Huawei P40 Pro Plus review: Unfortunately fantastic By Android Authority

Last year we reviewed the Huawei P 30 Pro, and it was freely perfect on, like all accounts, had superfast charging, perfect battery life, great performance and maybe the most impressive, a true 5x optical telephoto camera. The whole camera system was awesome. It could basically see in the dark without the use of a night mode, just because of the sheer size of the sensor and the fact that it's using our BYB pixel arrays and the true 5x optical telephoto, camera was amazing, was basically using this really cool prism mechanism to reflect light at 90 degrees. So you could turn the sensor sideways and have more distance to actually reflect that light onto you know. Since, while we released the P30 Pro, we've seen a lot of companies try to copy them in different ways. We saw Xiaomi released the Minor 10, which didn't have a true optical 5x telephoto, even though they said it was we've seen the galaxy s 20 ultra, which can do up to a hundred X zoom.

There are a lot of people that are just trying to the best Huawei in the camera department, but while we didn't really want to be beat- and this year, they're actually taking a note out of Samsung's book by releasing three flagship phones, you've got the Huawei P 40, the wall EP for new pro and this phone, the Huawei P 40 Pro Plus with true 10x optical zoom. Now before we go any further, I do have to give a shout-out to our sponsor tech deals, and we'll get more into that later in the video. Now, for all intents and purposes, you could watch our p40 pro review and get a good sense of what the p40 pro plus is. It's got a rounded screen and a rounded back, although the p4u Pro Plus uses ceramic, which feels really nice and the screens also curved on the bottom, which actually makes a lot of sense, because now most people use gesture navigation and, if you're, going home or doing multitasking swiping up from the bottom is just a lot more comfortable when you've got a curved display there. Now, while we did include these nice thick rails in the corners to protect that screen and I honestly think this design is a really nice, it still feels fairly thin, even though it's definitely a little thicker than you're, probably used to in a smartphone and from a specs' perspective, your pretty much getting what you got on the Huawei p40 pro as well you're, getting that cure 990 processors, with 5g built in you're, getting a gigabyte of RAM in 90, Hertz, fit plus display.

The big difference here is that you're getting 512 gigabytes of storage versus the 256 gigabytes of storage, that you're gonna, see on the Huawei p40 Pro I use the phone for around six days and performance overall was really great. I didn't really notice any hiccups or stuttering and performance on benchmarks is about the same as a snapdragon 855 and yes, that's not quite as good as a 55 plus or the 865. But when you can't really notice any stuttering or hiccups, does it really matter, and you're probably going to notice this a little in gaming? But if you're not a heavy mobile gamer? That probably won't be much of an issue. The p40 pro plus also has the same 4200 William hour. Battery and Huawei phones have traditionally had perfect battery life, and that's mostly because that Karen processor sips battery very slowly.

I got just under two days of battery life on the p40 Pro Plus, which is about unplugging in at 9:30 a. m. and having it die around 7:00 p. m. the next day, and that's fine I mean it's not quite as good as the LG v 60, but the B 40 Pro Plus charges at 40 watts with the included fast charger and when you can charge at a rate of 40 watts and get almost two day battery life, that's kind of the sweet spot now, one other upgrade that while we did make with the p40 Pro Plus over the normal p40 Pro is that you have the option of using a wireless 40 watt fast charger from while we know this is a proprietary charger.

You're going to have to buy it from Huawei. If you want to get the 40 watt fast charging, but if you get the regular P 40 Pro, you only have the option for twenty-seven ones. So, for all intents and purposes it looks the same. It feels mostly the same. You could probably go and watch our p4a pro review and get most of the gist of this phone.

But the big difference here is in the camera system, but before we get into that, we have to give a thanks to our sponsor the official Python certification bundle. So you're, probably stuck at home right now, like pretty much everyone these days, so you might as well learn programming. The Python certification model can help you go from absolute scratch to building practical apps for just $50. So if you're interested in learning more check out the link in the video description now, the thing that makes the Huawei p4u Pro pluses' camera system unique is the fact that it has true 10x optical zoom, and this is actually a huge deal. While we are able to build on the same mechanism in the Huawei P 30 Pro, which reflects light by 90 degrees in order to extend the effective focal length to the sensor and while we p40 Pro Plus, while we iterated on this a lot, and it's bouncing that light off of five different mirrors to increase that focal length now focal length is determined by the distance between the optical center of the lens.

That is the area where the lens can focus perfectly at infinity to the distance of the sensor and by bouncing the light off of multiple mirrors, you're, actually increasing the optical path that the light has to take to get to that sensor. So when you look in this lens, you're, not gonna, see a lens. You see a mirror and there's a multi mirror path that that light has to take to get to that sensor. It's a really cool piece of engineering, I love! When companies do this, so the question then becomes. How does this actually work in a reality, because it's an F 4.4 lens, which is to say it, doesn't have the widest aperture? It's going to have to artificially bump the ISO a little more in order to get the light you need and all in all, I would say it's pretty good ivory. The best way to test that 10x optical zoom would be to test it directly against the Samsung Galaxy s, 2000 ultra, because the Samsung Galaxy s, 20 ultra, also uses a similar prism mechanism, although it's just a little over 4x, not true optical 10x.

