mate10
Huawei Mate 10 Pro review
The Mate 10 Pro is very pretty. Huawei has minimized the edges around the screen considerably, with thin slivers running down both sides of the 6-inch screen, much like the LG V30 and the Samsung Galaxy S8. The 18:9 screen dominates about 80 percent of the phone’s front panel, which means it’s not as bezel-free as the iPhone X or the Xiaomi Mi Mix.
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Supercar-levels of attractiveness await when you flip the phone over. It’s like the Mate 10 Pro has been cut from the body of a futuristic concept vehicle. Heat-treated glass for extra toughness curves at each side and covers the metal body, and a subtle but distinctive stripe surrounds the camera lenses. It’s smooth, cool to the touch, and catches the light in a beautifully eye-catching way. We love the blue model, but couldn’t resist our titanium review unit. It also comes in an equally delicious mocha brown. The color line-up for the Mate 10 Pro makes it hard to pick the best one; they’re all so tempting.
It’s not too slippery in the hand, but the curved body does tend to slide about on flat surfaces when placed face-up. A clear silicone case comes in the box, and we recommend using it or another case, not just for drop protection but also to avoid scratches on the glass body.
Supercar-levels of attractiveness await when you flip the phone over.
Everyday usability is enhanced by little things like the textured power button, which makes it easy for your finger to find without looking, and the excellent placement of the fingerprint sensor. This may depend on the size of your hand, but for us, it was perfect. Huawei’s fingerprint sensor is also one of the best in the business. It’s ridiculously fast, and accuracy is second to none, only being foiled by wet fingers. The slight camera lens bump assists with finding the sensor too, as you feel the very edge if your finger is slightly too far up the body.
Huawei has added IP67 water resistance to the Mate 10 Pro. It’s a welcome addition that offers a little peace of mind. If there is a problem, it’s that Huawei added water-resistance by dropping the 3.5mm headphone socket for the Mate 10 Pro. A dongle is included in the box, ready to plug into the USB Type-C charging port. Not ideal. What’s worse is Huawei uses Bluetooth 4.2 over the newer Bluetooth 5 standard, which offers improved range and data transfer speeds. It’s a baffling decision, and if Samsung can have a better water-resistance rating as well as headphone jack, so should Huawei.
The Huawei Mate series has previously been less attractive than Huawei’s P-series phones. Not any more. The Mate 10 Pro is the best looking phone Huawei has produced, and it’s easily among the best of the year from any manufacturer.
Colorful display
The Mate 10 Pro’s body may be compact — it’s smaller than an iPhone 8 Plus — but the screen measures 6-inches with an 18:9 aspect ratio, meaning it’s taller and thinner. It’s an OLED panel, like the new iPhone X, with a 2,160 x 1,080 pixel resolution, and it looks great. Despite the resolution not being as high as the non-Pro Mate 10, it’s still sharp, detailed, and the colors are stunning. It’s an odd decision, but we haven’t found ourselves missing a 2,560 x 1,440 pixel resolution.
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Huawei has added HDR10 support to the Mate 10 Pro, and just like many modern televisions, it’s ready to enhance the color, black levels, and detail in compatible movies and TV shows. The problem is HDR10 mobile content isn’t widespread, and Netflix hasn’t added the Mate 10 Pro to its supported devices list yet, so finding content is a challenge.
It’s sharp, detailed, and the colors are stunning.
This isn’t a small phone, so using the screen with one hand and a thumb isn’t an easy task. The height of the screen makes reaching up for the notification shade a challenge without some jiggling around. The good thing is you can swipe down on the fingerprint scanner to bring down notifications, though this setting is off by default.
The screen’s sensitivity is excellent. We didn’t have any problems playing games, and using the interface. Typing is only a pleasure after installing Google’s Gboard. Huawei installed SwiftKey as the default option, and we found it frustrating to use, and less intuitive than Google’s keyboard found on many Android phones.
