We are reader supported. As with most Huawei phones, EMUI has a built-in step counter, potentially making your fitness tracker redundant if you like this kind of information, though it’s likely not as accurate as a dedicated device. HUAWEI did a nifty little thing with Quick Apps. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is one of the best camera phones out there – while its snaps are roughly on par with its top-tier competition, and which is the ‘best’ phone largely comes down to personal preference, the sheer number of modes and options on offer here outstrips most of the competition. But without a familiar way to install apps, the Mate 40 Pro has limited appeal. They are not only loud, but they produce a rather surprising high-quality sound, considering where that sound is coming from (a phone). HUAWEI calls it “the Space Ring”. 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. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro camera is by all technical measures a very potent image capture system. HUAWEI MATE 40 PRO. AppGallery does have plenty of apps, but few of the popular ones you’ll likely have installed on your Android device or iPhone. Some might find Petal Search solves all their app problems, especially for social media, with many popular platforms available this way. INSANE Galaxy S22 Ultra Camera, iPhone 13 Dummy Leaks & more.. MAJOR Galaxy Z Fold/Z Flip Leaks, iPhone Flip Timeline & more! Huawei Mate 40 Pro – full specifications, battery, camera, display, and performance tests. iPhone 13 Getting LARGER?! There’s also the option to go further with digital zoom, but we’d advise you to keep it towards the lower end. Color has noticeably improved over the P40 Pro, which often showed color casts in various light conditions, especially in low light. 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. Perhaps the most annoying absence here is Google’s own apps – especially, of course, the Play Store, but the others too. That is not the case with calls placed on WhatsApp or Facebook, where the quality is crisp and clear. Sign up to get breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more, plus the hottest tech deals! The Mate 40 Pro has a pair of rather powerful speakers, one at the top, and one at the bottom, for stereo effect. If you can look past the big app problem with the phone, you might reach the second stumbling block: its price. 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 look awful – they do look rather grainy though, so you might not find yourself using this feature very much. The power being delivered by the phone is fantastic. It's a beautiful phone with a great screen and capable camera, but we still can't recommend it. Huawei’s fantastic moon photography setting is back too, if you opt to zoom in to around 50x on the celestial body, and we took some amazing photos of it that we can’t quite believe we got from a smartphone. It’s a shame the phone has these two issues, because if you were able to look past both, you’d find possibly the best phone of the year in terms of straight-up hardware. The Huawei P40 Pro’s primary camera is almost identical to that of the P40, but the P40 Pro features OIS. Finally, there’s 5W reverse wireless charging, which lets you power up other wirelessly-charging devices using the Huawei Mate 40 Pro as a mat. Regardless of what you decide to capture for posterity, the Mate 40 Pro will not disappoint, let it be landscapes, close-ups, portraits, etc. I’ll be honest, I haven’t handled a smartphone snappier than the Mate 40 Pro in the past 12 months. For people who aren't in that position, or just want some extra services and games not available through the AppGallery, it's a valid option. Discover the key facts and see how Huawei Mate 40 Pro performs in the smartphone ranking. Now, whether you’re playing a demanding game, like Asphalt 9 Legends, or you have several other applications running in the background, you won’t feel any lag, delay, or hiccups. NY 10036. Average size mitts and above, no worries. Some of the Google services are actually available via the browser app, but you shouldn’t have to rely on this kind of workaround to access apps. Even without the stabilization mode enabled, videos don’t shake too much, and we’ve also got to commend the seamless zooming (up to 10x). There’s no 3.5mm headphone jack here, so fans of wired audio will have to use a converter with the USB-C port in order to use their existing wired headphones, or look for USB-C wired headphones, although there are few options around at the moment. The high max brightness helps with this too. The shared 50MP Ultra Vision sensor … The Huawei Mate 40 Pro halo-style camera setup utilizes a simply massive 1/1.28-inch, 50-megapixel RYYB sensor — which, along with the P40 Pro, is … Rendering for the Mate 40 Pro's high display resolution puts the Kirin 9000 at a slight disadvantage compared to the flagships that come with 1080p screens. At launch green, yellow and white versions of the Mate 40 Pro were also unveiled, and we’d say these look a lot more striking than the black model, although we haven’t seen them on sale anywhere yet. The OLED HDR10 tech makes colors pop – Huawei claims that the display shows off 16.7 million colors, although we didn’t stop to count. There is a potential remedy to the app problem in the form of 'Petal Search' which comes installed on the phone -  it lets you search for non-app-store ways to install apps, like APKs, straight from the app website, or similar. You can do that with Google Maps, Gmail, and pretty much every other service that has a mobile-optimized web offering. For example, with Quick Charge 3.0, the battery can be charged to 50% in just 30 minutes. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro feels great in the average hand: not too big, not too heavy, not too slippery or disproportionately weighted at one end. The Mate 40 Pro, as the case with any Mate model before it, is a beast. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro battery life is stellar, and not once did it fail to survive a day of use. Not everyone uses their phone camera all the time, and if that’s you, the Mate 40 Pro’s selling point - its phenomenal camera - is almost completely irrelevant. Turning to the front we can only commend Huawei for opting for a wide-angle lens for the selfie camera. On the back, you’ll find a trio of 50MP Ultra Vision Camera (Wide Angle, f/1.9 aperture),  20MP Cine Camera (Ultra-Wide Angle, f/1.8 aperture), and 12MP Telephoto Camera (f/3.4 aperture, OIS), as well as the LED flash. When you turn on the phone for the first time, the menu is littered with folders of app icons – these aren’t actually installed on the phone, so we can’t accuse them of being bloatware, and you have to click them to download the app. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is second to none when it comes to hardware, but you’ll have a hard time using it as your day-to-day smartphone given the lack of useful apps the AppGallery offers – there are virtually none of the social media platforms you’re used to, the majority of the top 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’s less-useful alternatives. You catch my drift. one of the best phones around in terms of hardware – its cameras take incredible pictures, its screen looks great, and it feels wonderful in the Should I buy it? Get the freshest Pocketnow updates to your mailbox. The lack of Google apps, particularly the Play Store, means there’s lots you can’t do on this device – you can’t use most social media platforms, or play many of the games you’d like, or handily navigate around a city. Donald Trump – might find it a bit big. We found ourselves having to plug the Mate into our computer to save photos and grab the photos for the camera samples section above. A rainbow captured with the ultra-wide camera. HUAWEI is not only committed to, but has already proven that it can build a solid alternative ecosystem. You might find the camera bump pretty eye-catching – it’s a big circle, with the lenses mounted within, as well as the flash module. Huawei Mate 40 Pro review: other specs and features (Image credit: Huawei) The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is a smartphone packed with power, thanks … And as for the battery life, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro can last for a full day with its 4,400mAh and the charging time is insanely fast with its 66W charger. User and experts reviews. We were particularly impressed with Portrait-mode shots taken in low-light conditions – when we took some photos in a dark bar the results were great, despite the lack of light and a bright red sign nearby. We won’t bore you with benchmarks and other analytical information (there are other reviews out there that specifically focus on that) as we here at Pocketnow believe in real-life performance. I won’t beat the same dead horse once again. On paper that might make the phone look a little worse off than the P40 Pro, which had the same main and telephoto snapper but a higher-res ultra-wide camera. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro could be a world-beater, thanks to an amazing chipset and highly competent cameras. That said, it … Three months after starting using it, this is our HUAWEI Mate 40 Pro review, long-term. The lack of Google Drive 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. The AppGallery is expanding every day and yes, while it’s still far behind the Play Store, chances are more and more apps are available every day, slowly filling in the gap. We could write thousands of words about AppGallery’s strengths and weaknesses, but to cut it down to six: ‘AppGallery is no Play Store replacement’. There are some attempts at replacements – TomTom GO is the recommended mapping app, for example, but it only has driving navigation, costs money after a free trial, and is just really slow to use. The display is a gorgeous 6.76-inch OLED panel with an FHD+ resolution of 2772 x 1344 pixels and a max refresh rate of 90Hz. On the Mate 40 Pro, white balance is accurate in pretty much all conditions