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Huawei P40 Pro review: would, should and could be the best, if...
by Dominik Bärlocher
Huawei Mate 40 Pro review: Huawei (almost) achieves the impossible
21.1.2021
Huawei’s fighting. Not for survival, but for the crown. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is supposed to return the dethroned manufacturer to the position of market leader. Will it work? Maybe. The camera is top-notch and the Mate is surprisingly suitable for everyday use.
The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is not the best phone I’ve got my hands on in 2020, but it’s definitely the most interesting. No other phone is as well-equipped in terms of hardware and as eager to experiment as the Mate 40 Pro.
And the Huawei Mate 40 Pro actually manages to be quite suitable for everyday use, despite the lack of Google Services. But it’s definitely not fully there, yet.
So, let's take a look at this flagship that’s made for enthusiasts.
The Kirin 9000: bam!
The Huawei Mate 40 Pro’s system-on-a-chip (SoC) is called the Kirin 9000. It’s Huawei’s newest, fastest and best chipset to date. And the specs sound cool:
- 5 nm design, so it’s energy efficient
- 15.3 million transistors, which is a great sales pitch
- native 5G, so it has fast data transfer and is future-proof
- The neural processing unit (NPU) is «integrated with an embedded Kirin ISP 6.0 for camera functions», so tech nerds have a cool phrase to throw around
In short, Huawei wants you to know that the Kirin 9000 is the best and strongest and absolutely best thing ever. To this end, Huawei’s marketing department has pulled out all the stops and is pounding out Apple-esque phrases.
So, we have a damn strong platform and soon enough, we’ll have significantly more efficient software to go with it.
What’s all this power for, then?
I have no clue, but one thing is for sure: it’ll be freaking awesome.
The screen and its marketing promises... I call bullshit
Huawei claims it also paid special attention to the Mate 40 Pro’s screen. The Amoled display has a resolution of 2772 x 1344 pixels and 88-degree curved edges. And, in not quite as capital letters, Huawei is kinda sorta also proud of the fact that it’s a 90 Hz display – that means it displays 90 images per second. Normal smartphone screens stick to 60 Hz, while flagships refresh the image 120 times per second.
So, the Mate 40 Pro falls exactly between standard and flagship. It goes unnoticed. The frame rate of 90 frames per second is so inconspicuous that it could just as well be 60.
The manufacturer knows this, of course. This is exactly where it pays to take a hard look at marketing speak. Because no matter what a Richard Yu or Tim Cook says at a press conference or event, there's always something he doesn't say. The Mate 40's screen is the perfect example of this.
The screen is supposedly built this way because to be more power-efficient than the 120 Hz displays found in the competition. This sounds logical and is also technologically correct. But after two seconds of thought, the argument falls apart. A simple rule-of-thumb estimate suggests that the better screen shouldn’t have too negative an effect on battery life:
Still, the display is nicely calibrated. But the fact remains that when enthusiasts talk about Huawei, they rarely talk about beautiful displays (that’s usually where Samsung comes in). The camera is typically the topic of focus.
The camera: here we go
It took about two hours for the Huawei Mate 40 Pro to replace the P40 Pro as my on-the-go camera. For elaborate photos, I still rely on my Sony a7sii. But for snapshots on road trips or the like, there’s no question: the Mate 40 Pro is my go-to. This is despite the fact that the Mate 40 Pro's camera is not even the best in the Mate series. There’s actually another, better version than the one you can find in Swiss stores.
The camera system on the Mate 40 Pro looks like this:
- 50 MP, f/1.9, wide-angle lens
- 12 MP, f/3.4, 5x optical zoom, periscope lens with optical image stabilisation
- 20 MP, f/1.8, ultra wide-angle lens
And now, what the non-enthusiast in Switzerland doesn’t know: there’s a Pro+ version, too. The camera system on the Mate 40 Pro+ looks like this:
- 50 MP, f/1.9, wide-angle lens with optical image stabilisation
- 12 MP, f/2.4, 3x optical zoom, telephoto lens with optical image stabilisation
- 8 MP, f/4.4, 10x optical zoom, periscope telephoto lens with optical image stabilization
- 20 MP, f/2.4, ultra wide-angle lens
- Time-of-flight (ToF) depth sensor
However, the Pro+ version won’t be launched in Switzerland, since both the Pro and Pro+ are being manufactured in limited quantities. It’s a lame explanation, but there’s little we can do about it. Thanks, Huawei.
There's «Cat», where the contrast and black levels are pushed so that every hair on the furry ball is as recognizable as possible...
.. «Snow», where the shades of grey are more refined and the image is slightly desaturated...
.. «Waterfall», where shutter speed is shortened so that every drop of water is made visible...
.. «Blue Sky», where the sky is made blue. Very blue.
There’s a lot more where that came from. The camera briefly identified the feline beast as «Panda» before deciding on «Cat». Then there’s sunrise, sunset, food, humans (portrait), car and so on. It’s impressive and delivers impressive images. It's no wonder the compact camera is joining the ranks of extinct forms of technology (like the fax), when a smartphone can do so much with what seems like so little effort.
Night mode, meanwhile, remains largely unchanged. While technologically impressive, the image is unrealistically overdone. But it could be and has been much worse.
We take our little mascot, known as Horny the Pink Stuffed Unicorn, and wrap garland lights around him. Then we put him in the darkest possible pile of branches. The theory: the camera can’t recognise Horny and doesn’t see any lines in the background that it could interpret as buildings or nature.
Here’s the result in three pictures:
Close up, the artificial intelligence doesn’t recognise any scene, person or animal. In other words, we get an image that shows the camera's performance with only minimal software trickery. Since the shot is well lit, the camera doesn't have much trouble detecting branches, unicorns and lights.
At a distance of about five metres, the camera fails. It no longer recognises the stuffed unicorn. The digital image stabilisation also fails. We get a blurred image with a white blurb of light in the centre. The camera didn’t find anything to optimise. And you could see even less on the phone screen right before the shot.
The Google Thing and the surprising suitability for everyday use
Huawei's replacement products are «Huawei Mobile Services» and «App Gallery».
And a lot has happened with their development. The replacement APIs have always fulfilled their purpose so far; they do their thing in the background of the system, unnoticed. Good. As it should be. It just means there's just not much to say about it in a review. It works, cool, moving on.
All in all, you have a phone that never gets boring. There’s always something going on. Perhaps a feature that’s being actively improved on, or a question to which the answer might only be revealed in a successor model. But above all, there's one thing: loads and loads of performance. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is a true workaholic. It’s almost invincible when it comes to processing a workload.
And on the software side? That's where it gets exciting. For the first time since the sanctions, the Huawei is a phone that I would deem usable in the every day, even if still with limitations. The features are there, whether it's a weather app or a cloud solution for backing up your pictures. It's just not yet as unified and fluid as a modern software ecosystem should be.
If you want a phone that, above all, takes damn good pictures and you're willing to put in some minimal effort to sync the resulting data with the rest of your stuff, go for it. Huawei has pulled off an impressive coup: within two years, it launched an ecosystem, all while maintaining a leading position on the market, and surprising the world with the design of its phones.
Bam. Done. I like the thing. I like it a lot. And I’m convinced that the Mate 50, probably with HarmonyOS, will finally be the long-awaited, full-fledged competitor to Google.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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