All about artificial intelligence
The new Kirin 970 octa-core processor drives the Mate 10 Pro, and performance excels. It’s the presence of the Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, that’s the headline grabber, as it’s purely to power complex artificial intelligence processing on device, rather than in the cloud. Although many of its benefits speed things up behind the scenes, you’ll see the NPU working in the camera and a translation app.
Running some benchmark apps, we can see how the Kirin 970 performs:
Benchmarks are great for making comparisons — the Mate 10 Pro beats the Galaxy S8, but not the OnePlus 5, for example — but it’s not always illustrative of real world performance. The previous Kirin 960 was highly capable, and the Kirin 970 is a worthy successor. We played games like Happy Hop, Reckless Racing 3, and Arena of Valor, without any issues. The phone didn’t get hot, we didn’t experience any slowdown or stuttering, and it did everything we asked, right when we asked it.
How about the NPU? Huawei talked a lot about its benefits at the Kirin 970’s launch, but in most everyday situations you probably won’t realize it’s there. It works with the Kirin 970 to increase efficiency, and keep your phone running optimally so it doesn’t succumb to slowdown issues as the device ages. We can’t judge this on the Mate 10 Pro yet, but the Mate 9 — which has similar features without the NPU — is still performing well after nearly a year with on-and-off use.
One of the ways you can see the NPU in action is to open Microsoft’s translator app. Translating something through the camera, with voice, or via typing, all happens much faster than if the app relied solely on the cloud. Information is processed locally, rather than sending it to a server and retrieving it. While this speeds up translation, it doesn’t improve it, so you get what the app thinks is correct. Results vary depending on the language, but this isn’t the fault of the Mate 10 Pro or the NPU.
The Kirin 970 and its NPU have considerable potential for the future, and Huawei is putting massive resources into its development. At the moment this hasn’t been fully realized, and probably isn’t something most people are going to notice in action. This may change in the future when developers start using its abilities in apps and services made for the phone. It’s therefore hard to know how it’s enhancing the phone at the moment; but it’s certainly not doing it any harm.
Superb camera
Huawei continues its partnership with Leica on the Mate 10 Pro, and has also added in some artificial intelligence smarts through the Neural Processing Unit. The rear camera is made up of two sensors: A 12-megapixel, f/1.6 aperture, RGB color lens with optical image stabilization, plus a 20-megapixel, f/1.6 aperture monochrome lens. Working together they offer a 2x optical zoom, a bokeh portrait mode, while using the monochrome lens separately you get amazing black and white images without the need for a filter.
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
The results are spectacular. Day or night, sunny or overcast, inside or outside, the pictures the Mate 10 Pro takes are stunning. Huawei has tasked the NPU with image recognition duties on the camera, so it understands if you’re pointing it at a sunny scene, an animal, or food, for example. It’s instant, and it tweaks the settings accordingly without you needing to open the manual Pro mode. While the technology is very cool, and the pictures are excellent, you never know what difference the NPU is truly making. We do like seeing the indicator suddenly pop up showing the scene setting, and it never got it wrong. It’s also hard to argue with the results, and we’re always pleased to see an innovative software feature that makes life easier.
The Mate 10 Pro’s camera is spectacular.
Monochrome mode now has a bokeh mode, and it’s offers great results. The 8-megapixel f/2.0 front camera takes bokeh shots that — in the right lighting, with the NPU’s assistance and some patience — takes attractive selfies. The built-in photo editing suite is comprehensive, and we like the hybrid zoom feature.
There are a few issues. The camera turns itself off after a short while, requiring a screen tap to wake it up again, but it often happens when you’re trying to frame a shot. It’s annoying. There’s also a mode that takes short videos called Moving Pictures, like Apple’s Live Photo, and it’s really superfluous. Still, we’re nitpicking. The Mate 10 Pro’s camera is brilliant, and you’ll want to use it at every opportunity.
