Huawei Mate 40 Pro Impressions: Technically Awesome! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up MHD here, you know what sucks not being able to recommend a phone, no matter how good it is seen. Every time Huawei drops a new phone. I feel like the conversation we all have is the same thing over and over, which is its a great piece of hardware, and they made these advances and here's some new features. But if you live outside of China, you probably shouldn't get it, and even if you do, the experience is so gutted. That is just not worth it, and so what do you know believe it or not? They just dropped the mate 40 pro and to me this phone. This is the ultimate expression of like no matter how good their new phone is.

It's impossible to recommend which sucks, because this phone has some really technically impressive stuff. You can see this new color slash finish here on the back of this one. They call it mystic silver, and it has this sheen to it. That reflects like pretty much every color of the rainbow. Depending on what angle you hold it, which is technically impressive, then around the front, you see the huge display, a roughly 2k 6.76 inch, OLED display with a 90 hertz, refresh rate fingerprint reader, underneath the glass of course, and then they're doing what they did last year with the mate series, which is curving that display over the edges until it like melts into the side of the phone. Now you all know how I feel about actually using curved displays.

They create unnecessary, accidental touches. They can be frustrating, they cost more, and they're more fragile, but Huawei's sticking with it. Basically because they look so dramatic, like this one's again curved so much that they had to move the power and volume buttons further back on the phone, and sometimes even the content on the display or the keyboard itself. That you're typing on is like melted off of the side inconvenient, but technically impressive. Then around the back, there's even more.

You can see the camera bump they're, calling this a space ring, design inspired by the first photo of a black hole which might be a bit of a stretch, but it's definitely a unique design for the four cameras that they've put up in this phone and because it's in the middle, actually it has the unique benefit of not rocking as much as most other phones that put the camera bump in the corner and the cameras include a 50 megapixel massive primary sensor, one over 1.28 inches. That's nearly rx100 one inch sensor size so very technically impressive, then there's a 5x periscope telephoto lens, there's a macro camera and there's a 100-degree ultrawide camera. Even the speakers on this phone go the extra mile so typically on a flagship phone you'll, see like the speaker, grill at the bottom and then maybe an earpiece stereo speaker at the top with mate 40 pro they're, giving you stereo speakers with a real second speaker from a grille at the top and the earpiece, and so the stereo effect is better and just in general. These speakers get really loud and they're. Some of the loudest I've heard in a smartphone, and they actually sound good, so that is technically, very impressive, oh and while we're talking about what's inside, this phone also has a 4400 William hour battery, pretty solid flagship size cell, and it supports up to 66 watt charging, which is insanely fast.

You might remember, I just looked at the OnePlus 8t with its 65 watt, fast charging. So I guess they literally went up that, but that whole thing went zero to 100 in under 40 minutes, which is crazy, and then on top of that it can do 50 watt wireless charging, which is incredible now to get that you'll need like the exact right wireless charger, that's compatible, probably built by Huawei, and the setup has to be just right. But the fact that it's able to achieve that at all is technically impressive. Then, to top off everything inside this phone is powered by their new Karin Kiran, Karen 9000 chips, which is actually a five nanometer chipset, and so this and apple's a 14 bionic in the new iPhones are the first five nanometer chipsets shipping and any smartphones this year. So that's, of course, bleeding edge and all those extra transistors translates generally into performance and efficiency improvements.

Now this isn't the review, so I haven't tested battery life, and it almost makes me wonder why they didn't just go all out and drop 120 hertz display in this phone if the five nanometer chipset is so impressive and so efficient, but nevertheless it's on that bleeding edge. It gives you stuff, like fusion, HDR video, with real time, processing of every frame and just great overall performance, throwing around apps in multitasking and throughout this whole UI, and then last bell whistle there is a pretty big pillbox cut out in the top corner of the display, which I was a little worried about at first, because anytime, I see that I'm like all right. What did they put up next to the selfie camera, like you? Have this whole huge immersive display with razor-thin bezels, and you did a pill box cut out, but inside this one you get a standard, selfie camera and another 100 degree ultra-wide. So not some like pointless monochrome or depth sensor or anything like that. It's actually a significantly wider selfie camera.

I haven't seen that since the pixel 3 XL, but I thought it was great back then, and I still think it's great now. Technically, actually you know what that one's, not that technically impressive, they are still kind of far apart uh, it's just smart. It's just smart, so Huawei's mate series each year feels like it's consistently built to just show off the best that they can technically achieve, and they have the p series at the beginning of the year, which is typically more photography focused, and they make a bunch of other phones, but it's just another phone they make. That is very technically impressive, so the story lately has been. If this is such a good phone, then what are they doing to build up their own experiences to catch up to what they're missing, with the lack of google support? What are they actually building? And you can see it's running emu 11 here, not my favorite UI as I've talked about, but it doesn't mean there aren't any nice features.

There are multitasking features and quick launchers and customization and plenty of stuff like that. But it's the app situation. That's still a sticking point: Huawei's app gallery continues to grow, which is great, but it's still missing some pretty fundamental pieces that I would say most people would find needed daily on their phone Instagram YouTube some of my favorite productivity apps, aren't here all the Google apps, of course, and sometimes I'll actually just list them in the app gallery, but as literally web apps. So with a link you can see for good measure, it's just launching it in the browser. Now, first thing, while we would say to that, is they're actually making pretty significant improvements to their first party apps, so they're alternatives to stuff we're used to, so they have their own shopping app.

They have their own browser, they have their own mapping and navigation apps, and so that's pretty technically impressive too. But to that I would also add my take, which is I've always recommended. Don't buy a piece of tech based on the promise of future software updates, buy it because it's good now, and you'd be great with it now if it never got updated, and this app store this app gallery and all these services being built, they are really great that they're putting in the work and the effort for them, but they're not done, yet they're, not finished being built. Yet so they'll continue to make incredible. Phones like this, but I'll have to continue waiting until it's achieved that replacement level.

So, while Huawei's gotten so good at making technically impressive hardware, the end of the video is still the same, which is like. I wish I could recommend it like to imagine. Take the logo off of this phone, take the Huawei out of this phone and imagine this phone from someone else, the Samsung, the apples of the world. This would be right up against the bleeding edge of the stuff that they make five nanometer chip super crazy wireless and wired charging tech. All this, this camera tech in here it's its perfect, but I'm not recommending it.

But all that being said, I'm so happy to see the effort, because don't think the other companies aren't noticing this stuff either way. That's been it thanks for watching a lot more coming soon in October stay tuned catch you guys later peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee