Huawei P40 Pro+
A luxurious phone with extraordinary cameras, but we can’t ignore the price and lack of Google services
PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from huawei.com
How much? Yes, Huawei really is charging £1,300 for this update to the P40 Pro ( see issue 309, p62), and no you still can’t load the Google Play store – unless you’re willing to follow tortuous online guides that may or may not work. While Huawei is throwing in tempting extras to make the package more alluring, with a 40W wireless charger and its Watch GT 2 bundled at the time of writing, it’s a lot of money for an Android phone that doesn’t support Google Play store or Google Play services.
In Huawei’s defence, the lack of Google’s official app store is less important than it was. That’s largely due to Huawei’s Phone Clone app, which makes it easy to copy apps from other Android phones, but also thanks to Huawei’s new Petal Search service: enter your chosen app into this and there’s an excellent chance that Petal will find it on a third-party app store such as Aptoide. Keep in mind, though, that installing these apps comes with a greater risk than on the Play store.
The bigger loss is Google’s Play services, which many apps rely on to provide location data (for example). So while you can load Garmin Connect on there, it won’t show you maps, and The Guardian will work but show an error each time. It’s all cumbersome and irritating compared to an ordinary Android phone.
Then again, when it comes to photography the P40 Pro+ is far more extraordinary for the right reasons. Most impressive is its
10x optical zoom camera (ignore Huawei’s 100x zoom claim as that’s digitally enhanced), and you can also access an excellent 20x “hybrid” zoom that works in combination with the other cameras to create the final output.
And that output is phenomenal: whether you’re taking portraits or shooting landscapes, whether you’re indoors or outside, you will be delighted by the phone’s sharp results.
Its video capabilities are almost as strong, with support for 4K at 60fps with optical image stabilisation. Should we ever have communal activities to record in the future, you will be in prime position.
Fans of ceramic finishes will also love the P40 Pro+, which is available in either black or white. I was sent the white version for review, and I suspect this is a better choice in terms of fingerprint smudges; you can see them, but they aren’t obvious. Ceramic inevitably adds weight, and at 226g and 9mm thick this is one of the bulkier phones around, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing; like a weighty Rolex on the wrist, sometimes girth is a sign of quality.
Where I take issue with Huawei’s designers is its literal corner cutting: for the sake of swooshing edges you lose information on the screen, and that includes the areas where app designers like to put the X for closing apps. I also find the huge notch annoying. Both these design choices made me quickly reach for the phone’s “hide the cutout” setting.
Naturally, the 90Hz OLED panel itself is from Huawei’s top drawer. With 1,200 x 2,640 pixels and an official 6.58in measurement (which ignores the rounded corners), it offers a pixel density of 441ppi. If your eyes can discern pixels, you’re
“Naturally, the P40 Pro+’s 90Hz OLED panel itself is from Huawei’s top drawer and offers a pixel density of 441ppi”
too close. You have a choice of two colour modes, with Vivid being less accurate but punchy, and Normal tracking the sRGB colour space nigh-on perfectly (99.8% coverage, 103% volume 0.29 average Delta E) but looking pale in comparison.
I dropped the screen from its peak brightness of 434cd/m2 to 170cd/m2 for our video-rundown test, where the P40 Pro+ lasted for 18hrs 46mins. By modern standards, a solid rather than spectacular result, but it means you’ll get a heavy day’s use from the battery. There’s a 40W charger in the box too, which took the phone from zero to 67% in 30 minutes.
It would be curmudgeonly to criticise the core components here, with Huawei’s own Kirin 990 5G chipset in place. That’s roughly equivalent to a Snapdragon 865 in terms of both general speed and 3D acceleration, as shown by the graphs on p63. With 8GB of RAM and a suitably generous 512GB of storage, there’s no need to take advantage of the proprietary card slot – which only adds up to 256GB anyway. That’s good news because it means that you can fill both of the dual SIM slots, which can be used at the same time (one with a 5G SIM, the other 4G).
In many ways, then, this is a terrific phone. Even if the P40 Pro+ had easy access to Google’s store and services, though, I would hesitate to recommend it: the price is too high, the display too compromised by the notch and savage corners. While I love this phone’s ceramic finish and the cameras, I would buy the Google-toting P30 Pro ( see issue 297, p68) for £600 instead.
SPECIFICATIONS
Octa-core 2.86GHz/2.36GHz/1.95GHz HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G 8GB RAM Mali-G76 graphics supports 5G 90Hz 6.58in AMOLED screen, 1,200 x 2,640 resolution 512GB storage NM card slot quad ToF/50/40/8/8-megapixel rear camera dual ToF/32-megapixel front camera 802.11ax Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5.1 NFC USB-C connector 4,200mAh battery EMUI 10.1 (based on Android 10) 72.6 x 9 x 158mm (WDH) 226g 2yr warranty