HUAWEI P40 PRO REVIEW: THERE’S A CATCH

HUAWEI P40 PRO REVIEW: THERE’S A CATCH

In a different 2020, I might be telling you that the Huawei P40 Pro is one among the simplest phones you'll buy. After all, it sees the Chinese telecoms giant at the peak of its hardware powers, delivering a tool that performs extremely well and leaves little off its spec sheet.

But the trade war President Trump is waging against China has expanded to single out Huawei specifically, placing the telecoms giant on the Entity List and banning most American companies from doing business with it. Whatever your views on the national security allegations, the results for Huawei’s phone business are clear: the corporate can’t ship new devices with Google services, including Google apps and therefore the Play Store. And, for a spread of reasons, this makes these phones total nonstarters for many people in most Western markets, not just the US.

For the sake of the historical document and technological interest, though, it’s worth taking a glance at Huawei’s latest flagship, the P40 Pro. Unless you reside in China and are embedded within the country’s unique mobile ecosystem, I can’t possibly recommend it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting piece of hardware.

GOOD STUFF

• Technically excellent camera
• Excellent curved display
• Strong performance and battery life

BAD STUFF

• No Google apps or services
• Anemic app ecosystem outside of China
• Poor speaker, no headphone jack

 Like Samsung with its Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series, Huawei has two flagship lines: the P series and therefore the Mate series. The P series is roughly analogous to the Galaxy S therein it’s the more mainstream, design-forward device, whereas the Mate series tends to be aimed toward power users, just like the Galaxy Note. Unlike Samsung, though, Huawei’s flagships look dramatically different to every other.

“They are dual flagships for Huawei — we attempt to keep them separate,” said Huawei designer Quentin Tang during a recent roundtable interview with reporters. “The Mate series represents our technology flagship, including the very latest advancements. The series looks at the sweetness we will create through science and technology. The P series is predicated on sensitivity — it’s like watching an ancient painting on the within of a cave as how people use it to portray feelings and emotions. It’s not about technology, it’s about emotion.”

Those are lofty, perhaps dubious words. But what they have a tendency to mean in practice is that the P series makes use of softer, rounder designs, and that’s certainly the case with the P40 Pro. Its key design feature is an OLED screen that subtly curves on all four sides, instead of just the left and right edges.

I don’t want to overstate the worth of this because it’s more of an aesthetic flourish than anything and won't work great during a case, but it really is sort of nice. Swiping up from rock bottom of the screen to unlock the phone or mention the multitasking menu is basically smooth, and once you’ve used the P40 Pro for a short time, those swipes start to feel unnecessarily obtrusive on other phones.

The screen also looks great. The curves are subtle on all four edges, even more so on the highest and bottom — accidental touches or visual distortion haven’t been issues on behalf of me on this phone. But the sunshine always seems to catch the screen’s edges in a beautiful way; head-on, the P40 Pro looks more like an amorphous mass of gloopy glowing pixels than a flat display board. The 2640 x 1200 resolution also looks like a sensible move; it's noticeably sharper than 1080p at this 6.6-inch size, but I’m unsure 1440p, like you’ll find on Samsung’s S20 line or the OnePlus 8 Pro, would be a big upgrade in practice. This is often also Huawei’s first phone with a high refresh rate display, at 90Hz.

In lately of nearly bezel-less displays, most phones distinguish themselves design-wise from the rear. That’s not the case with the P40 Pro — partly due to the unusually curved screen but mostly because its back panel is extremely boring. There’s a big camera bump with a Leica logo, and that’s about it. It doesn’t help that my review unit has an unflattering metallic gunmetal-style finish that picks up fingerprints like flames attract moths. Overall, I feel last year’s Mate 30 Pro may be a far more attractive device, with its aggressive curves and contrasting back panel: cause the Mate 40 Pro.

So, that camera bump. Huawei’s last few P series phones have offered breakthrough camera performance, and while there isn’t necessarily one standout feature with the P40 Pro, it acquits itself quite tolerably. On a purely technical level, I feel this is often the foremost impressive smartphone camera on the market.

The 1/1.28-inch 50-megapixel primary camera sensor is, as far as I’m aware, the most important available on a phone unless you count historical oddballs just like the Panasonic CM1 or the Nokia 808 PureView. It’s even larger and higher-resolution than the fabled Lumia 1020. Despite the massive physical size, Huawei is using dual phase-detection autofocus across the whole sensor, and therefore the results are excellent. Regular P40 Pro photos are extremely detailed with wide dynamic range, and therefore the camera feels snappy in action. Low-light shots look awesome even outside of the separate night mode, which honestly feels superfluous.

This alleyway, for instance , was almost completely coal black once I shot it within the P40 Pro’s regular shooting mode, which sometimes tells you to carry still for sharpening except for nowhere near as long because the night mode. Sure, it’s not perfectly sharp across the frame, but I would like to reiterate that I could see little or no of this with my actual eyes:

The combination of the larger sensor and f/1.9 lens delivers shallower depth of field than other phone cameras, though you won’t mistake the natural bokeh for that of a DSLR. Here’s a comparison between a photograph I took of an iPhone with the P40 Pro and one I took of the P40 Pro with a Sony RX100, a high-end compact camera with a bigger 1-inch sensor. I feel the P40 Pro acquits itself very well:

The 5x periscope zoom lens returns from the P30 Pro, though the sensor resolution has been upped to 12 megapixels. Huawei doesn’t have the unique zoom advantage it wont to, as companies like Oppo have deployed similar periscope modules, but the implementation here is nearly as good as any as you’ll find. Behold, this quick 10x snapshot of Fuji from my apartment. (I live about 75 miles faraway from Fuji.

