is the 'best' phone largely comes down to personal preference, the sheer number of modes and options on offering here outstrips well-nigh of the competition.
The primary snapper is the same 50MP f/1.9 camera we also saw on the Huawei P40 serial and Mate twoscore – this has a RYYB sensor (reddish, yellow, yellowish, blue) every bit opposed to the 'standard' RGB (red, green, blue), which allows it to have in more low-cal. This is joined by a 20MP f/one.8 ultra-broad camera and a 12MP f/three.4 periscope telephoto (for 5x optical zoom) snapper.
On newspaper that might make the phone wait a petty worse off than the P40 Pro, which had the aforementioned main and telephoto snapper simply a higher-res ultra-wide photographic camera. Yet, that ultra-wide camera is where many of the improvements really come, as it has an improved focal length, along with another central change that we'll get into afterward in this department.
Pictures taken on the Huawei Mate 40 Pro looked fantastic, from scenic vistas and close-upwardly subjects, or portrait shots. We could expend plenty of words praising the color accuracy, depth, dissimilarity, AI tweakery, and more, but instead we'd propose that you lot just coil downwardly to our Camera Samples section to encounter for yourself.
The ultra-wide camera uses a 'free-form' lens which, to cut a detailed scientific procedure down to its bare elements, uses an uneven shape to effectively reduce the kind of distortion ultra-wide snaps ordinarily have. This works well, and wide-angle pictures looked fabulous.
The periscope telephoto lens supports 5x optical zoom, and pictures taken at this zoom level look so good that it's difficult to tell they're zoomed at all. You can zoom in 50x optically, which simply crops in the image, and compared to super-zoom snaps we've seen from other phones the Mate 40 Pro's don't wait awful – they do expect rather grainy though, and then you might not detect yourself using this characteristic very much.
Portrait style is great – images don't have over-the-summit 'bokeh' furnishings, and instead some settings, similar highlights and shadows, are tweaked to brand the bailiwick stand out more naturally.
It's when the sun goes downwards that the Huawei Mate 40 Pro really shines – information technology'due south consistently brilliant at taking photos in low-low-cal conditions. Standard shots taken during the dark, or in dark places, looked dandy, with plenty of detail, colors picked up well, and highlights and shadows counterbalanced. Snaps also had very footling noise in nighttime areas.
We were particularly impressed with Portrait-manner shots taken in low-light conditions – when we took some photos in a dark bar the results were smashing, despite the lack of low-cal and a bright cherry-red sign nearby.
Huawei'due south fantastic moon photography setting is back too, if you opt to zoom in to around 50x on the angelic torso, and nosotros took some amazing photos of information technology that we tin can't quite believe nosotros got from a smartphone.
On the front, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro has two cameras, with a 13MP f/ii.iv ultra-wide snapper joined past a fourth dimension-of-flying (ToF) sensor for improved depth sensing. Selfies await practiced, as they're pretty assuming in terms of color, and we liked having the power to adjust our framing thank you to the use of an ultra-broad lens, as you can zoom in or out to a express degree.
Portrait mode on the front-facing photographic camera is a little less useful that on the rear though – instead of snaps having some background mistiness applied and settings tweaked a fiddling, you take to choose from a limited option of effects, like Stage Lighting (removes all your groundwork) or Hearts (which makes lights behind you look heart-shaped). None of the options we could find produced anything that looked like a 'standard' Portrait selfie, as they go too hard on the processing effects, so we found ourselves ignoring them.
Talking of processing, Huawei has typically gone hard on the 'AI Optimization' for its camera phones, and we thought this was to give thanks for our great-looking snaps until we realized that we'd had information technology turned off for much of our camera testing – nosotros had to call up to switch it on for our later shoots. Past this nosotros mean to say the cameras are and then great that AI doesn't even feel necessary - if you turn information technology on, you'll find photos tweaked in subtle ways to make them look better, though non all snaps benefit too much.
Fans of fun camera modes volition find enough in the Huawei Mate twoscore Pro to enjoy. There'due south the aforementioned moon mode (though we'd love to see an astrophotography option for stars too, a la Google Pixel iv), Dual View which lets you tape video on the front and back cameras at once, various boring-mo settings up to an impressive 3840fps (normal slow-mo is just 960fps, and this super-slow-mo lets you run across even the quickest activeness in total item), and Light Painting, which seems to combine shutter speed tweaks with AI optimization to create artistic snaps of everything from cars to star trails.
Finally, permit's look at videography. The phone uses the ultra-wide snapper, not the main one, to tape videos, and you can shoot up to 4K 60fps, but if y'all turn on image stabilization or subject tracking that drops down to 1080p 30fps.
Footage looks smashing, with surprisingly vibrant colors for a smartphone video. Even without the stabilization fashion enabled, videos don't shake too much, and we've also got to commend the seamless zooming (up to 10x).
Unlike on many other smartphones, you can record 4K video using the forepart-facing camera. Nonetheless, the resulting video looks a little dim, and the efforts of the AI to comprehend this up when the prune was played back on the phone became rather apparent, with excessive brightening and oversaturated colors.
Photographic camera samples
Operation and specs
- Kirin 9000 paired with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage
- 5G compatible
- Felt pretty powerful for a range of tasks
Equally with the display, the lack of apps makes it a piffling hard to really examination the Huawei Mate 40 Pro performance in full - from our experience, though, nosotros never felt permit down by the phone's power.
There'due south Huawei'due south newest Kirin 9000 chipset here, paired with 8GB RAM. AppGallery doesn't actually take our usual benchmarking app, Geekbench, and so we tin't use scientific methods to compare the phone'due south power to its competitors, simply we'd imagine it's roughly on par with the Snapdragon 865 Plus found in some recent phones.
