Huawei Mate 10 Pro
A beautiful 6in phone that offers a tempting alternative to the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE 64GB, £583 (£699 inc VAT) from huawei.com
There are two Huawei Mate 10 models, and the Pro shares many features with its smaller sibling. They both include Huawei’s new flagship processor, the Kirin 970; they both have a glossy metallic glass rear; and they both include a pair of Leica-branded f/1.6 cameras. Where they differ is that the Mate 10 has a regular 16:9 aspect ratio IPS display, while the Mate 10 Pro includes a 6in 18:9 AMOLED screen with a boosted 1,080 x 2,160 resolution.
As a result it’s both narrower and taller, with the former perhaps explaining why the Mate 10 retains its 3.5mm headphone jack while the Pro does not. Another difference is that the Pro is dust- and water-resistant to IP67. Oh, and there’s the price: the Mate 10 will cost £519, the Pro £699.
Whichever you choose, you’re buying a fine-looking handset with barely-there bezels. Huawei sent me a Pro finished in “Mocha Brown”, which is more of a burnished bronze and looks great. Other colours include blue, grey and “pink gold”.
Both the power and volume rocker keys sit on the right-edge of the phone, while the dual microSD (which supports cards up to 256GB in size) and nano-SIM tray is on the top. On the bottom, you’ll find a solitary speaker grille and USB-C port.
The Pro’s OLED display covers 98.7% of the sRGB colour gamut in normal mode but isn’t very colour accurate. You can choose “vivid” if you like, but it’s too vibrant for my tastes. I’ve no complaints about brightness, peaking at an impressive 727cd/m2 with a small patch of white displayed against a black background, and 570cd/m2 when the screen is filled with white. Those measurements were in auto-brightness mode; switch to manual and you’ll get peak brightness of below 400cd/m2.
On the inside, Huawei’s Kirin 970 chip is backed by 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (a 128GB model is available). The chip is another first, claims Huawei, due to its integrated “neural processing unit” designed to speed up tasks such as intelligent photo analysis and language translation. You can see this in action in the camera app, which recognises people, food and scenery, then tweaks camera settings on the fly.
Elsewhere, the Kirin 970 lends the Mate 10 Pro a fair turn of speed. It isn’t quite as snappy as the Razer Phone, but it’s fluid and responsive ( see the results on p56). As the GFXBench test indicates, it can play the most intense games in the Google Play Store without breaking a sweat.
It’s battery life that’s the real strength of this phone, though. Over a solid fortnight’s use, I found the Mate 10 Pro typically lasted a full two days of light use. If I pushed it a little more – let’s call it “average use” – then it still lasted over one-and-a-half days.
“Battery life is the real strength of this phone. Over a solid fortnight’s use, I found the Mate 10 Pro typically lasted a full two days of light use”
Performance wasn’t as impressive in our video playback test. Its huge 4,000mAh battery kept going for 14hrs 52mins, which is good but not up there with the OnePlus 5T.
The Mate 10 Pro runs the latest version of Android Oreo, but you won’t see much of it as it’s slathered with a thick layer of Huawei’s Emotion UI 8 software. This even features a desktop-like environment when you connect the phone to a monitor via a USB-C cable – unlike Samsung’s equivalent, there’s no need for a separate docking station – and it works reasonably well. You can even use the phone’s screen as a touchpad. However, many of my apps simply didn’t show up in the desktop mode’s start menu and couldn’t be launched.
For photography, the Mate 10 Pro is equipped with a pair of wide f/1.6 aperture rear-facing cameras, complete with optical image stabilisation, phase detect and laser autofocus, and a dual-LED flash. The main 12-megapixel camera utilises an RGB sensor, while the secondary camera uses a 20-megapixel, monochrome-only sensor, which helps to capture finer details.
In good light, there’s loads of detail, images are well exposed and colours are both accurate and well saturated. Black and white photography is great, too: images are brimming with impact and oodles of detail. In low light and for video it’s a similar story, but note that video captured at 4K isn’t stabilised and looks shaky when shot handheld.
The only annoyance is that you have to enable a separate HDR mode to activate the feature – there’s no auto HDR facility and no shortcut on screen so you can switch it on while in other modes.
So is the Mate 10 Pro good enough to unseat Samsung at the top of the all-screen smartphone tree? Not quite, but close enough to warrant a wholehearted recommendation. Although the screen isn’t as competent as the S8 Plus’, the Mate 10 Pro has better real-world stamina and an attractive price – although you can buy the S8 Plus cheaper online. SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2.36GHz/1.8GHz Huawei Kirin 970 processor 4GB RAM Mali-G72 graphics 6in OLED screen, 1,080 x 2,160 resolution 64GB storage dual 20MP monochrome/ 12MP colour rear camera 8MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 NFC USB-C connector 4,000mAh battery
Android 8 Oreo 74.5 x 7.9 x 154.2mm (WDH) 179g 1yr warranty