and color rendering is pleasant. Colors are accurate, contrast and depth are spot-on, and with the improved focal length of the ultra-wide camera, you’ll get great results. But it’s the software and services that really made me hold back just a little in recommending a purchase, especially for those who are not advanced users to the point where you can make this work by spending a little extra time and tinkering with the software. Cameras The Mate-series is the one pushing the limits of performance. This color option shifts shades from dull silver all the way to red, through orange, yellow, green, and starting from blue. Talking of processing, Huawei has typically gone hard on the ‘AI Optimization’ for its camera phones, and we thought this was to thank for our great-looking snaps until we realized that we’d had it turned off for much of our camera testing – we had to remember to switch it on for our later shoots. That put it as one of the last major phones released in 2020. Perhaps look at Huawei’s P Smart line instead. Their solid build quality, great design, snappy performance, stellar cameras, and the all around experience makes it easy to recommend them hardware-wise. You don't use many apps Huawei hasn't skimped on the smaller niceties either, and the Mate 40 Pro comes with stereo speakers – two evenly matched units. (Pocket-lint) - Autumn is the time of year Huawei releases its Mate series of flagship phones and 2020 is no different in that regard. The screen is beautiful … It’s not exactly small, with quite some distance between the two lenses, so it cuts a fair amount out of your viewable area. For more information on Petal Search check out Huawei's website here. With the P40 Pro introducing Sony’s incredible IMX700 1/1.28″ 50MP sensor, its low light performance, shallow depth and ample detail for a smartphone blew us away when combined with Huawei’s smart imaging software. Price and availability Learn more. Is this because the relative lack of apps means there were fewer reasons to use the phone? But that fantasy Huawei Mate 40 Pro isn’t the one we got; instead, we’ve got more of a mixed bag, where the strong hardware and troubled software clash on multiple fronts. It is needless to say that it’s one of the best camera phones out there, competing head to head with its other siblings in the Mate 40 line-up, as well as the P40 lineup. We found the social media absence the real killer - we had to use a second phone alongside the Mate 40 Pro for WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and the Facebook suite. HUAWEI decided to spruce up the color palette of the Mate 40 Pro, offering it in White, Black, Olive Green, Sunflower Yellow, and the very interesting, chameleonic, Mystic Silver we have over here. Fast screen refresh rates are the latest battleground in the smartphone spec wars, but the Huawei Mate 40 Pro caps out at 90Hz, which some might find a little low for a premium smartphone (others hit 120Hz or 144Hz). It’s the software and ecosystem efforts of HUAWEI that allow me to finally recommend a flagship like the Mate 40 Pro without reservations. Last year, Chinese tech giant Huawei launched its highly anticipated next generation of 5G Mate 40 flagship smartphones to much fanfare.. An ultra-wide shot which maintains lots of detail. EMUI 11 is based on AOSP Android 11, and, instead of Google Play, you get your apps officially from the HUAWEI AppGallery, or unofficially (at your own risk) from one of the various services out there. The 256GB storage here feels more than enough for most people; if you’re not sure that will be enough, not many popular cloud storage options are available via AppGallery. There’s a strange, though not unwelcome, focus on regional apps in AppGallery. Sure, I’ve been commending and recommending modern HUAWEI smartphones for years now. In the UK we were recommended plenty of apps from national retailers, catch-up apps from certain channels, telecoms hubs and banking services, and we’d imagine in other countries, you’ll find plenty of apps for you. New York, The buttons are easily reachable with the power button on the lower side being painted in vibrant red. Whether it’s the fast processor, the amount of memory, or EMUI 11 (or a combination of all the aforementioned), I really don’t know, but it’s wicked! If this camera performance came from a phone with a bigger and better selection of apps, it would be a five-star device. The Mate 30 Pro didn’t actually have a volume rocker, as on that phone Huawei debuted tech that allowed you to slide your finger up and down the curved screen edge to change the volume – given that the rocker has returned here, we’d guess that particular novelty didn’t catch on. Cons:– a tad on the expensive side;– some apps might not be available yet. A detailed picture of the moon taken at 50x zoom. Huawei Mate 40 Pro … © The leading Chinese phone manufacturer announced four new models in its Huawei Mate 40 series—the Mate 40, Mate 40 Pro, Mate 40 Pro+ and Porsche Design Mate 40 RS. 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