Android 8.0 and EMUI 8 software
The Mate 10 Pro runs Android 8.0 Oreo with Huawei’s EMUI 8.0 user interface over on top, and it also packs Google’s November Android Security Patch. All this means it’s just about as up-to-date as you can get right now. It’s not likely to last long, as Huawei’s track record with Android software updates isn’t great. While EMUI may get some attention, don’t expect Android itself to get the same love as you’ll find on a Google Pixel 2 phone, for example.
If you can live with this, the EMUI experience is greatly improved over older phones, and has been since the introduction of EMUI 5.1 on the Huawei P9, P10, and Mate 9. It’s faster, and easier to use, despite Huawei’s flourishes. Enter the system settings and the options list is minimal but a little confusing, and although you can change the overall theme, EMUI’s icon design is often jarring and inconsistent. We’d rather have stock Android icons, around which many app’s base their own icons on, giving the UI a more consistent overall look.
That said, the wallpapers are pretty, and we like the standard Magazine lock screen wallpaper that changes each time you hit the sleep/wake key. Google Assistant works as expected, and you can delete almost all the pre-installed non-essential apps. Huawei’s EMUI is closer to Samsung’s TouchWiz and LG’s UI than ever before, but Huawei can’t resist adding in “features” to cure problems that aren’t there. Namely, the Navigation Dock: A little virtual joystick that controls navigation. The Android keys everyone is used to work perfectly well. All the Navigation Dock does is give you something new to learn, but we do like the way it makes it possible to have a full-screen display all the time.
It’s not all bad news. App icons get Android Oreo’s little blobs telling you the app has new notifications. Split screen works well, and the implementation is logical and easy to understand without looking for assistance. Another great feature is Pocket PC, where all you need is a USB Type-C to HDMI cable to have a full-screen experience on a computer monitor or TV. It’s like Samsung DeX, but without the pricey dock. We’ll have to do more testing to see how well this works.
Battery and charging
Huawei has completely removed battery anxiety.
Huawei has worked some magic on the lithe Mate 10 Pro. Inside is a massive 4000mAh battery that has lasted us two full days between charges. Huawei has completely removed battery anxiety, and that’s a rarity these days, even with other smartphones with relatively large batteries such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. There’s plenty of software trickery making this possible, and power management has evolved into a true Huawei speciality.
Charging is also spectacularly fast, zipping to full in about 90 minutes using Huawei’s proprietary SuperCharge technology, which does mean you’ll always need the specific charger and USB cable to make it work.
Price, availability, and warranty
This is not a cheap smartphone. Huawei is playing with the big boys not only in terms of making a winning smartphone, but also in charging a lot for it. In Europe it’s going to be 800 euros, or around $945; but the U.S. price hasn’t been confirmed yet. In the U.K. it’s sold through Carphone Warehouse for an unlocked price of 700 British pounds, with a November 17 delivery date.
The warranty in the U.K. covers the phone for two years, and the battery for six months. If you break it by accident, the warranty won’t cover it. Should you need to get the phone repaired or replaced, you’ll need to visit a Huawei service centre. When the phone is properly announced for the U.S. — and it will be — we’ll know more about the local warranty.
Huawei Mate 10 Pro Compared To Our Take
Huawei gets the design, camera, screen, and battery exactly right on the Mate 10 Pro, while the NPU and AI smarts show promise for the future. It’s an exceptional all-round smartphone package we highly recommend.
Are there better alternatives?
Huawei has produced its best smartphone in a year when every other manufacturer has also stepped up its game, making competition really tough. The LG V30 is LG’s best phone yet, the Galaxy Note 8 is supremely capable and has a brilliant camera, just like the Pixel 2 XL, and the HTC U11. The iPhone 8 Plus may have been overshadowed by the iPhone X, but both are excellent smartphones worth your money. It’s impossible not to recommend the cheaper OnePlus 5 too. What a year for smartphones.
Pretty much every other flagship smartphone released in 2017 is a worthy alternative to the Mate 10 Pro. Not because the Mate 10 Pro is bad, just because it and everything else is so good.
How long will it last?
