Huawei P40 Pro
The P40 Pro has superb cameras, but it’s hampered by its software.
This is the best-looking phone Huawei has ever released. It feels premium in the hand, and it uses similar materials to other top-end phones you can buy right now.
The P40 Pro features what Huawei calls a ‘Quad-curve Overflow Display’, which essentially means it has curved glass at all four edges. We’ve seen a few phones with curved sides – it’s a design feature that dates all the way back to the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge – but with the Huawei P40 Pro you also get curved top and bottom edges.
However, the display itself only curves at the sides, not at the top or bottom of the phone, where it’s just the glass on top that’s curved. This gives the handset a unique feel, but it doesn’t change the look of the phone’s screen all that much.
The Huawei P40 Pro is powered by the same Kirin 990 5G chipset that we’ve seen in the Mate 30 Pro 5G and Huawei’s folding phone, the Mate XS, and it’s plenty fast enough to keep up with the latest flagship phones from rival brands.
We found it to be just as speedy as other top-end phones, such as the Galaxy S20 or iPhone 11, when we were darting around between apps and games. It scored an average of 2997 in our Geekbench 5 benchmarking, which is a similar score to the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus, which sports a similarly top-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset.
If there’s one thing that has made Huawei’s P series phones stand out from the crowd, it’s the camera tech. The P20 and P30 handsets raised the bar when it came to mobile photography, and Huawei is looking to raise it higher again with the P40 Pro.
The Leica-branded camera setup comprises 50MP f/1.9 primary and 40MP f/1.8 ultrawide cameras, and a 12MP telephoto camera that’s capable of 5x optical zoom or 50x digital zoom. There’s also a time-offlight (ToF) sensor for creating bokeh effects in portrait-mode shots.
The Huawei P40 Pro is running Android 10, the latest version of Google’s operating system, but without Google services, including applications such as Gmail and Google Drive. This is due to the restrictions the US government has placed on Huawei amid ongoing security concerns.
That’s the elephant in the room with the P40 Pro, and for many it’ll be reason enough to avoid this handset.
It’s a frustrating scenario, as this is something that has been out of Huawei’s control, but it makes this phone a lot less useful to the average person than a device from a rival like Apple, Samsung or Google.
The lack of Google Mobile Services is a major problem for many would-be users, and while the camera, design and battery life are all first-rate, that Googlesized hole in the overall package means it’s a very difficult phone to recommend.
James Peckham