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HUAWEI P40 Pro Review

Charles TYK

Introduction

The HUAWEI P series has always been one of the flagships that I am looking forward to. Each year there’s always something new on the camera department, which is also the key feature of the P series devices. This year, HUAWEI announced three P40 series devices and I’ve been using the P40 Pro for nearly a month. Without further ado, this is the HUAWEI P40 Pro review!

Unboxing

The P40 Pro comes in a simple box, pretty much similar to its predecessor. I kinda miss the old HUAWEI where the company focused a lot on package design, but I guess no one really cares about the box design nowadays.

The box contains:

Design

Since the P20 series, the design language has been quite consistent. However, HUAWEI has upped its level, making the P40 series more elegant and beautiful ever. The P40 Pro has a Quad-Curve Overflow Display, which basically means it has curves on the top, bottom, left, and right side of the glass. It looks stunning, especially when the screen is off, this phone is truly a masterpiece!

There’s one thing weird, though! It has a wide camera cutout on the top left corner of the screen, which houses the 32MP autofocus selfie camera and depth camera with an IR sensor. HUAWEI states that the depth camera also supports face unlock with IR. It is safer and the phone doesn’t need to increase the screen brightness to the max when using face unlock in low-light conditions, but the whole camera cutout just kind of spoiled the overall design a little bit. Sure, it doesn’t have the humongous notch like an iPhone, but I guess the under-glass selfie camera tech isn’t ready yet.

If you look closely, the P40 Pro doesn’t have an earpiece like most smartphones. It uses the under-screen piezoelectric driver as an earpiece speaker for calls. Nope, the audio quality isn’t good, and the person next to you might be able to hear the conversation between you and your caller.

Another under-screen tech can be found on the phone is the optical fingerprint sensor, which works pretty fast. If you are using face unlock as the unlock method, chances for you to use the fingerprint sensor are low because it scans your face quicker.

The top of the phone has the IR remote sensor, while the volume rocker and power button are located on the right side. The bottom of the phone houses the SIM slot (also the NM card slot), USB-C port, and the mono speaker. It’s disappointing to know that a flagship phone like this doesn’t have stereo speakers, which compromises the overall audio experience.

Our review unit is the Deep Sea Blue variant, which will change to different colors depending on where the light refracts. The back changes from cyan to turquoise to emerald, which looks magnificent. Like most flagships, it has a huge camera bump, which houses the Ultra Vision Leica Quad Camera setup.

Display

The P40 Pro sports a 6.58-inch Full HD+ (2,640 x 1,200) OLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate. I won’t complain about it not having a 120Hz refresh rate screen since 90Hz is already smooth enough. The screen supports HDR10 tech, but at the moment you can’t even download Netflix from the AppGallery, it seems hard to find any HDR content to watch.

Overall, it has a top-class display and I really recommend using Dark Mode all the time to save the battery life, as well as hiding the camera cutout on the top left. One complaint, though, the accidental touch on the curved sides of the screen is an issue. Even sometimes holding the phone to watch videos, it’ll recognize your touch and move 10 seconds backward or forward. This is a common issue on phones with curved sides on the screen, I think phone makers should stop doing that, let’s get back to the flat screen, please.

Performance

The P40 Pro is powered by the company’s own Kirin 990 processor with 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB UFS 3.0 storage. The chipset supports 5G connectivity, but 5G isn’t ready yet in Malaysia, we’ll just skip this part. In terms of performance, the Kirin 990 chipset seems to be lacking behind its competitors, but that’s on benchmark charts. As expected for a flagship phone, it runs smoothly throughout day-to-day usage.

When it comes to gaming, I was able to play Call of Duty: Mobile in “Very High” graphic quality and frame rate. As for PUBG Mobile, I was able to run “HD” and “HDR” graphics with “Ultra” frame rate, if you want to hit the “Extreme” frame rate, you’ll have to change it to “Smooth” graphics. The phone temperature kept under control all the time and the battery doesn’t drain as quickly as other phones with other chipsets, this is where the Kirin 990 shines.

Software

The P40 Pro runs on EMUI 10.1 based on Android 10 with HUAWEI Mobile Services (HMS). I’ve already covered the experience of using HMS and AppGallery here, so let’s just skip the frustration part.

The phone has one feature called Air Gestures, which I don’t think people will ever use. Just hold your palm out 20-40cm from the screen and flick your wrist up or down to scroll up or down, you can even take a screenshot by making a fist when the hand icon appears. To be honest, this isn’t a useful feature, it won’t work all the time and it’s always faster to scroll the screen by touching the screen and taking screenshots by just knocking on the screen twice with a knuckle.

HUAWEI now has its own ecosystem of products, which isn’t a surprise to see the company is integrating its product into another product. The “Multi-Screen Collaboration” feature mirrors your HUAWEI/HONOR phone to your HUAWEI/HONOR laptop or tablet wirelessly. You can control two devices at once and transfer files seamlessly, which is really convenient.

Camera

“Visionary Photography” is the tagline of the P40 series, which is the kind of photography experience HUAWEI wanted to provide. The P40 Pro has Ultra Vision Leica Quad Camera setup on the back, which includes:

You might notice the company uses the term “Cine Camera” for its ultra-wide lens. Well, HUAWEI claims that its ultra-wide camera is a cinematic video camera with many features. Hence, when you switch to the video mode, the ultra-wide camera will be the default camera to record videos. Even though it has 40MP resolution, the camera only outputs 10MP photos due to the Quad-Bayer nature.

By default, the 50MP main camera outputs 12.5MP photos, you’ll have to switch to the “High-Res” mode to shoot a 50MP photo.

Check out the camera samples here!

Image quality generally is quite impressive based on a few shots we have taken. There is no point for you to shoot in 50MP mode as the 12.5MP photos are already good enough thanks to the post-processing. Obviously, you won’t need to shoot photos in 50x zoom like a lunatic, photos in 5x optical and 10x hybrid zooms are decent.

Selfie wise, the phone has a 32MP f/2.2 autofocus and 3D depth cameras on the front. It has the best selfie camera I’ve ever tested so far. Selfies have a good amount of detail, with excellent contrast and colors. When you are taking selfies in low-light conditions, the camera interface will turn white so that you can use the screen brightness as the source of light too, that’s a nice tiny detail!

Unfortunately, due to the Movement Control Order (MCO) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the country, we weren’t able to go out to test the camera capabilities. We hope we can test out more about its cameras once MCO is lifted, there are still more for us to explore and test.

Battery Life

The P40 Pro packs a 4,200mAh battery with HUAWEI SuperCharge support (40W wired and 27W wirelessly). Based on my test, it took 30 minutes to charge from 15% to 80%, and another 27 minutes from 80% to 100%. That’s less than an hour from 15% to full! The battery life is able to last through a day easily with nearly 7 hours of screen-on-time, all thanks to the good efficiency from its Kirin 990 chipset.

Final Words

Retailing at RM3,899, the HUAWEI P40 Pro is a good phone! It is one of the well-designed smartphones with a top-class display, flagship performance, superb cameras, and impressive battery life. There is still a long way for HUAWEI Mobile Services to go, especially when it comes to the number of apps in AppGallery. Most apps I’m using aren’t available in AppGallery and I’ll have to rely on third-party app stores and APK files. If the apps you use are available in AppGallery or you are okay with downloading APK files, the P40 Pro is a phone you can get. Hopefully, in the near future, HUAWEI can get most apps on board in AppGallery.

Yay

Nay

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