The Mate 10 Pro has IP67 water resistance, so it’ll survive a light dowsing, but not prolonged immersion in water. The body is made of glass — Gorilla Glass 5 — and is fragile like all glass phones. Put it in a case if you’re clumsy, or care about keeping the finish looking its best. The software is right up-to-date now, but it won’t stay that way for long, and Huawei isn’t fast at releasing new Android versions. This could leave your phone vulnerable to security problems, and the only way to guarantee updates is to buy a Google Pixel 2 phone.
Outside of the software, the hardware is cutting edge, and will easily last you through a two-year contract and beyond. Additionally, the real power and benefits of the NPU will come into play over time, as more apps and services begin to utilize its ability, so the Mate 10 Pro may actually improve with age.
Should you buy it?
Yes, and for once you can without using an importer, because Huawei will sell the Mate 10 Pro in the U.S.. The OLED screen is beautiful, the camera is fantastic, there’s masses of power, the battery lasts for a couple of days, and it’s damn good-looking too. Go on, treat yourself.
Huawei Mate 10 Pro review: Beauty and brains, but a questionable bargain
Huawei isn't a widely known name in the US market, but that hasn't stopped the Chinese company from becoming the second largest smartphone maker on the planet. As its fortunes have risen, so has the quality of the hardware. Last year's Mate 9 was a reliable phone, and Huawei's revamped Nougat version of Android eliminated many of the pain points from its past devices.
Now, we've got the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro on the horizon. The Mate 10 Pro, which is the phone we'll be talking about today, is the more expensive of the two. Despite being called "Pro," it lacks some of the features power users have come to expect like a microSD card, headphone jack, and 1440p display. Can sleek design and Huawei's custom neural network processor make up for that? Maybe a bit, but it's hard to see the Mate 10 Pro competing with phones like the Note 8.
Design and display
Huawei has hopped on the glass phone bandwagon, but it's not a functional change a la Apple—this phone does not support wireless charging. The back panel is glass just for aesthetic reasons. I'm not necessarily a fan of glass phones, but this one does look pretty nice (except for the fingerprints it picks up as soon as you touch it). The back is a single piece of glass that's curved on all four sides. There's also a strip of reflective foil under the glass in a strip that surrounds the cameras. Huawei made a phone that's very comfortable to hold (with IP67), but oh my god, the fingerprints.
The fingerprint sensor is in a small recess directly below the cameras. I like that the two lenses and the fingerprint sensor are all lined up right in the middle of the back panel. Huawei also has the dual flash on one side of the cameras, and a matching autofocus window on the other side. Symmetry is good. I've come to expect good quality fingerprint sensors from Huawei, and this one delivers. Even the lightest touch for just a moment is enough for the phone to recognize my fingerprint, and the phone unlocks instantly. It's even faster than OnePlus phones. I know that sounds like a strange metric, but OP's fingerprint sensors have been great in recent years.
On the bottom edge is the lone port, a USB Type-C. Instead of a headphone jack, you get a digital adapter for your 3.5mm devices. The sound quality coming from the included adapter sounds fine to me—it's very middle-of-the-road for smartphone audio and similar to other Huawei phones I've used. The bottom of the phone is also where you'll find the speaker. This one gets the job done, but I don't think it's a particularly good speaker. It doesn't get very loud, and when you get anywhere close to maximum volume, the distortion makes music unlistenable. The speaker is also in the perfect spot to be blocked by your finger while holding the phone. That's not a problem exclusive to Huawei, of course.
On top of the phone is a somewhat baffling feature—an IR blaster. It seems odd to drop features people expect in a high-end phone but keep the IR blaster. I'm sure the IR blaster will make some people very happy, though.
On the left side is the SIM tray. I would not usually bother calling attention to it, but this one supports two SIM cards, and both of them can be LTE. On the opposite side are the buttons, which are also made of metal and feel solid in the frame.
Left: Mate 10 Pro, Right: Mate 9
The regular Mate 10 has a 1440p LCD, but this phone uses an entirely different display; it's a different shape and resolution. The front of the Mate 10 Pro has slim bezels on all sides of the new 6-inch 18:9 OLED panel. The corners aren't rounded off like a lot of other phones, but that doesn't affect usability. The display still dominates the front of the phone. There's barely enough space on the bottom bezel to squeeze in the Huawei logo. They found a way, though.
The OLED has a resolution of 2160x1080. So, it's a slightly taller 1080p. The resolution is lower than the regular Mate 10, but it is OLED. As we've all come to know, OLED quality varies quite a bit. This is a good overall panel with only minor color shifting at angles, and the colors are calibrated to be vibrant out of the box. There's a more natural "normal" mode in settings. I'm not sure if it's sRGB, but it looks close.
Brightness levels are average for a modern OLED, but it doesn't get as bright as Samsung's latest phones. It's bright enough, and the low brightness is sufficiently dark to use in a dimly lit room without blinding yourself. However, there's some noticeable smearing in the transition from black pixels to colored ones. It looks to me like last year's Samsung OLED tech.
Cameras
Huawei is again using a dual camera array on this year's phone. The Mate 10 Pro has a 20MP monochrome sensor and a 12MP RGB sensor. There's optical stabilization only on the 12MP sensor, but both have a respectable f/1.6 aperture. By default, the camera takes 12MP images. However, the camera app blends data from the RGB and monochrome sensors when you snap a photo. That means you can take 20MP shots with color. The drawback is that some of the camera's special features don't work in that mode. In 12MP mode, you have the option of 2x zoom "lossless" zoom. It uses the higher-resolution 20MP sensor to essentially zoom and crop to 12MP.
I'm extremely impressed with the quality of photos from the Mate 10 Pro. It excels at taking quick snapshots in moderate light, which is what most people are doing with their phone cameras. In most situations, I'd place it up there with Samsung and Google as one of the best smartphone cameras I've ever used. It pulls in a lot of light to make photos in dim settings usable, and captures are fast enough that you don't get too much blurriness. The OIS on the 12MP sensor helps there. White balance looks very accurate, and focusing is almost Samsung-fast, too.
It's not all good news, though. I have noticed some noise in black and almost black areas of photos, which I think is an issue that can be addressed in software. Some other photos in low light come out looking a bit over-processed and almost like a painting. This is something I've seen on LG phones over the years, but less so lately.
Outdoor shots on the Mate 10 Pro are good as well, but they're not exactly leading the pack. My main issue with this camera is HDR is a completely separate mode, and it disables a lot of the camera's other capabilities when it's on. This isn't the magical HDR processing Google has on its phone or even the slightly less impressive version from Samsung. Without HDR, the Mate 10 Pro tends to blow out some brighter areas. However, the Mate 10 Pro HDR shots come with slightly more shutter lag and no option to zoom or do AI analysis.
Ah, yes. The AI features. Huawei is making a big fuss over the neural network processor built into the Kirin 970 SoC. Using the on-device AI engine, Huawei has made the camera able to recognize what sort of objects are in your viewfinder. This all happens on the device, and it's fast. I can point it at my dog, and the camera correctly identifies him as a dog. Point it at a page of text, and it IDs the text. Food? Yep, it usually knows what that looks like, too. Okay, so that's basically a fun tech demo, but what can you do with that info? The camera applies different post-processing settings to the image based on what it sees. I don't know if this is really making a difference, but I do like most of the photos I get from this camera.
Battery and performance
Most phones are shipping with a chip from Qualcomm or MediaTek, but Huawei uses its own Kirin SoCs in many phones. The Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro debut the new Kirin 970, which consists of four ARM Cortex A73 cores at 2.36GHz and four ARM Cortex A53 cores at 1.8GHz. There's also a Mali G72 GPU with 12 cores. These are all reference designs, but the neural processing unit (NPU) is a completely custom core intended for machine learning and neural network applications. Since this is a new chip, I've got a few benchmarks below.