Looking at the two side-by-side I would definitely say that in most cases the Huawei beats out the Samsung pretty handed. It's definitely sharper, especially on things with hard edges like text, although in some circumstances the RUP processing on the Samsung can produce a much better image. It's definitely going to depend on what you're shooting and how that phone interprets that data and in most cases, data out of the wall way is definitely sharper. But if you're outside and need that extra boost in the shadows, Samsung will actually do a better job, which is pretty surprising for software AI. Now another thing that the wall EP 40, Pro Plus can do is zoom to up to a hundred X and that's something that the Samsung Galaxy has 20 Ultra was really excited about doing.

In fact, it's got a space zoom marker on the back of its lens, and when you compare 100 x EU on both of these phones, it's much more of a mix-up. They both look awful, just very blurry and very, very difficult to actually see anything now. Samsung did have a leg up in the fact that it's stabilization was a lot better. When zoomed in to 100x. We always did get better with an update that I had during my review time with the device, but it's still very, very wobbly when you're actually trying to get a shot.

Both Michael, Fisher and I also experienced this bug where, if you're zoomed into a hundred X, and then you take the shot, the actual image that comes out will be shifted slightly to the left. So it's actually hard to get a shot at 100, X zoom. So it's cool it's nice to have a camera that can zoom that much and has that big of a focal range. But what about the other cameras? Well, the main sensor on the Huawei p40 Pro Plus is a huge one over 1.2 an inch sensor that uses an AR, BYB filter array, and this means that it actually is using red, yellow and blue pixels instead of red, green and blue pixels. The reason they did this is that the spectrum of yellow light is much wider than the spectrum of green light and when you're working with just a few photons compared to the many photons that you're getting from larger cameras.

That lets a lot more light into a small sensor and, of course, that filter array performs really well just like. We saw in the Huawei P 30 Pro, especially in low-light performance you're, getting crazy, crazy, good low-light, even in areas that it's almost completely pitch black honestly I felt like the only light that was shining on my body was coming from the phone itself, and it still made the room. Look like it was pretty well lit. It's really, really good general imaging with the sensor is also perfect. Things had really nice sharpness, and they didn't feel like they had over dynamic range, where you lift the shadows too much, but I didn't notice that Huawei really likes to shift the hue of Reds more towards this, like pink or magenta color.

Here's a comparison between the galaxy s, 20 ultra and the Huawei P 40 Pro Plus, just to show you what I mean now, there's also a wide camera on the Huawei P 40 Pro Plus, which was also perfect. It had good sharpness and color. Reproduction I did see a weird color shift between this and the main sensor, though, where the wide sensor tended to shift a little more towards the yellow spectrum, which isn't really a huge problem, but I would have preferred to see more consistency between the lenses and then, of course, there is a 3x telephoto lens, and this allows Huawei to more consistently go from really wide to a 10x optical zoom, and it's really nice to have that. Full range now would have been cool to have a 5x optical telephoto zoom. Here but then they would have had to add another prism mechanism and that would have just taken more space on the front.

You've got a punch, hole, selfie camera, which some people love some people hate I personally like it now, these selfie cameras, 13 megapixels, and it also has autofocus, which is not something that we see in a lot of smartphones. Usually that's a fixed focus camera now. The other camera is an IR depth camera, so that can help for things like face, unlock and also with both mode. Overall quality of the front-facing camera was pretty good, especially in high light situations. It was very sharp with very good color, but when you get into lower light situations, it started to distort the color a bit, and it was just a little muddy, and it just didn't look quite nearly as good as you would get if you just took the photo with the back camera.

Ok, so with that all out of the way, how is the phone actually to use and as with most Huawei phones after the P30 Pro? It's rough? If you didn't know, while we got put on the entity list by the United States, which is to say, they're, not allowed to work with a lot of US companies- and that includes Google now, even if you don't like Google and you don't like using any of their apps, having no access to Google Play Services means that you can't use the Google Play Store and that's kind of the backbone and foundation of all Android smartphones. So to try to get around this. While we created an alternative, app store, called app gallery, and they're slowly trying to get people to bring their apps over to their proprietary app store for Huawei phones to their credit. They've got things like Microsoft, apps, and they've got Snapchat, and they've got zoom and telegram, but there's still a ton of apps that you would normally use every single day missing from app gallery. Apps I use every day like Twitter slack, Instagram and Spotify they're, not on App gallery and there's not really an indication of when they might be on App gallery now.

I was able to sort of get around this by making desktop versions of websites and for some websites they actually work. Just like the app in the mobile brow. So Instagram and Spotify look almost identical in the browser as they do in the actual app, but not having physical apps on a phone is really difficult and there are a ton of apps that look absolutely Castro seas in a web browser or just don't have a website at all, if you're, totally okay with not using that many apps on your phone, or you actually like wall Waze, apps that they have pre-installed on their phone, then go for it. But it's really hard for me to recommend a device that won't give you access to all the apps on the Google Play Store. So let's break it down on the wall, EP for you, pro plus you're, getting perfect, build quality, perfect cameras, perfect performance and superfast charging under any other circumstance.

This would be a very good phone which I could wholeheartedly recommend, but look. The reality is, our phones are just portals to absence services and the quality of a phone is determined by how well that phone can interact with those apps and services and when you can't interact with those services at all. What do you have a pocket camera now, if always able to fix its relationship with the United States and in effect Google in the next year or so, then, I'll probably go back to recommending their phones as long as they're still as good as this phone is? But until then you might want to check out some competition anyways guys. That was our review of the Huawei p40 prop last. Let me know what you think in the comment section down below I'll be sure to hop down.

There stay tuned for a lot more phone reviews coming very soon: it'll catch you in the next video.

Source : Android Authority