When playing games on the phone (Fortnite is available) or using photo editing apps (PicsArt sat at the AppGallery's popular apps list for the entirety of our review, though we'd never heard of it before), the Mate twoscore Pro felt snappy and fast, and we never constitute much lag when doing intensive tasks or opening apps.
The 256GB storage here feels more than enough for most people; if you're not sure that will be plenty, not many popular deject storage options are bachelor via AppGallery. We found ourselves having to plug the Mate into our figurer to relieve photos and catch the photos for the camera samples section above.
Software
- Uses EMUI 11 laid over Android 10
- No Google apps, including Play Store
- Huawei'south AppGallery is hit-and-miss
We've finally reached the elephant on the phone, the apps state of affairs. Nosotros could write thousands of words about AppGallery'southward strengths and weaknesses, just to cut it downwards to six: 'AppGallery is no Play Store replacement'.
AppGallery does have plenty of apps, but few of the pop ones you lot'll probable have installed on your Android device or iPhone. There are few social media apps salvage Tiktok and Snapchat, no major entertainment services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Spotify, and a relatively trim list of games. We found the social media absence the existent killer - we had to apply a 2nd phone alongside the Mate 40 Pro for WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and the Facebook suite.
There'south a strange, though not unwelcome, focus on regional apps in AppGallery. In the UK we were recommended plenty of apps from national retailers, catch-upward apps from certain channels, telecoms hubs and banking services, and we'd imagine in other countries, you'll detect plenty of apps for you lot. The UK's All4 is no substitute for Netflix, though.
Peradventure the nigh abrasive absenteeism here is Google's own apps – especially, of grade, the Play Store, merely the others too. The lack of Google Bulldoze leaves no mainstream cloud storage services available; Google Maps' replacement, TomTom GO, is slow, costs money, and only gives driving instructions; the Huawei news feed, replacing Google News, exclusively recommended us tabloid stories, with an emphasis on celebrity clickbait. Some of the Google services are actually available via the browser app, but you lot shouldn't have to rely on this kind of workaround to access apps.
Nosotros've also got to query the way Huawei handles its apps. When you plow on the phone for the first time, the menu is littered with folders of app icons – these aren't really installed on the phone, and so we tin't charge them of being bloatware, and you have to click them to download the app. Still, this feels a little too pushy in the way it encourages you to download the apps – and in the case of dating apps like Tinder and Badoo, whether they're pre-installed or not you might not be comfortable with having those icons on your phone for a partner, or acquaintances, to see.
To its credit, Huawei does seem proactive in bringing new apps to AppGallery, and in the next few months or years we'll near certainly see its app roster swell. Simply until there are more of the bigger apps you likely utilize in your current smartphone, it's hard to recommend the Mate 40 Pro every bit your next handset.
In that location is a potential remedy to the app problem in the course of 'Petal Search' which comes installed on the phone - it lets you search for not-app-store means to install apps, similar APKs, straight from the app website, or like. This technically lets you install apps you otherwise wouldn't exist able to discover like WhatsApp and Instagram, and the vast majority of apps y'all likely utilize every day are included, though not every unmarried app.
Some might notice Petal Search solves all their app issues, especially for social media, with many popular platforms bachelor this way. We didn't actually use nigh apps downloaded this way, as our WhatsApp backup and social media logins are tied to our Google account, which means we tin't access them on the phone.
For people who aren't in that position, or just desire some extra services and games not available through the AppGallery, it's a valid option. However if your accounts on games, shopping apps and more are tied to your Google log-in, you might accept issues. For more information on Petal Search bank check out Huawei's website here (opens in new tab).
Beyond the app situation, the phone runs Android x (Google banned Huawei from using its apps and services, non Android itself) with EMUI 11 laid over the top.
Nosotros're big fans of EMUI - information technology has loads of options to alter the way the phone works, from visual tweaks (Dark mode, Eye Comfort filter, the ability to change color temperature) to functional (editable always-on display, various navigation options, useful pre-installed apps). Information technology brings quite a big visual overhaul from stock Android, with vibrant backgrounds and app icons, which helps you lot appreciate the display technology.
As with most Huawei phones, EMUI has a built-in pace counter, potentially making your fettle tracker redundant if you like this kind of data, though it's probable not as accurate as a dedicated device.
Battery life
- 4,400mAh bombardment
- Hands lasts a 24-hour interval of use
- 66W wired, 50W wireless charging
The Huawei Mate 40 Pro bombardment life is stellar, and non in one case did it fail to survive a twenty-four hour period of use. Is this because the relative lack of apps means there were fewer reasons to utilize the telephone? Perhaps, but there'due south probably more to information technology than that.
The battery chapters is iv,400mAh, which is about boilerplate for a flagship phone, but we'd imagine the real reason the telephone lasts a long time is some smart software optimizations to keep the battery going longer. We say this because the visitor has used similar optimizations to give its wearables fantastic bombardment life.
Charging here is equally impressive: at that place's 66W wired charging, which will power upwards the telephone in under an 60 minutes, and also 50W wireless powering, which is certainly a rarity in smartphones. Nosotros didn't actually go to test out this latter speed, as to get information technology you lot demand to purchase a separate 50W pad from Huawei, but nosotros used the telephone with ane of the visitor's other wireless pads, and it seemed pretty snappy too.
Finally, there'due south 5W reverse wireless charging, which lets you power up other wirelessly-charging devices using the Huawei Mate 40 Pro as a mat. At 5W this is ever so slightly faster than other devices with the feature, but the option is a little hidden in the Settings menu.
Should I buy the Huawei Mate forty Pro?
Buy it if...
Don't buy it if...
Get-go reviewed: November 2020
Huawei Mate 20 Pro China Version,
Source: https://www.techradar.com/in/reviews/huawei-mate-40-pro-review
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