Benchmarks only tell part of the story, though. What you really want to know is how the phone feels in daily use. In a word: fast. The Mate 10 Pro is extremely responsive: apps open quickly, everything remains in memory as it should, and multitasking is instantaneous. There's no hesitation on the quick-switch multitasking gesture like there is on a lot of other phones. Even next to a phone like the Pixel 2 XL, the Mate 10 Pro can hold its own.
I've always been pleased with Huawei's phones when it comes to battery life, and the Mate 10 Pro continues that tradition. Everyone's battery life varies based on usage, so here's a quick rundown of how I used this phone. I have three Google accounts syncing to the phone, and it was always connected to a wearable device of some sort. My usage consisted of a lot of messaging and email, some gaming, video streaming, and listening to audio over Bluetooth. Under these conditions, I used the phone heavily for a day and a half and saw well over seven hours of screen time. I would classify this as solidly above average battery life.
Huawei has also done some sort of magic with the Kirin 970 SoC to reduce power consumption in idle mode. I left this phone sitting overnight, and the battery didn't lose even a single percentage point. With lighter usage, the Mate 10 Pro could probably last you the better part of a week on a charge. It's a 4,000mAh battery, but this is still impressive.
When it does come time to recharge, the Mate 10 Pro comes with a Super Charge adapter. This plug supports 4.5v and 5A for more than 20W of juice. I'm happy to report you don't need to use that hardware to fast-charge the phone. A USB-PD charger like the one shipping with the Pixels also charges the Mate 10 Pro at an accelerated rate—I'm seeing the full 18W speed from the Pixel 2 adapter.
Software
The Mate 10 Pro launches with Android 8.0 Oreo along with EMUI 8. Huawei skipped a few versions of EMUI there, which is supposed to be in recognition of how much has changed. Really though, it's probably just to match the Android version number. There are still some rough edges in EMUI, but overall it's in a much better place than it was a few years ago.
A lot of the good things are just sticking around from the Nougat revamp of EMUI. The OS doesn't kill apps in the background every time you turn off the screen, and you don't have to babysit apps just to get notifications. Huawei has learned its lesson there. There are also plenty of handy options for the status bar like showing/removing the carrier name (you might want that for dual-SIM reasons), network speed, battery percent location, and more. Some devices offer more customization, but I think Huawei strikes a good balance between power and usability.
The notifications and quick settings support all the usual features like quick reply, snoozing, and custom settings tiles. The rounded notification items look a bit odd to me, but they behave exactly as they should. I only wish I could say the same for the lock screen. Huawei is still obsessed with the Magazine unlock, which shows you a new picture every time you wake up the phone. Your notifications will only appear on the lock screen once. If you unlock, those notification items won't show up when you look at the lock screen next—you can't even pull down the notification shade without unlocking. One bright spot here: Huawei has made media notifications persist across unlocks, which was not true on the Nougat build of EMUI.
Huawei still includes knuckle gestures on the Mate 10 Pro, which it had on the Mate 9 also. I know this sounds goofy, but I actually use and like this feature. You can knock on the screen twice with your knuckle to take a screenshot or draw a line across the middle to open split-screen mode. You can even draw letters on the screen with your knuckle to launch the app of your choosing. For example, draw a "C" to open the camera. I just wish knuckle gestures worked when the screen was off.
Because this phone has an 18:9 screen, Huawei needed to make some allowances in the software for apps that don't scale correctly to the taller aspect ratio. Samsung, Essential, LG, and Google all have their own versions, and Huawei is closest to Samsung's approach. Apps that don't fill the screen get a small bar at the bottom of the UI (see the benchmark screens above) that fills the unused space. You can tap that bar to force the app into full-screen (zooming and cropping). The settings also contain a menu where you can choose which apps run in full-screen by default. This is a totally reasonable way to do things.