Periscope telephoto cameras are still a rarity within the US market; it’s basically just the Galaxy S20 Ultra, which otherwise didn’t acquit itself so well within the camera department. The P40 Pro isn’t available within the US, of course, but I do want to reiterate that this is often a legitimately great feature when shipped as a part of a well-rounded camera system. It changes the way you think that about your phone camera.

The ultra-wide camera features a 1/1.54-inch 40-megapixel sensor. That’s bigger than the 40-megapixel primary sensor within the P30 Pro. The result's that the gulf in quality between the most camera and therefore the ultra-wide is far less pronounced on the P40 Pro than on most other phones. The catch, though, is that the ultra-wide is… well, less wide than most competitors, at around 18mm-equivalence compared to roughly 13mm on the iPhone 11. Here’s a comparison between the two:

This is presumably due to the constraints inherent to designing lenses for physically larger sensors. 18mm remains plenty wide for virtually any situation, but it’s something to think about if you would like the foremost warped perspective possible out of your ultra wide phone camera. I prefer Huawei’s trade-off. The P40 Pro photo above isn’t as wide, but its image quality is way better. Check out the iPhone’s muddy ground detail and purple fringing within the power lines.

I would not necessarily say that the P40 Pro automatically produces the foremost pleasing photos straight out of the camera, nor that it's a specific style. Its white balance metering are often a touch indecisive sometimes , giving images an unwanted red or green tint, and that I think the iPhone 11 and Google’s Pixel phones do a far better job at arising photos with a uniform look. But you nearly always get crunchy detail, balanced exposures, and enough dynamic range to play with albeit the colours aren’t nailed initially.

ALL OF THIS HARDWARE DISCUSSION IS ACADEMIC FOR WESTERN USERS

I don’t have many other complaints about the P40 Pro hardware. The battery life is superb, as Huawei is understood for, and therefore the Kirin 990 processor feels as fast because it did on the Mate 30. The haptic are good, and wireless charging is present, neither of which may be a given with Chinese flagship phones. The most important catch is with audio, which is handled by an unimpressive downward-firing speaker at rock bottom fringe of the phone. The shortage of a headphone jack isn’t exactly surprising, but you’d better have some good Bluetooth buds or cans if you would like to concentrate to anything on this phone in the least.

But look, all of this hardware discussion is only academic for Western users. Unless you exist in a particularly specific software bubble, you ought to not buy this phone. The P40 Pro doesn’t ship with Google apps. It doesn’t have the Play Store. It doesn’t even have a preloaded maps app.

It does have Huawei’s own App Gallery, which may be a threadbare app store. It also has various ways to put in apps from outside that store, including a way called Phone Clone where you transfer apps from a second device. None of them are reliable; I can’t get Twitter to launch on the P40 Pro through Phone Clone, for instance, though it had been fine on the Mate 30 Pro. Sometimes apps like Uber won’t work albeit you'll run them thanks to their baked-in reliance on Google Play Services. I really like this phone’s hardware, but not enough to leap through its many software hoops. Often, those hoops prove impossible to leap through.

I wrote about this extensively after using the Mate 30 Pro for a short time, and that I wondered if Huawei would spin some deals for the P40 Pro to form it more usable for a mainstream Western audience. As far as I can tell, basically nothing has changed. If you would like to read more about what its wish to use a Huawei phone without Google, I encourage you to read my earlier piece. But rock bottom line is that it almost certainly isn’t well worth the effort. You’ll use this as your main phone, sure. You could’ve used a Windows Phone in 2015, too. I might not have recommended that you simply do either.

Huawei did what it could with the P40 Pro, and that I commend it for the trouble. This is often nearly as good a piece of mobile hardware as you’ll find in 2020, and if you are doing happen to measure in China where Google’s services are irrelevant, it’s a top-tier flagship experience. Unfortunately, hardware isn’t all that matters, albeit the P40 Pro’s critical software failing within the remainder of the planet is essentially out of Huawei’s control.

Huawei now makes excellent phone cameras, excellent phone processors, and really good phones generally. I’d be quite happy to use this as my primary phone if it supported the apps I want to use.

It doesn’t. It probably doesn’t support the apps you would like to use, either. And Huawei is not any doubt conscious of that. This makes the P40 Pro’s global launch a singular phone release in 2020, one that represents more of a technological flex than a significant consumer offering. I admit that I’m impressed by the flex. But if you’re reading this during a Western country, don’t buy this phone.

AGREE TO CONTINUE: HUAWEI P40 PRO

Every smart device now requires you to comply with a series of terms and conditions before you'll use it — contracts that nobody actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one among these agreements. But we’re getting to start counting exactly what percentage times you've got to hit “agree” to use devices once we review them since these are agreements most of the people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

The P40 Pro causes you to comply with Huawei’s EULA to line up the phone, and you’ll also got to grant permissions to the browser, phone, storage, camera, messaging, contacts, and calendar apps all directly so as to line a Huawei ID for App Gallery and cloud services.

HMS Core, which is analogous to Google Play Services, has many optional permissions that come up during the setup process, including settings for personalized ads and automatic updates. Huawei further prompts you to permit or deny several “enhanced services” for things like Wi-Fi network switching, local content searches, and weather data, and therefore the phone also asks you to opt in to Huawei’s user experience improvement program, location services, and another analytics sharing tool.

There’s tons to read during the P40 Pro’s setup, but most of it's optional beyond the initial EULA and therefore the permissions for App Gallery. Many of the opt-ins are for things that other phones would only prompt you for after you attempted to use related functionality post-setup.