Huawei's stock launcher has seen some substantial improvements in Oreo including a swipe-up app drawer and Google Feed integration on the far left panel. It also has launcher shortcuts, custom transitions, and several different grid options. I have two qualms here: One, the widget picker is arduous to use thanks to tiny previews and no quick scroll. Second, the launcher is jerky when swiping over to the Google panel. These are both things that can be fixed, but I expect a little more refinement from a flagship phone.
While Huawei has learned some lessons from past mistakes, it still insists on cramming the phone full of unnecessary apps. There's a Huawei calendar app, a calculator, a notes app, a music app, email, and so on. There are also a few third-party pre-loads like the Booking.com app. You can disable or uninstall most of this, so it's not the end of the world. Huawei points out its custom apps include special features like quick access to split-screen mode and a dual-pane UI in landscape mode. That's great, but I'm still not using Huawei's email client over Gmail.
Huawei also has an interesting "navigation dock" alternative to the standard navigation buttons. It's a floating widget that supports back (tap), home (long-press), and overview (press and drag to the side) actions. You can move it around wherever you want and reclaim the bottom of the display from the nav bar. It sounds good in theory, but long-pressing and dragging is a little more arduous than just tapping a button. I also can't figure out how to trigger Assistant while using this feature.
The Mate 10 Pro's AI-powered SoC is evident in the software experience, but not as much as I had hoped. Many of the applications for AI Huawei talks about aren't obvious to the end user. For example, it's supposed to improve battery life and make calls clearer. There's no way to turn off the AI core, so I can't say how much of a difference this makes. For now, the Mate 10's AI chops are very limited in scope. There's only one app shipping on the phone with support for the AI core—a special version of Microsoft Translator. This works well enough, but it doesn't seem faster or more accurate than Google Translate. You need to download languages for the Microsoft app to translate offline, just like Google Translate. When the chips are down, the translation experience is not noticeably better for running on a phone with a dedicated AI core.
The true value of Huawei's NPU could be in the future availability of third-party apps. The Kirin 970 will be able to run code developed for Google TensorFlow and Facebook's Caffe2. That doesn't do you much good for the time being.
There's one other fancy custom software feature we should talk about: projection mode. By plugging in a Type-C to HDMI cable, you can mirror the phone's UI on a larger display. When you do that, there's also the option to switch into desktop mode, which is much more interesting. The Mate 10 Pro does a pretty passable impersonation of Windows in this mode. You have a desktop, windowed apps, a taskbar, and a notification center. Unfortunately, not all apps work in the expanded desktop mode. It's mostly Huawei's apps, but the UI also makes allowances for Chrome and a few other third-party apps. This is all very impressive from a technical standpoint, but I don't know how much use it will actually see in real life.
Conclusion
The Mate 10 Pro looks great in photos with the sleek glass frame and small bezels. Yet, as a glass phone, it picks up fingerprints to a maddening degree. The decision to go with glass on this phone doesn't even have a functional component like wireless charging. Huawei is just doing glass because everyone else is doing glass. I wish the Mate 10 Pro was a metal phone like the Mate 9, but it's a pretty glass phone at least.
The Pro variant has a fingerprint sensor on the back, which is where I prefer them. Unlocking the phone with this sensor is essentially instantaneous—maybe the fastest I've ever used. At the same time, the Pro ditches Mate 10 features like the microSD card, 1440p display, and headphone jack. It's bizarre to call something "Pro" when it's actually missing features from the non-Pro. It is water-resistant, but is that enough to make up for the omissions? It's just very strange to make the cheaper phone more capable.
The display might not be 1440p, but it is OLED. It's a solid panel, too. There's very little color shift at off-angles, and the calibration is nice and punchy with the option to switch to a more natural mode. However, the lower resolution means you can see a bit of fuzziness if you look closely. You won't have the opportunity to be disappointed in VR because this phone lacks support for Daydream. I can't imagine why, but you can't install the app. You'll have to make do with being disappointed in Cardboard.
Huawei's dual camera setup performs admirably on the Mate 10 Pro. Shots in most lighting conditions are captured quickly and with impressive fidelity. I can trust this camera to produce good enough results that I don't need to take a bunch of backup photos. You have 2x lossless zoom, a capable portrait mode, and AI-powered scene recognition. However, Huawei's HDR capture is a separate mode that deactivates many of the camera's fancy features. Additionally, I'm not entirely sold on the value of the AI camera modes.
I don't know if the AI software features will amount to anything in the long term, but the Kirin 970 makes this phone very responsive. I never feel like I'm waiting for the phone to catch up, even after a restart or when it's installing apps. The battery life is fantastic as well. It uses almost no juice while asleep, and the screen-on time has been well above average during my testing.
I applaud Huawei for shipping this phone with Oreo—some other OEMs (which shall remain nameless) are still shipping phones with Android 7.1. Huawei has taken past criticism to heart. EMUI no longer kills apps every time you turn off the screen, and there are fewer unnecessary feature substitutions and UI tweaks. It's not perfect, though. I don't much care for how many apps Huawei has included on the phone. There's also some lag on the home screen that needs to be addressed.
The Mate 10 Pro is a good phone, but it's hard to say if it's a good deal yet. The phone is only available in a few markets so far, and it's priced at the equivalent of between $900 and $1,000. Huawei cannot sell this phone for almost $1,000 in the US—it has neither the name recognition nor the feature set to justify it. The Mate 10 Pro doesn't do anything significantly better than the similarly priced Note 8, and it's missing several features you get on that phone. The regular Mate 10 might prove to be a better deal for a few hundred less, but I hope Huawei can find a way to make this phone viable.
The Mate 10 Pro is flashy and brings portrait selfies
[MUSIC] The first thing you're gonna wanna know is the Huawei Mate 10 pro is a big beautiful device. Whose camera quality and zifty speed definitely stands up to other high end devices like the note 8, the lgb 30 and Apple's newest Iphone. The second thing you're gonna wanna know is that the price is right up there to This isn't the phone to buy if you're trying to save some cash. It's the phone you buy because you want a smooth running experience in a flashy package. You definitely get some slick hardware here. Like that six inch screen, it's got a really high resolution. There's also a sleek build. There's a large battery in here, and six gigabytes of ram, which is always welcome. The phone is waterproof, too. It's got those slim bezzels that are on trend right now. And a fast, accurate Fingerprint reader on the back. Wiley's definitely known for those. And of course it runs with Android 8.0 Oreo. What you don't get compared to those other phones is the Note 8 stylus the LG 30s extra video software and the iPhone 10s fancy face unlocking. But Wiley wants to make it's own mark, With its dual camera. And that is co-engineered with a respected camera for [UNKNOWN] like a bunch of the [UNKNOWN] phones before. So we know that we're getting some consistency here. There's a 12 mega pixel lens and a A 20 megapixel lens that only shoots in black and white. The camera has a dedicated monochrome mode that takes striking shots all on it's own. But the second lens also adds layers of detail to your regular color photo. Your going to find a portrait mode on here and in fact, you can even take selfie portraits. That's something a lot of phones don't do. You can take photos also with just that wide angle camera and you can dive into pro tools so you can fine tune your shots. One interesting addition for the camera is what Huawei calls it's A.I. processor and that automatically recognizes your scene and adjusts the settings. So you point the lens at food and bam you are on food mode. The same with taking shots of landscapes or of text, like the back of my business card. The idea is that you will save time with setting up and editing shots. Here are other two things that I kind of like. From the lock screen, you can double press the volume button to launch the camera and double press again to take a quick pic. You can also get rid of those three typical android navigation buttons and replace them with one on screen button that you can drag around and use for everything. So it can save space if you want to use more of the screen. The ten pro comes in two colors A titanium-ish black gray shade and a shiny brown color that is actually really nice even though it sounds kinda boring. It's not. The phone isn't available everywhere in the world like in the US so you will have to check wow ways website or your local retailer for availability. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
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